Surveillance and Executive Privilege

So, I read an article recently about how the White House
has for the past few years been eschewing the use of
government e-mail addresses. The reason is that those
e-mails send a carbon copy of all messages to a database
where they are stored, and can from there potentially be
subpoenaed: “Even former President George H.W. Bush said
his son, the current president, spurns e-mailing because
the records could be subpoenaed.”  The quote is from the
American Progress Action Report which put out a pretty
comprehensive and convincing report on the issue.

What I found missing from the article however was any
comment upon the manifest irony of the situation.  The
Bush Administration has for the past few years been 
expanding public surveillance oftentimes unilaterally
and possibly illegally.  However, while they’re
scrutinizing us more so than ever before, they’re
doing everything within their power to prevent us,
who they’re ostensibly serving from knowing what they’re 
doing.

The whole situation makes me wish that we could subject
them to the same sort of surveillance they subject us
to.  It makes me, in a way, very angry at the American 
system of government that these people have the power
to watch the rest of us, and yet there seems to be no
effective mechanism for us to do the same to them.  
They ostensibly work for us, and yet for political
reasons we are prevented from knowing what exactly 
they’re doing in fulfilling that service.  Fuck this
serving at the pleasure of the President shit that
we’ve heard so frequently from white house staff
recently.  They’re supposed to serve at the pleasure
of the American people and the American Constitution.

Anyway, there’s a very real likelihood that the White
House poses almost as serious a threat to the safety
of the American people as do the terrorists which
the White House’s surveillance is supposedly designed
to deal with. Their incompetence in Iraq has killed more
Americans than the terrorists ever did, and quite
frankly, it looks like a good surveillance campaign
conducted against the white house would probably score
more convictions than Bush’s anti-terror surveillance
ever did.  

Doubts About Obama and Edwards

It scarcely took me any time to me figure out who were my favorites in the presidential primaries. They were Edwards and Obama. The two of them were willing to take strong, affirmative stances on very liberal issues, while Clinton, seemed prone to equivocation. An expert political actor, Clinton appeared to be driven by polls and political concerns, not heart-felt, deeply seated beliefs.

I still support Edwards and Obama, but my initial enthusiasm has been tainted by a realization: Edward’s and Obama’s out spokeness is very likely a symptom less of heart felt conviction, than of real politick. Granted, it’s never really possible to speculate definitively about other people’s motivations, but this isn’t an essay about definitive truths, it’s about doubt, about questioning the credibility of candidates who I, by and large, support.

The fact is that the three front runners in the presidential primaries are acting very much in accordance with the logic that real politick would suggest that they ought to. Clinton is the front runner in the primaries because of the popularity of her husband’s administration within the Democratic Party. But, she doesn’t have the same sort of support amongst the general populace, which generally imagines her to be too liberal. Because she can take the support of her party mostly for granted, she doesn’t need to make strong liberal statements, which would attract people to her in the primaries, but could become a liability when she faces moderate voters in November.

Obama and Edwards on the other hand are more popular amongst the general electorate than Clinton, and are therefore less concerned about alienating them than with tackling the juggernaut in the primary elections, Hilary Clinton. To do that they need to be taking radical positions that will appeal to the democrats voting in the primaries. The more desperate they are, the more inclined they are to make more radical statements in the primaries, which they know might come back to haunt them in the general election. Hence Edwards, the one who trails furthest behind Clinton, is calling for universal healthcare, an extraordinarily liberal proposition. The notion that Edwards is making these statements for political purposes is supported in part by the fact that he wasn’t nearly so radical in the last election, during which the field was less crowded, and he didn’t have a name as big as Clinton’s to contend with.

Though, despite these doubts I still prefer Obama and Edwards to Clinton. They’re just doubts, and, quite frankly, what matters is what they do, not why they do it, so the question of motivations is almost a moot point. I’m tried of seeing democratic politicians without backbone. To win democrats need to start electing real leaders, people who stand by the guns. Anyway, sticking to the center is a strategy of extraordinarily dubious utility, since the center might well be far left of where we imagine it is by the time election day rolls around. Already Clinton’s stance on the war puts her well to the right of the majority of the nation, and even further right than some republican politicians. If there really is a political shift happening, we need leaders who aren’t afraid to take advantage of it, who have the charisma to cultivate it, and who can give it a strong, respectable face.

The Burden of Experience

One of the central issues that democrats will have to deal with in the coming election is that of experience. Two of the three front runners in the primaries – specifically Obama and Edwards – have only a handful of years worth of experience in politics, and some democrats might hold that against them. Democrats however should be cognizant of one of the sad truths of politics today: that while experience is without a doubt an incredible asset in governing; it has become, in the modern political era, a serious impediment to acquiring the ability to govern. Simply stated, political experience has become the greatest of political liabilities.

It was the confirmation of John Roberts, a man with almost no experience as a judge, to the chief justice of the Supreme Court, which “confirmed” so to say, this principle. Any other nominee would have provoked a vicious struggle, but Roberts was handed the foremost position in the nations judiciary, ironically, precisely because he had almost no judicial experience. Without any knowledge of a man, there’s really no way to slander him, and what is American politics today if not a competition to see who can out slander the other?

Now one might object: “Yes it’s better to have no record than a bad record, but is it not better to have a good record than no record?” The answer is no, precisely because there is no such thing as a good record; any record, properly spun, can be made into a bad record. We saw that fact demonstrated in the 2004 Presidential election. Kerry’s war experience, considered by most to be his primary strength, was spun into a liability by the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.” Then Kerry's votes on military funding, which took funding away from obsolete parts of the military, votes which were at the time supported by people within the Bush Administration, were spun in such a fashion as to make Kerry look like a liberal commie, destroying our national defense by taking money away from the army. No good deed goes unpunished in the modern political sphere, and every record is a bad record.

Spin and Rhetoric are nothing new – they have existed for millennia before the American Union was so much as a twinkle in the eye of any democratic minded idealist. But a handful of changes have occurred in the past few years to make the airwaves more susceptible to outlandish and even demonstrably false rhetoric. Campaign finance reform has meant that more money has been flowing to unreliable third party political groups like “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” which can make outlandish claims without having to worry about tarring the reputation of their own candidate because the are, at least in name, independent of any party or candidate. Secondly, cable has opened the news up to more competition, and more competition means that news networks have had to sensationalize their news in order to bring in viewers. The result has been a rise in a new sort of yellow journalism, with Fox News at the lead. Finally, and most importantly, there has been radical shift in the way news networks conceive of their mandate for objectivity. Instead of having one impartial anchor, it's not believed that to be objective we need cross-fire style shows with two sides duking it. The idea is to be “fair and balanced” to allow both sides to represent themselves, even if one is demonstrably false, as was the case with the swift boat veterans for truth, who received amble coverage.

The result is that the modern political debate looks a little something like a court of law, with two lawyers arguing their case. We all know how fallible that system is, how one incredibly persuasive lawyer can mislead a jury; but the court of law has an advantage which the court of public opinion does not offer. The court of public opinion is not composed of a captive jury which listens to both sides and comes to understand the whole of the case, it is composed of people flipping through channels, who often times only get to hear one side of the story, or, who only hear bits and pieces of the issue, some of which directly contradict each other. This produces an electorate which has been either indoctrinated into false ideas without ever hearing the facts which would disprove them, or which has been profoundly confused by a flood of contradictory information. The prevalence of the later is why the great political debate today, the one which would provide either side with it’s end game, is not a philosophical one having to do with peace and war or capitalism and socialism, but is rather one about ethos – about which political figures can and can not be trusted. Look at the stream of political literature which is pouring into book stores nowadays. The books don’t have titles like “The Communist Manifesto,” “The Wealth of Nations,” “and “The Spirit of the Laws,” they have titles like “Lies and the Lying Liars who tell them” “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot” and “One Hundred people who are ruining America.” The contemporary political thinker is not so concerned about winning a philosophical argument; his first goal is to prove that he’s the one telling the truth, because, in this day and the age, the truth is a very difficult thing to find on T.V.

It’s this fundamental difficulty with truth that makes John Roberts the best man for the job, that makes political inexperience the greatest of political assets. Nowadays, any fact can be altered, any act can be twisted into an unforgivable sin, and, subsequent to that, disseminated freely across the nation to millions of people, spread via word of mouth, and as indelibly grained into the American consciousness as if it were a fact. The only man safe from spin is the man who we know nothing about, the one for whom there are no facts to be twisted, the one utterly devoid of any political experience.