Meant to post about this Friday night, but got too busy…
NPR posted this Friday under the headline, “Why Partisans Can’t Kick The Hypocrisy Habit:”
American politics has become like a big square dance. When the music stops after an election, people switch to the other side on a number of issues, depending on whether their party remains in power.
That was pretty clear this week, when polls revealed more Democrats than Republicans support tracking of phone traffic by the National Security Agency — the exact opposite of where things stood under President George W. Bush.
A Washington Post-Pew Research Center released Monday showed that 64 percent of Democrats support such efforts, up from just 36 percent in 2006. Republican support, meanwhile, had dropped from 75 percent to 52 percent.
It’s not just a question of whether you trust the current president to carry out data mining in a way that targets terrorists and not innocent Americans. Partisans hold malleable positions in a number of areas — foreign policy, the economy and even who continue to serve under a new administration.
“People change their views depending on which party is in power, and not based on objective conditions on the ground,” says George Washington University political scientist John Sides….
But is “hypocrisy” the right word? You know me; I like to trash partisanship whenever I can. But maybe in this case at least some of the partisans are getting a bum rap.
As usual, I was very interested in what E.J. Dionne and David Brooks had to say on the subject Friday night.
Here’s what Brooks said, regarding the way Joe Biden has changed his tune on surveillance practices that he once called “very, very intrusive:”
Actually, there’s education, not hypocrisy… You get into office and you learn the threats. You get the daily intelligence brief. Maybe you get sucked in by the National Security apparatus, but I’d like to say you just learn. And so you do things you wouldn’t otherwise do because you learn the truth…
Indeed. And as you know, I have welcomed the Obama administration’s pragmatism on so many points of consideration in the realm of national security.
E.J. also saw something more positive than mere “hyprocrisy,” although he saw it from a different angle:
You know, in only partial defense of Biden, I would say that we have more legal limits now than we did at the time he spoke. But I think there’s been a lot of hypocrisy on this, and oddly enough, I kind of welcome it. On the one hand, you do have some liberals who were critical of Bush and now support Obama, and you have a lot of conservatives who supported Bush but now suddenly say the same things are bad.
But you also have consistency. You have liberals who are mad at Bush, mad at Obama, conservatives who support Bush, support Obama. I think the fact that there is – people have switched sides reflects a deep and intelligent ambivalence. We want to be safe. We also want to be free. And we want to have our privacy protected. And we know it’s complicated to have all of those at the same time.
And I think the fact that the partisan and ideological lines have been scrambled might actually help us have a debate on the merits…
Good points from both. For my part, I take the good breaks we can get. If Obama is able to get the political room to act on these things for the same reason Nixon could go to China, well, more power to him. Pun intended.
By the way, in the realm of putting these surveillance programs into a clearer perspective, I liked this, from Brooks:
As for the point [Biden] made, Charles Krauthammer in a column today said it’s like the outside of an envelope. The government has a right to keep track of what’s on the outside of the envelope.
They do not have to read what’s in the envelope and that’s essentially what they’re doing with the calls. I’m old enough, I can remember getting a phone bill where every single call you made was listed on your phone bill. Is that keeping track? Is that an invasion of privacy? I think a minimal one.
Related Posts
Apparently in the 36 years Joe Biden spent in the Senate, he didn’t have time or access to any information to help him form a solid opinion on national security surveillance programs. It’s good to see he’s finally got the spare time to study up on that topic.
” You get into office and you learn the threats. You get the daily intelligence brief. Maybe you get sucked in by the National Security apparatus, but I’d like to say you just learn. And so you do things you wouldn’t otherwise do because you learn the truth…”
How does this sync up with your belief that in a representative democracy the voters can select the person who they want to review the national security programs? If the VP has access to more and better information (which must be the case since he has flip-flopped on the issue), then how do we voters have the ability to vote for representatives when they don’t have the same information? Does my Congressman know everything about PRISM that Joe Biden does now? If not, why not?
The one thing that doesn’t bother me about the whole domestic phone tapping scandal: If you got a free Obamaphone, you shouldn’t have any expectation of privacy.
Those Reganphones have been massively abused. But since I don’t see the ads on tv anymore (or is it that I’m not watching), maybe the Obama administration has modified the rules about this program?
Yeah, to repeat what I said earlier on the subject…
Except, of course, that there’s no such thing as an “Obamaphone.” Some salient points from an explainer in The Washington Post recently:
Brad,
If you took out the references to national security surveillance and replaced those with comments on the SC legislature’s pass on ethics reform, your post would read in an entirely different manner.
Anyway, the linkage amused me. Sometimes partisanship is closer to self-serving impulses or just plain stupid knee-jerk reactions than it is to an actual platform for action.
The debate is still largely fueled by hyper-partisanship, regardless of the consistency of a few commentators. A large, highly-visible group on the right want to pile on anything that makes voters uncomfortable and distrustful of Obama, regardless of whether he actually did it (Obamaphone, welfare increases, harmed economy, accumulated federal debt) and regardless of their own previous positions on the matter. Others, more centrist, circle the wagons when Obama is attacked to minimize political damage or in defense of the actual facts (Issa “investigations,” Obamacare adding to deficits, Obamacare cutting Medicare benefits). The more left-leaning Democrats are very critical. The militarists (Graham, Cheney, et al) are consistently non-critical on matters where Obama supports the military/security establishment and kills folks as a security measure.