There’s no question that Barack Obama has been riding the wave of a generational zeitgeist, having captured in an elegant form the feelings of disgust and longing and sudden hardship of the younger half of America. There is no question about that. But even though that’s been the case until now…now, Barack Obama has cracked up on the shoals and rang out a tremendously discordant note.
The whole party has been riding on the crest of a high wave that promises to inundate and destroy the rot of a Washington Establishment that has failed us…dishonored our past and robbed us of the future we deserved and our children deserved. But we cannot forget that Barack Obama is but one man. And the Washington he hopes to lead is currently run entirely by the very people that have been instrumental in the failures that have so disappointed the nation. What has happened is that failures like Jay Rockefeller and Silvestre Reyes, and political strategies like those espoused by the Blue Dogs and the Democratic Leadership Council’s New Democrats, have reached up from beneath the sea foam and tossed Obama off his board. Obama is a skilled surfer of political waters, but he is not a world champion. Not yet, anyway.
It shouldn’t have been this way. Barack Obama is running against history, he’s running against the Clinton diehards, he’s running against the Common Wisdom of the punditocracy, he’s running against John McCain and the sitting president. He shouldn’t be forced to run against the leadership of his own party in Congress, as well. It is a failure of leadership on Pelosi, Reid, and Hoyer’s part to even put this added burden on Obama. But they put this burden on him nonetheless and we are forced to ask him to take on this burden. We are forced to ask him to take on this burden because he is our last line of defense. No one else has the power to stop the bulldozer that threatens to earth over our Fourth Amendment rights.
It is one thing for the Washington Establishment to forgive themselves for their prolonged heat fever in the post-September 11th world. They can excuse a certain amount of irrational exuberance for torture and ill-advised war and illegal warrantless surveillance. Washington does this sort of thing from time-to-time, when they find that they’ve overreached and gone off course. It’s morally abhorrent, yet it’s our peculiarly American way of maintaining our belief in ourselves. Washington can excuse themselves, but they absolutely cannot be permitted to do so at the expense of our rights, and the rights of our children. A Gerald Ford can pardon a Richard Nixon and a Poppy Bush can pardon the Iran-Contra crew, but they cannot make the crimes of Nixon and the crimes of Oliver North retroactively legal. This is not how this nation faces up to its defects. We sweep our defects under the rug but we don’t enshrine our defects in law.
And that is what Reid, Pelosi, and Hoyer now ask Obama to acquiesce to. A matzah ball that big can overflow the bowl. It is wrong to put the responsibility for preventing this miscarriage of justice on Barack Obama’s shoulders. Not now. Not with so much already on his plate. But they have done it. And now we must ask Obama to take a stand and undo what they have done.
Part of this is a basic misunderstanding. It’s a generational misunderstanding. It shouldn’t be, but it is. The older generation of Democrats should have learned from the mistakes of Richard Nixon. Rather, they should have learned from the near-miss we had in not forcing Nixon from office and cleaning up Washington. We almost lost our Republic back then. We came so close. But the older generation of Democrats only sees the failures of McGovern and Mondale and Dukakis. They are blind to what they prevented from happening and how incredibly important it was that they they did prevent it from happening.
For my generation of political activists, nothing is so sacred and nothing redeems the promise of America as much as the success in toppling Nixon, enacting reforms, and preserving our rights. It’s what we are grateful for. It’s our greatest debt to our mothers and fathers. And now our mothers and fathers’ generation of Democrats are giving it all away for less than a song.
The real new Democrats are civil libertarians, born into a more tolerant, multicultural, and technology-driven entrepreneurial egalitarianism. Reading our email and snooping on our cell phones is a form of privacy rape. I get the feeling that all but the newest members of Congress have no feel for why the blogosphere is howling with rage at the prospect of legalizing warrantless electronic searches. Perhaps they know why we don’t fall for their hapless justifications for capitulation, but they’re lost when they try to understand why we care so much.
The FISA bill is a most unwelcome intrusion in our journey to a new kind of politics. It just created a giant pile-up on the road from here to there. We have already demonstrated to our own satisfaction that, in fact, Father Does Not Know Best. When it comes to a new kind of politics, the train has already left the station. We know how to raise money. We know how to compete in any geographical location. We know how to win by running on our beliefs rather than away from them. We’ve built up the most commanding advantage in candidate recruitment, fundraising, and message in political memory. We are ready to steamroll the old guard and usher in a totally new generation of politics. And this is the gift you give us? Retroactive immunity and vastly increased police-state domestic spying powers?
I don’t know what Barack Obama is going to do, or even what he is capable of doing. I sincerely hope that he has the wisdom to surf the wave we’ve helped build for him. But if he doesn’t, or if he can’t, and he cracks up on the shoals, we’ll have Reid, Pelosi, and Hoyer to thank for it. They and the outdated anachronisms that make up the DLC and the Blue Dog Coalition are to blame.
