Barack Obama Issues a Reality Check

We liberals have just received a valuable reality check. It came none too soon. We may now begin to cope with reality more effectively.

Many of the blows Barack Obama has given the body of his supporters in the last few weeks should not have surprised us.

• Accepting federal financing for the general election would have been highly disadvantageous to Obama, to Democrats--partly because of the amount of money Obama could raise if he didn't accept federal financing, partly because of the role 527s will play in advancing the Republican (probably using unethical tactics that most Democratic 527s are less likely to employ) and partly because of the financial lead the Republican National Committee has over the Democratic National Committee. Obama is right in claiming the system for federal financing is broken. He may be faulted in this matter, but it should be primarily for not attaching enough conditions to his initial assertion that he would accept federal financing if his opponent did. It would be a much greater fault to sacrifice the entire election, accepting all the human misery and damage to America that would bring, to an inadequately qualified initial statement.

• Obama stated well back in the primaries that he believed the Second Amendment to the Constitution gave individuals the right to own guns. He was so eager to distance himself from a ban on guns that he refused to acknowledge his own signature on a survey in which he agreed he would support a ban in Illinois. He never described the extent to which he thought firearms could be regulated. It was not certain that he would agree with the Supreme Court's decision that a major city could not attempt to safeguard its citizens by banning handguns, but neither was it surprising.

• During the entire brouhaha Jeremiah Wright initiated over whether God should damn America or bless America, no one seemed bothered that all contending parties agreed with the remarkable contention that God gives special dispensations to nations, either because of their inherent virtues or because of their actions. Obama thereafter began to end his speeches with the phrase "God bless America." He subsequently offered more financial support than the Bush administration ever gave to "faith-based" charities. We customarily decline to think through the implications of our religious beliefs, but it should surprise no one that a person who believes an omnipotent God makes special interventions in the operation of the universe on behalf of nations who please or displease Him is not too eager to emphasize the separation of church and state, whatever inconvenience the First Amendment may provide.

• When his patriotism was impugned on national television because he was not wearing a flag pin, any politician who felt empowered to do so would have pointed out the dark implications of the fact that only he, among the candidates or the debate interrogators, was required to "prove" his patriotism by wearing a flag pin. Obama declined to point this out, then meekly began to wear a pin regularly. That, in itself, is trivial, but it may be indicative of something that is not. We cannot be sure what policy consequences will result from this lack of a sense of empowerment, but it should not surprise us in the future when a more servile response than seems warranted is the answer to conservative pique. We got an early preview when Wesley Clark's reasonable, respectful, and perfectly correct observation that experience in battle and as a prisoner of war was not executive experience elicited absurd if predictable faux outrage from John McCain, typical reflexive support of McCain's inviolability from the mainstream media, and a craven rejection of their own staunch supporter from the Obama camp.

There are some responses we could not have anticipated. Obama's view of the application of capital punishment exceeded the savagery of even the Supreme Court. Although not widely decried, this reaction may be of high importance. The rest of the civilized world considers capital punishment to be barbaric, even when applied to perpetrators of the most heinous murder. Yet much of Obama's foreign policy is keyed upon exhibiting "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind," and many of us hope that a new President will help restore worldwide respect for the United States. That Obama deemed this less important than expressing a vengeful attitude is cause for apprehension. Attitudes toward capital punishment are often indicative of very basic values, and the fact that we did not anticipate Obama's values on this point may mean we have a similar misunderstanding of other values he holds. At a time when the United States has departed from worldwide ideals of human rights we once championed, the need for our vigilance is especially acute. In addition, it is clear we will have to be vigilant in assessing nominations Obama may have the opportunity to make to the Supreme Court.

Perhaps the most alarming surprise Obama has handed us came in his view of Fourth Amendment freedoms undermined by the FISA Amendments Act. In seeking a balance between liberty and security, Obama has given a great deal less weight to liberty and to the rule of law than most of us hoped. Our disappointment on this score is not our fault. When Obama asserted that he would participate in filibustering any bill that gave immunity to telecommunications companies that abetted possible executive lawbreaking, he encouraged us to believe his views were different than they ultimately proved to be.

It is not just Obama's weak stand on the issue of immunity that is disturbing. To most of us, the rest of the FISA Amendments Act does not seem to meet constitutional requirements for warrants to conduct surveillance. Our system of government is grounded in the recognition that, sooner or later, power will corrupt some people in positions of trust. Whatever its constitutionality, the act clearly does not provide enough protection against those people or the agencies they will control. Obama's stand on this issue is especially unsettling because several of his Senate colleagues, with whom we assumed he shared values, stood firmly against the act.

In coming years, advancing technology will make intrusion into our private lives increasingly easy for governments, corporations, and individuals. The need for legal and institutional protections against intrusion is acute, and we are now establishing precedents for whatever protections we will or will not have. Technology typically advances much more quickly than institutions can react, so we will be many years building the institutional barriers to intrusion. Both the legislative and executive branches will have to cooperate in building them and the commitment of the executive will be crucial. We have already seen how helpless the Congress, even a Congress controlled by the opposing party, is when the executive is determined to undermine protections. We have yet to see the results generated by a Congress and a President united by both partisan ties and timidity.

In the selection of a President, we have no reasonable alternative to Barack Obama. On virtually any issue or value, John McCain has less to offer. On questions of fundamental rights, we must remember that McCain would not even stand firm for habeas corpus. It is, of course, a bitter pill to realize that, after all the hope the campaigns have generated, our least assailable rallying cry is "McCain is even worse." Nevertheless, we cannot fall into the kind of self-pitying, self-righteous egomania that declares we are too virtuous to vote for "the lesser of two evils." We have had too recent a demonstration of how many good people die, how far our country may decline, and how far the world can slip toward disaster when too many citizens adopt that attitude.

Too often, Americans fall into the assumption that all it takes to secure good government is to find leaders of good will. Our Constitution, though, is built on the understanding that it is good structure and good incentive systems that will produce good leaders and can limit the capacity for harm of the inevitable opportunists, the officials of ill will, and the temptations that assail every human being. Barack Obama generated great enthusiasm in the electorate partly because he seemed to embody a fresh perspective and promise a greater commitment to principle than his opponents. We have now learned that not all his principles are what we thought. Fight on! Barack Obama has many virtues, but there are no perfect human beings. Disappointment must not fall into resignation. Whatever the accuracy of Obama's image, the reality check he has issued provides an essential reminder of the perpetual struggle we must continue, whoever occupies Presidency. We cannot depend exclusively on the virtue of some individual to secure our liberties. The price of liberty continues to be eternal vigilance, eternal commitment to building and rebuilding the institutions of democracy, and eternal skepticism about the promise of individual virtue.

Comments

[Zanti]

"We liberals...." I'm a liberal who never trusted Obama in the first place, and there are many like me. So, obviously, being liberal and having (or having had) high expectations of B.O. are not necessarily synonymous.

Many Hillaryites, like me, concluded well before you did that a vote for Obama is something best rationalized as a vote against McCain. Welcome to the club.

And I'm at a loss to understand why I should view Obama as "a person who believes an omnipotent God makes special interventions in the operation of the universe on behalf of nations who please or displease Him." Because he used a traditional blessing? Obama, whose words regarding faith strongly suggest a liberal faithview, is hardly likely to harbor such old-fashioned, fundamentalistic views.

Re the First Amendment, the establishment clause (in keeping with the phrase) forbids the establishment of a state church--it doesn't deny religion the same representation that every other industry, group, or person routinely enjoys. Even with the fairly recent revelation (pun intended) that Big Energy has been writing many of our environmental laws, somehow there hasn't been a liberal cry for separation of Big Energy and state. Isn't that odd? Yet, we hang on to the imaginary ban on state/church interaction. Let it not be said that, as our country was handed over to the rich, to the gun lobby, and to business in general, we libs didn't fight the good fight against religious representation.

(CONTINUED)

[Zanti]

(CONTINUED)

I'm also intrigued by the (admittedly standard) idea that, in order to keep things constitutional, anything that happens between the govt. and faith must represent each and every possible faith, including Satanism and/or The Church of Soiled Sock Puppets. Yet nobody thinks to suggest that the cable industry, when it lobbies Congress, might be violating the Constitution unless it represents the interests of every other electronic entertainment area in its requests, including the Internet and cell phones. Or that Big Oil, when demanding (and getting) freedom from paying taxes, should be required to seek no-tax status for the rest of the anti-green industry.

Maybe churches should learn to masquerade as business, sports, or military interests. Then, like everyone else, they wouldn't be barred from enjoying the same representation.