Obama, FISA and the Angry Left

Senator Obama's flip in support of legislation to grant immunity to telecom companies that aid the government in the surveillance of communications involving suspected terrorists is drawing a maelstrom of fire from the Left side of the blogosphere.  Many of these erstwhile Obama supporters are using the official website of the Obama campaign to register their disgruntlement and, in fact, organize against the Senator by creating an online group:

That same day, a new online group named "Senator Obama—Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity—Get FISA Right" formed on his campaign's social networking Web site. Now with more than 22,000 members, it is the largest group on MyBarackObama.com.

The online group is flooded with messages of disappointment and disillusionment. Some threaten to ask that their campaign contributions be returned, while others suggest they will simply stay home this fall.

One man even said he had removed his Obama bumper sticker from his car. "It's the first and only bumper sticker that I've ever put on a vehicle that I owned, so my disappointment felt personal and significant," he wrote.

Others, meanwhile, are countering that Obama is simply being pragmatic, now that he is in the midst of a general election campaign, and that a single issue should not be used to push supporters away.

"Some people in the group clearly are disillusioned," said Jon Pincus, a consultant and social networking author from the Seattle area deeply involved with the discussion. "A lot of people are saying, 'Let's see how real the rhetoric is.' "

The blogosphere is changing politics in innumerable ways.  As the Obama campaign is quickly learning, the very technology used to promote a candidate and his or her message can be hi-jacked and used to subvert both the candidate and the message.  To make matters even worse for the candidate getting the blowback, the whole fight can be aired out, blow-by-blow, in excruciating detail on the internet for the whole world to see.  It will be interesting to see how Senator Obama responds before this issue gets out of hand.  It will be very tough for him to build a winning coalition if he angers his base on an issue they believe is of critical importance and, at the same time, gets tagged as a frequent position flipper.

Update on Wednesday, July 9, 2008 at 05:33PM by Joe

Former Clintonista Lanny Davis tries to spin Obama's FISA vote as some kind of a "profile in courage."  He employs a bogus analogy between the FISA issue and Bill Clinton's noteworthy rebuke of Sister Souljah during the 1992 campaign.  The argument is that, just like Bill Clinton, Senator Obama is standing up to the extremists in his own Party.  The difference, of course, is that Bill Clinton never supported Sister Souljah before condemning her.  A John Kerry analogy would be more appropriate, since Senator Obama was against the telecom immunity provision before he was for it.