That's a lot of metaphor there. No matter the "chips", and "pushing", it's still the legislative branch that makes the laws. There's got to be a limit to the blame you can assign someone for failing to convince someone else to do something.
I really can't subscribe to that argument when you look at other national issues for which the President is fighting tooth and nail. Without straying too far from the subject, take gun control as an example [and please note, I am deliberately writing this from a partisan-agnostic perspective]. The opposition to this is fierce, and the issue extremely polarizing. Yet, the President seems to be willing to go the distance on the issue of gun control. The movement has failed again and again to gain bipartisan support. Yet, here we are still talking about it in the news. Same can be said about abortion, too. These debates went on for decades now.
Nobody can say the President isn't trying hard enough in those cases, whichever side of the fence you happen to fall on. Yet, when we talk about basic human rights, the President somehow gets to just give up on the issue, and we should be OK with that? In my opinion, there is definitely a lack of effort by the President to do something about closing Gitmo, and I find that almost as disappointing as Gitmo being opened in the first place.
