How Expedient Is Obama's Support for the FISA Bill? (redux)
[reposting this after TPM ate the body of my post. Josh/Greg: Preview would be nice!]
The piece that I find unconvincing in arguments defending (or choosing not to critique) Obama's support for the FISA bill is the supposition that he needed to do this to win the election. For supporting this bill Obama is now being attacked as a flip-flopper by the GOP. So if the situation was a damned-if-he-does, damned-if-he-doesn't, then why not stand on principle and be damned for defending the Constitution (and the Obama "brand" of not poitics as usual)? And did he really gain anything by doing this? Most people support the idea of requiring the goverment to get warrants for wiretapping international calls and emails [pdf link]:
Sixty-one percent (61%) of voters favor requiring the government to get a warrant from a court before wiretapping the conversations U.S. citizens have with people in other countries, with an outright majority of voters (51%) “strongly” supporting the requirement for warrants.
Obama has certainly run a strategically savvy primary campaign, so seeing him make an allegedly calculated and expedient choice that doesn't obviously gain anything is puzzling at best. Seeing him do this at the expense of defending the Constitution is definitely troubling and none of the "get over it" arguments have convinced me that we shouldn't critique our leaders when they stray from ideals that they had previously professed to uphold. And none of this is to say I’m taking my ball and going home. I’m still voting for Obama and still donating money (after giving some to Greenwald’s Act Blue fund for FISA issues); I really think that using a polarized, with-us-or-against-us frame for this discussion is a counter-productive approach that short changes what should be a worthwhile discussion. So I’d like to avoid attacks on people’s patriotism and love for the Constitution in exchange for not being dismissed as a whiner or someone who can’t see the big picture.
