Dancing Nancies

(Apologies to the Dave Matthews Band for appropriating their song title for this bunch)

As a follow-up to yesterday's rant about spineless, gutless Democrats, this article in Salon today demonstrates further that there is NO battle the current Democratic Party is willing to fight, lest it appear "weak" -- completely oblivious to the fact that the party's own fecklessness makes it weaker than any well-thought-out dissent from the Administration's policies would be:

Typical was my lunch discussion earlier this week with a ranking Democratic Party official. Midway through the meal, I innocently asked how the "Big Brother is listening" issue would play in November. Judging from his pained reaction, I might as well have announced that Barack Obama was resigning from the Senate to sell vacuum cleaners door-to-door. With exasperation dripping from his voice, my companion said, "The whole thing plays to the Republican caricature of Democrats -- that we're weak on defense and weak on security." To underscore his concerns about shrill attacks on Bush, the Democratic operative forwarded to me later that afternoon an e-mail petition from MoveOn.org, which had been inspired by Al Gore's fire-breathing Martin Luther King Day speech excoriating the president's contempt for legal procedures.

A series of conversations with Democratic pollsters and image makers found them obsessed with similar fears that left-wing overreaction to the wiretapping issue would allow George W. Bush and the congressional Republicans to wiggle off the hook on other vulnerabilities. The collective refrain from these party insiders sounded something like this: Why are we so obsessed with the privacy of people who are phoning al-Qaida when Democrats should be screaming about corruption, Iraq, gas prices and the prescription-drug mess?

Recent polling data reinforces skepticism about the size of an untapped civil liberties vote. In a survey conducted in the first week of January, after the eavesdropping scandal hit the headlines, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found the electorate evenly split on the issue. (For those who love the precision of polling questions, 48 percent said it was "generally right" to monitor Americans suspected of terrorist ties "without court permission," and 47 percent said it was "generally wrong.") This division should not be surprising, since voters are evenly split on virtually every public issue aside from declaring war on Canada.

[snip]

These assessments were all made before Osama bin Laden released his latest tape threatening new attacks on America. Even card-carrying members of the American Civil Liberties Union may have felt a momentary shiver of fear that (to quote an ad for a "Jaws" sequel) "this time it's personal." But more than four years after the horrors of Sept. 11, ingrained American political attitudes are unlikely to significantly change either way because of the broadcast of a menacing videotape on Al-Jazeera.

But Time magazine columnist Joe Klein ("Primary Colors") will argue in a new book coming out this spring, "Paradise Lost," that misjudgments by Democratic consultants have played a major role in leaving the party without a power base more influential than the state of Illinois. And from my own vantage point, the Democrats' positioning on the eavesdropping issue invites comparisons to their fetal crouch in the run-up to the Iraqi War. A majority of Senate Democrats voted for Bush's go-to-war resolution -- including John Kerry, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton -- at least partly because the pollsters insisted that it was the only politically safe position, a ludicrous and self-destructive notion in hindsight.

The problem with a consultant-driven overreliance on polling data is that it is predicated on the assumption that nothing will happen to jar public opinion out of its current grooves. As Elaine Kamarck, a top advisor in the Clinton-Gore White House and a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, argued, "These guys [the consultants] just don't get it. They don't understand that in politics strength is better than weakness. And a political party that is always the namby-pamby 'me too' party is a party that isn't going to get anyplace."

Kamarck also shrewdly pointed out that if leading Democrats follow the consultants and abdicate the field on the NSA spying issue (Hillary Clinton, please call your office), "They're going to leave the critique open to the far left. And that will exacerbate two problems the Democrats have: one, that they look too far out of the mainstream, and the other, that they don't believe in anything."

Now, I'm pretty much a civil liberties absolutist when it comes to the right to privacy, and when we have an administration as paranoid as this one, an administration that repeatedly warns Americans that anyone who disagrees with them is a traitor, yes, I'm loath to give them carte blanche to eavesdrop on just anyone they choose. Dick Cheney is going around the country claiming that this sort of eavesdropping is necessary to thwart terrorist attacks, but what no one in the mainstream media is reporting is that when such eavesdropping is necessary, it is perfectly legal to do so -- PROIVIDED that the necessary FISA warrants are obtained within three days. This hardly stands in the way of acting quickly, and it protects the kind of surveillance of political opponents about which those of us who oppose what Bush is doing are most concerned.

Given that this president ignored a warning in August 2001 that pretty much spelled out what was going to happen on 9/11, if not the exact date, and given that this Administration has done virtually nothing in terms of taking the steps recommended by the 9/11 Commission to protect this country from another attack, how can we rely on them to use the power to eavesdrop without accountability in a responsible manner?

The President, as conservatives were SO fond of saying during the 1990's, when the president's name was Bill Clinton, is not above the law. This president isn't above the law either. If the FISA requirement is too onerous, then let him make his case to the Congress headed by his own party, and work to change the law.