Anti-FISA Group On Obama’s Website Reaches 14,600+ Members
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in 2008 Election, Barack, Law, Legislation, Technology, The War On TerrorismI covered this back on June 27th, and at that time the group had around 550 members. What a difference a week makes, eh?
Not only that, this group is now the biggest on his website now.
TPM points to a story from USA Today about the group…
In recent days, Obama has criticized the Supreme Court for saying that child rapists cannot be executed and refused to oppose a decision knocking down a handgun ban. He announced a plan to support “faith-based” social work and said he would vote for a bill giving immunity to telephone companies that allowed warrantless wiretapping of their customers.Those centrist positions may help woo swing voters, but they infuriated some of Obama’s core supporters. Nearly 12,000 of them have formed an online group on Obama’s presidential campaign website, urging him to vote against the domestic wiretapping bill.
That story was posted 11 hours ago. Since then the group has added around 2,600 members.
So this sets up an interesting predicament. One of the strengths of the Obama campaign has been its ability to give people the tools to self-organize online and take action offline. But now those tools may work against him, and what happens if the candidate completely ignores these people? What will the backlash be?
One thing’s for sure…expect this group to get bigger…and fast.
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 and is filed under 2008 Election, Barack, Law, Legislation, Technology, The War On Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 3rd, 2008 at 10:23 am
John Scalzi, a sci-fi novelist with a fantastic blog, summed this issue up quite well the other day in a post called, Reminder: There’s No Actual Office for “President of the Left”:
“Personally speaking I’m not hugely thrilled with every move Obama has made recently: … . On the other hand, I have strong suspicions that President Obama would nominate to the high court the sort of judges that would see the FISA “compromise” bill as fundamentally unconstitutional, and in the meantime his positioning deprives the right-wing shouty chorus of some oxygen during his presidential campaign.
Which is to say that I’m fundamentally unsurprised to discover that Barack Obama, who has been in politics for a number of years, is a politician. And a politician who wants to win as big as he can.”
As for me, I’m not particularly thrilled abut Obama’s position on FISA, either. But the thing that stopped me from joining the shrieking masses who are, well, shrieking about it is that President Obama can’t deliver even a speck of what he’s promising if he’s not, you know, elected.
July 3rd, 2008 at 11:10 am
Anyone who genuinely believes that Obama is a “different” kind of politician is really really mistaken. It’s somewhat frustrating to know that by early next year, there’s going to be an entire generation of young first-time voters, people for the first time in their lives energized by the hopeful promise of genuine change in politics, utterly disillusioned by the reality that Obama is simply a normal politician with an exceptional ability to persuade and motivate with his words.
But honestly, for the upcoming election, it doesn’t matter. Those 14,000+ folks who are upset with him will still vote Obama in November. It’s the same thing with the conseravative core of the Republicans. There will always be a chunk of people who end up voting AGAINST a candidate, rather than for one.
July 3rd, 2008 at 11:48 am
“John Scalzi, a sci-fi novelist with a fantastic blog, summed this issue up quite well the other day in a post called, Reminder: There’s No Actual Office for “President of the Left””
but this isn’t just an issue of right vs. left. i know a lot of right-leaning libertarians that despise this bill more than i do. i read somewhere there was a poll with up near 3/4 of those polled opposed the bill?
this is an issue of the people vs. the government, pure and simple. the people do not want this bill, on the right or the left. only the politicians do.
July 3rd, 2008 at 2:53 pm
@dan: And Scalzi agrees with you. I do, too, for that matter (Unaffiliated voter here who usually votes Libertarian). If you haven’t already, I urge you to read the entire post along with the comment trail.
As for your all/none statement at the end: surely there are non-politicians (I’m assuming this is who you mean when you say “the people”) who don’t care about FISA and even some who do think it’s a good idea to affirm telco immunity… just as there were, in fact, politicians who voted against the bill. ;)
July 7th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
[...] I wrote about this last Thursday, and at that time the group had 14,600 members. [...]