Then there were ten.
Eight Senate Dems and Jeffords joined Russ Feingold this time in voting against the Patriot Act renewal. I'll wait for better in-the-weeds analysis when it comes online, but the Bloomberg article overviews the compromise pretty well. (One question I still have is whether the controversial provisions expire again in four years part of compromise, since I think I've seen mixed reports on this.) Feingold's Senate website provides a fact sheet from a few weeks ago explaining his continued opposition to the deal, and I assume not much has changed. From my complete layman's perspective, his best case comes from the compromise document's failure to give adequate legal protections to those who face "gag orders" about turning over documents to the FBI.
The cloture vote earlier this week passed 69-30 (interesting tidbits: Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden both voted for cloture). That's still a better showing, it must be said, than was achieved on Kerry's attempt to lead a filibuster on Alito. Feingold is, not surprisingly, upset with his party for caving.
I take note of this not because I really understand enough about the Patriot Act to have a valid opinion on how decent the compromise is, or how serious a threat the remaining controversial provisions pose to American civil liberties, but because I more or less reflexively, in my relative ignorance, trust Feingold on the matter. The fact that he was locked out of the compromise talk while false-maverick Republicans Sununu and Markowski bashed out a deal with the White House, seems wrong enough in itself to warrant stronger Democratic opposition to the final product.
Assuming I'm not alone in feeling this way, it's a powerful position for a senator and potential presidential candidate to find himself in, with the implicit trust of a large swathe of the more politically aware potential primary electorate, at least on his specialty topics. It's the same sort of thing as what Edwards seems to be going for on the topic of work and poverty -- to own the issue, to be implicitly trusted on it. It's interesting in that a case can be made that both of the Democrats' last two nominees suffered from the fact that they were largely single- or few-issue wonks slogging their way unenthusiastically through the wide-ranging policy platforms they had to adopt and didn't much care about. (See this diary by Armando and in particular Ezra's comments about Kerry's suberting his fascination with his pet topics of global financing of terror and organized crime in favour of rote recitations about health and education.) Compare that to Bill Clinton whose intellectual interests were more fleeting, supple and wide-ranging, allowing him to riff at will on just about any subject he'd done some reading on.
Feingold seems more a cerebral wonk in the Gore-Kerry mold more than a Clinton Rennaissance thinker-politician. On the merits, I've got no objection to that; intellectual focus is a sign of discipline, and a president doesn't need to be, and can't be, emotionally involved in every aspect of his Administration's policy. The question is, can Feingold be more supple and less dogged about his obsessions, and less obvious/ more natural about hiding them when they're politically problematic, than his predessosors were? The answer to that question probably will tell a lot about how far the Feingold-'08 bandwagon will travel.
The cloture vote earlier this week passed 69-30 (interesting tidbits: Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden both voted for cloture). That's still a better showing, it must be said, than was achieved on Kerry's attempt to lead a filibuster on Alito. Feingold is, not surprisingly, upset with his party for caving.
I take note of this not because I really understand enough about the Patriot Act to have a valid opinion on how decent the compromise is, or how serious a threat the remaining controversial provisions pose to American civil liberties, but because I more or less reflexively, in my relative ignorance, trust Feingold on the matter. The fact that he was locked out of the compromise talk while false-maverick Republicans Sununu and Markowski bashed out a deal with the White House, seems wrong enough in itself to warrant stronger Democratic opposition to the final product.
Assuming I'm not alone in feeling this way, it's a powerful position for a senator and potential presidential candidate to find himself in, with the implicit trust of a large swathe of the more politically aware potential primary electorate, at least on his specialty topics. It's the same sort of thing as what Edwards seems to be going for on the topic of work and poverty -- to own the issue, to be implicitly trusted on it. It's interesting in that a case can be made that both of the Democrats' last two nominees suffered from the fact that they were largely single- or few-issue wonks slogging their way unenthusiastically through the wide-ranging policy platforms they had to adopt and didn't much care about. (See this diary by Armando and in particular Ezra's comments about Kerry's suberting his fascination with his pet topics of global financing of terror and organized crime in favour of rote recitations about health and education.) Compare that to Bill Clinton whose intellectual interests were more fleeting, supple and wide-ranging, allowing him to riff at will on just about any subject he'd done some reading on.
Feingold seems more a cerebral wonk in the Gore-Kerry mold more than a Clinton Rennaissance thinker-politician. On the merits, I've got no objection to that; intellectual focus is a sign of discipline, and a president doesn't need to be, and can't be, emotionally involved in every aspect of his Administration's policy. The question is, can Feingold be more supple and less dogged about his obsessions, and less obvious/ more natural about hiding them when they're politically problematic, than his predessosors were? The answer to that question probably will tell a lot about how far the Feingold-'08 bandwagon will travel.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home