Bad Omens
I’m disappointed at the news out of the Obama camp. Doubly disappointed.
First, he’s reneged on a promise to stick to federal matching funds if his Republican opponent did the same. At the time he made it, the promise must have been easy to make: McCain, who took federal funds only because he desperately needed them right then, was widely considered to be already out of the picture, and the other Republican contenders, used to belonging to the party of big money, showed no intention of doing so. Obama surprised the country, and possibly himself as well, by seizing the nomination, and especially by bringing in as much campaign money as he did. But he did raise well over the limit mandated by matching funds, and McCain wobbled his way through the Huckabee-Romney religious schism to grab the brass ring, so we now learn that Obama didn’t really mean the promise in the first place.
It’s a worrying sign, particularly when Obama himself is largely an unknown. A fine orator, to be sure, and he’s offering lots of attractive promises, but for a political career as short as his, we’re currently taking those promises on faith. Tossing one aside so lightly even before entering office is a bad omen.
The decision may even work to his disadvantage. Obama has raised an unprecedented amount of cash from small donations, easily enough to compensate him for the arm’s-length at which he has held corporate donors. My circle of online friends, inspired by this example, have sent more than their fair share. Now that Obama has proven unwilling to stick to the straight and narrow of campaign finance reform—the reliance on small donors in practice, if not in actual law—they’re rethinking their pledges. If this gusher of funding slows to a trickle out of his (understandable) desire to make his monetary advantage work for him, he loses both the financial sledgehammer and the moral high ground he sacrificed to get it.
Second, Obama’s stated intentions concerning the latest FISA bill are lukewarm at best, and disappointing in the extreme. Instead of using his already substantial political capital to attack a bill that grants federal authorities free use of warrantless wiretaps, and especially the (entirely needless) retroactive grant of immunity to the phone companies which acquiesced to the White House’s unconstitutional requests, Obama has merely pledged to offer an amendment. Not to vote against the measure if his amendment is ignored, mind you, but simply to suggest it be rewritten.
History lesson: the original FISA legislation was written precisely to prevent presidential abuse of authority, forbidding the use of our federal agencies to spy on ordinary citizens, and especially on the political opposition. It arose in the wake of Nixon and the Watergate debacle. Remember Nixon? He didn’t see anything wrong with using the FBI to destroy political enemies. Public, judicially-approved warrants for the new wiretap technology were deemed essential to rein in such abuses. I don’t believe that what we’ve seen out of the White House recently in any way suggests we can now trust presidents only to spy on bad guys. Do you?
If the phone companies did nothing wrong (ha!), they should have no trouble defending their actions in court; otherwise, both private and class action lawsuits—expensive lawsuits—are the surest way to prevent similar criminality in the future. All they had to do was ask for a warrant. Or anything, anything, in writing: when Qwest asked for an official request in print, the request was dropped. And there’s no reason to offer immunity to the phone companies as a means of collecting evidence against the current administration. Such evidence as the telcos have should be subpoenaed immediately. Such evidence as the White House has is being carefully expunged from the record even now, but whatever survives is handily in reach of the next president. Immunity won’t safeguard either.
I don’t know why Obama did not, instead, raise holy hell about FISA. Voters know that Bush and cronies are up to their eyeballs in abuse of authority, and they recognize retroactive immunity for what it is. The bulk of American voters have no great love for large corporations, especially when those corporations are visibly selling out basic constitutional rights. Other Democrats are standing up in righteous indignation, or at least a decent performance of it, and jumping in the polls for it; Obama could win votes by doing the same. Does he hope to use the dangerous reformulation of FISA to his own advantage? Is he beholden to the telcos for some reason, or fearful of their vengeance? Is he simply not yet divorced enough from the whipped dog mentality of the Democratic party generally to think that we as a nation, and he specifically, can stand up to the bastards who have been rewriting constitutional law to their own ends for so long, and punishing anyone who objected on grounds of principle?
I don’t know, nor can we rely on Obama to give a straight answer to the question, if asked. No matter how you cut it, this too is a worrying exhibition of the ritual post-primary, pre-election move to the center from a candidate already in the center. The neocons have been in charge so long, and so dominated the public message, that we’ve forgotten where the center is.
And, for that matter, what’s right.