It’s in extraordinarily bad taste for Nancy Pelosi’s staffers to justify their capitulation on the FISA issue to Time on strictly political grounds.
“For any Republican-leaning district this would have been a huge issue,” says a top Pelosi aide, who estimates that as many as 10 competitive races could have been affected by it.
Pelosi’s decision is fateful. As Glenn Greenwald explains, this decision has created a new alliance.
Our campaign just exceeded $300,000 yesterday. We’re going to announce the details behind the Money Bomb part of the campaign, coordinated by those responsible for the Ron Paul money bombs, very shortly. I can’t think of a better explanation for the strategy we’ve adopted than this Time article and what it’s conveying about the mindset of Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democratic Congressional leaders. This model of an ideologically diverse coalition, devoted to battling the political establishment’s endless expansion of unchecked power, is creating real turmoil and disruption in Britain, and that model can work here, too.
For the first time, the blogosphere is teaming up with libertarians to defeat and harass incumbent Democrats. This is a direct result of Pelosi’s decision. This was what I was hinting at in my Tsunami Interruptus piece, where I talked about a generational misunderstanding.
To one degree or another, the blogosphere is made up of libertarian-minded people that are attracted to the Democratic party because they respect privacy and embrace multiculturalism and tolerance for cultural minorities. While the blogosphere has many dyed-in-the-wool Democrats it also has a lot of people that see the Democratic Party as more of a vehicle to correct the abuses and mistakes of the Bush administration. In a parliamentary system, the blogosphere would probably line up with a more left-leaning party than the Democrats. But in our system where third parties get no proportional representation, we are forced to use the only vehicle available.
Job One was to seize control of both Houses of Congress from the Republicans. Job Two was to nominate someone that opposed the invasion of Iraq and promised to change the mindset in Washington that got us into the war. Job Three was always going to be a purge of bad Democrats that embody that mindset. Support of the FISA bill is emblematic of the same bad attitude that got us into Iraq.
Pelosi’s decision has given Job Three a real impetus. Once an alliance is formed between the blogosphere and Ron Paul supporters, there is no going back. Pelosi could have postponed this alliance or avoided it altogether by leaving FISA reform to the next president to craft on their own terms. That she made a different decision, and that she is justifying it this way, indicates that she profoundly misunderstands the values of the younger generation of political activists. And, I submit that misunderstandings of this type indicate that the Democratic leadership is misjudging the explanation for and strength of the party’s popularity with young people in general.
For a digital generation, warrantless electronic surveillance is anathema. The Democrats are (or were) popular with young people precisely because they are presumed to not be in favor of a surveillance state. It’s only one component, of course. It’s also important that the Democrats support women’s privacy, gay rights, and Terri Schiavo’s rights. Privacy, as a general matter, is a big part of tolerance, and that is what attracts young people to the Democratic Party. Insofar as the Democratic Party betrays that faith or takes it for granted, activists will go after them just like they went after the Republicans for doing the exact same things.
