ASK passers-by on any street in America what their top issue is for the upcoming presidential election, and they’ll all answer the same thing: the Foreign Service Intelligence Act.
Gas prices, home foreclosures, the Iraq war – all pale in comparison. Single mothers gathered at the laundromat are all talking about one thing: FISA.
And if you get them to stop yammering on about immunity for telecoms, you won’t be able to shut them up about their next favorite outrage: Barack Obama‘s decision to opt out of public financing.
Don’t believe it? Then – unlike many left-wing bloggers and activists, known as the “net roots” – you’re in touch with reality.
One top liberal blogger opined last week that Obama’s drop in a recent Newsweek poll resulted from his vote for a compromise on FISA, the intelligence surveillance law.
Ridiculous: The average American voter can’t describe what FISA is.
Meanwhile, a virtual mutiny is taking place on Obama’s campaign Web site, which is swamped with angry complaints that Obama has sold out his “base.”
Newsflash to the netroots and the media (which seems perpetually confused on this issue): The netroots are not the base of the Democratic Party.
Overwhelmingly white, male and highly educated, they’re a loud anomaly in a party that’s wholly dependent on the votes of African Americans, women and working-class whites.
And every poll in existence confirms that what the folks in the party’s actual base care about is the economy and the Iraq war.
It’s high gas prices, not electronic snooping, that have most Americans on edge.
This isn’t to say that Obama’s vote was right or good. The bill grants legal immunity to telecom that cooperated with the government’s illegal wiretapping program, an affront to anyone concerned with privacy. The problem here is the extreme lack of self-awareness on left-wing activists’ part.
They claim to want to win, yet they’re determined to malign the Democratic nominee for doing what he always said he would do: make compromises and find the middle ground.
The reality is that Obama was never a good fit with the net roots. Obama’s less-ideological brand of postpartisanship is directly at odds with these brawlers – who are more committed to picking fights with opponents (Republicans and moderate Democrats) than anything else.
In a 2006 Washington Monthly article, Markos Moulitsas – the founder of DailyKOS and godfather of the liberal net roots – summed up the strategy of left-wing bloggers: Embrace partisanship and confrontation.
Said Moulitsas: “I’m not ideological at all. I’m just all about winning.” Yet there he was blasting Obama on MSNBC last week for his FISA vote, saying he may be one of those “spineless Democrats who are . . . afraid of controversy.”
Self-indulgence is the name of the game. It’s more important for this group to have temper tantrums than to rally around Obama – though he’d, without question, be a more progressive president than John McCain.
The New York Times quoted a former Obama devotee who had been inspired to register as a Democrat but is now so disgusted by Obama’s “move to the middle” that she’s changed her registration to her old love, the Green Party.
This reminded me of 2004, when so many Deaniacs registered to vote because they had finally been “inspired” to vote by Howard Dean’s “new” kind of politics. They uniformally seemed to believe that voting was supposed to give them a high – or they couldn’t be bothered.
No sense of civic duty, no awareness that voting is a great privilege denied to most of the world even today.
The true believers’ passion is admirable – but, at some point, grownups realize that they can’t get everything their way. Instead, left-wing activists can seem emotionally stunted – always seeking the mountaintop experience, when governing happens in the valleys.
With so many Democratic activists stuck at the developmental level of a neglected 5-year-old, it’s a wonder Bill Clinton ever got elected – until you recall how he alternately dissed and ignored the low-tech version of this group.
Grow up, net rooters: You’re going to see more Obama compromises with reality, more shifts to address what the real Democratic base cares about. Don’t even be surprised if he comes out with a plan to allow domestic oil drilling.