Organizing for America | Greg Alexander's Blog: Hope and disappointment.

Hope and disappointment.

By Greg from Bloomington, IN - Jul 3rd, 2008 at 12:24 pm EDT

Also listed in: President Obama, Please Get FISA Right

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Tags: despair, disappointment, FISA, immunity, telecom

I have been politically aware since about 1999. In other words, I've seen a lot of politicians win elections by telling one lie after another. For example, every primary season my congressman is strongly against the Iraq war. Then from May-November he tries not to talk about it. Then every January he goes to Washington and votes to fund the war, six months at a time. Every primary there is a challenge from an honest progressive who is actually against the Iraq war. Each time, their honesty fails to overcome various limitations in our electoral system. I become jaded.

Introduce Barack Obama. I never really heard of him until he started winning primaries. When I started looking up his stances, I was shocked. Here is an honest progressive, running for office, and winning! When he gave a speech confronting the intersection between race, religion, and politics, I found his commentary not only insightful but stunningly forthright. He didn't shy away from the complexity or difficulty of the issue. He delivered a speech knowing full well that it would not "sound bite" well. Wow! Then Hillary invented this bogus gas tax holliday and instead of joining on and shovelling the poop, he stuck to basic principles of sanity and honesty. And he was still winning! Wow!

For the first time in my life, I saw someone use honesty to win an election. I had not felt this good about democracy since reading Jefferson and Franklin in a gradeschool civics classroom.

Then there is today, and these quotes come to my attention. Until June 2008, Obama was saying all of the right things about FISA and telecom immunity. He was not using weasel words, he was promising concrete actions in service of concrete goals: the rule of law, equal application of the law, executive accountability, and essential liberty over temporary security. He was willing to stand up in public and say something that needed to be said even though it didn't make the best sound bite or use any of our base fears to manipulate us.

But as you can see, in June 2008 he completely changed his stance. When someone makes a promise in October 2007 to filibuster a bill and then announces in eight months later that he will support that bill, that is not just a flip-flop, that is a lie and a betrayal. It is a breach of the basic trust between politician and populace. It is not change I can believe in. It is change I have seen (and smelled) before.

To be clear, this is not a wedge forming between Obama and the progressive movement. This is a wedge forming between Obama's actions and Obama's words. It is not a failure in Obama's security policy, it is a failure in Obama's character.

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