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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Of Course, They're All Politicians…

…which is why you shouldn’t trust any of them.  On its own, Obama’s support for the FISA legislation would be unremarkable.  When done in the name of antiterrorism, wiretapping is quite popular, and a candidate running in a general election campaign in which he cannot afford to have people challenge his national security bona fides […]

…which is why you shouldn’t trust any of them.  On its own, Obama’s support for the FISA legislation would be unremarkable.  When done in the name of antiterrorism, wiretapping is quite popular, and a candidate running in a general election campaign in which he cannot afford to have people challenge his national security bona fides successfully.  Further, someone who supported the reauthorisation of the PATRIOT Act is not exactly brimming with zeal for the Fourth Amendment in the first place, so those who expected Obama to take a different position may be some of those imaginary people “who think Obama is the messiah, capable of making the lion lie down with the lamb, cooling the planet with the touch of his hand, bringing the dead back to life…”  Or they may just be gullible enough to think that Obama is particularly interested in protecting civil liberties when doing so involves political risk

It seems to me that this is really why Obama boosters ought to be deeply concerned about his position on the FISA bill, just as they ought to be concerned about his zig-zagging on NAFTA and Iran policy on the one hand and his consistency regarding Israel/Palestine, because it fits into a pattern of avoiding confrontation and seeking consensus in the worst way imaginable in which consensus-building means surrendering to whichever interest group or faction in Congress has the most clout.  This is not just worldly pragmatism, but a pattern of avoiding fights, bruising or otherwise, on any issue.  If the bill was, as Feingold put it, a “capitulation” to the administration, Obama’s support for it seems to confirm the fears of his progressive doubters who thought there was something treacherous in all of this talk about unity and bipartisanship.  But in the area of national security and foreign policy, Obama has usually been quite clear that he is not opposed to that much of the status quo, and much as his few admirers on the right get the impression that he is interested in their ideas on certain domestic policies his admirers on the left have had a bad habit of imagining that he really agrees with them on national security and foreign policy much more than he does.  Both sets of admirers have tended to allow themselves to be fooled or at least disarmed by his rhetoric, even as they have been determined to show that he is a knowledgeable and substantive candidate who does more than give nice speeches. 

Yes, he is a politician who will disappoint many people because of some political need for various compromises, but the thing that should begin to worry them is whether he will ever do anything other than disappoint them.

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