Obama's scold is a good sign
Fri Sep 23, 2005 at 07:42:05 PM PDT
but not for the reason other people might think it is.
The fact of the matter is that politicians do not lead. Not usually. Not with civil rights, not with abolition, not with the american revolution, not with nuclear freeze, not with women's equality, not with opposing war, not with gay rights. And to be completely honest, in a democracy they aren't supposed to lead, they're supposed to follow the will of the people. Because we live in a democracy that understands ultimate sovereignty as residing in the people, not their aristocratic betters (as the framers of the constitution to some degree envisioned) or their political betters, as many in DC seem to see it.
The fact that it has come to the point where they sent out Obama, one of the most popular democratic politicians with the blogosphere and the democratic base, to tell us to back off, to stop being so unreasonable, is a good sign, because it means that we're getting to them. It means that they've heard us, and that we're bugging them, and that they're getting defensive about not following their constituents' will when the chips were down.
And they
should be defensive, because they sold us out on roberts by not fighting from the get-go, as a unified team, using whatever methods available, from the fillibuster on down to running series after series of attack ads, to public rallies around the country, to talking points on the talk shows, and threatening to slow everything in the senate down to a crawl until roberts answered whatever questions that we had for him, to our satisfaction. The supreme court, after all, is an extraordinarily important nomination, and a chief justice doubly so.
Their defensiveness is to be expected. their perspective is not our perspective, and they do not suffer from the policies that they pass or do not pass in the immediate way that we, the people, do. The beltway insulates them, and it is our responsibility to wake them us from time to time, hopefully with more peaceful methods than those that Thomas Jefferson, our party's founding father, intended and explicitly called for over two centuries ago.
The great news here is that we are really starting to bother them. And that's a good start. They notice us now. But they do not yet fear us. That's step two.
Obama will be a great statesman one day, when he lives in a nation where the popular sentiment, the will of the mob, is raging for change, and forces him at the point of a ballot box or threat of widespread civil disturbance to legislate the liberal agenda that he believes in, deep down inside, in private. Obama will be a great statesman when he is able to act as FDR or JFK once did, and moderate the impassioned cries for progressive change, and stand up to the forces of reaction and oppression, and negotiate a new truce between those two opposing historical forces. But he won't do that without our dialectic force pushing him inexorably in that direction, necessitating the intervention of statesmen such as himself as peacemakers and moderators.
It is our job not merely to inform our senators and representatives what we would like them to do, although that is a part of it. It is our job to demand that they do what we want them to do, and make them hate us if need be, but more importantly to make them fear crossing us politically. At that point, when we have helped to turn the tide of public opinion, and have made it clear on what issues they cannot cross us without paying with their careers, under no uncertain terms (and that, to be clear, also means making it clear among ourselves what things we are willing to bend on, and what things are deal-breakers, so that we have more discipline, and pick our battles), we will have done our job as citizens.
We have believed for too long that citizens vote and politicians lead. we need to act like true and sovereign citizens who hire politicians to do our bidding, and do the leading for them, and then play hardball with them if and when they falter. We have squandered precious time after the primary season of 2003-4 by waiting for the Democrats to lead, when we should have been thinking about how to make the political status quo such that their political interests lied in not crossing us, much as the Christian right has done with the Republican party and conservative Democrats in decades past. Dean gets this, i think, as FDR did before him, and both have encouraged us (with a wink and a nod) to take the power that is our god-given right, and force the politicians to do the right thing.
They're listening now. Let's turn the heat up and hold their attention.
</rant>
