Gail Collins on Obama and FISA

Gail Collins compares the freakout over Obama's stance on FISA to the girl who thinks that she has met the perfect man only to be disappointed when he leaves for Antarctica to do scientific research -- exactly like he said he was going to. The problem, as Collins points out, is that Obama is doing exactly what he said he was going to when he first shot into prominence in 2004 -- bridge the divide between red and blue. He's not an ideologue -- he's a compromiser.

Therefore, Obama errs on the side of inclusion, such as the time when he let McClurkin emcee one of his events. And he errs on the side of giving people the benefit of the doubt, like when he says that George Bush is a good man with the best interests of the country at heart. And he errs on the side of compromise, like with the FISA bill.

What Obama opposes, as Collins writes, is any kind of dumbness, which he equates to any kind of oversimplification. He opposed Wright because of his narrow and black and white views on race relations. He could care less if one were to refuse to vote for him based on FISA -- after all, if you're a one-issue voter, then he doesn't need your vote. He opposed Iraq because he saw it as a dumb war seeing that the real terrorists were still at large in Afghanistan. If you think the world is a simple place, then you probably bought into the with us or against us mentality that George Bush sold and Obama never had your vote in the first place. Or, you voted for Nader in 2000; in that case, Paul Wellstone, Russ Feingold, or Dennis Kucinich would not be perfect enough for you.

And here is how it translates into policy:

On the common-ground front, he’s called for giving more federal money to religious groups that run social programs, but only if the services they offer are secular. People can have guns for hunting and protection, but we should crack down on unscrupulous gun sellers. Putting some restrictions on the government’s ability to wiretap is better than nothing, even though he would rather have gone further.

But the problem with Collins' characterization of Obama's refusal to take public financing ignores the fact that John McCain was going to take it and then line up all these 527's along with the RNC with millions of dollars to take aim at Obama in the fall election while he was hamstrung by the federal matching limits. In other words, John McCain was never negotiating in good faith over this issue, so why should Obama take public financing when the playing field was not going to be level?

tags: gail collins  barack obama  public financing  constitution  john mccain  

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