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November 12, 2006

Integrity Chic

The story, originating in 1994, goes as follows: Upon hearing that former president Richard Nixon had just died, one of his political enemies of long standing is supposed to have said, "Really? I wonder why he did that?"

With Nixon, of course, the joke was obvious: The man didn't have a guile-less bone in his body. Anyone who knew him took it as axiomatic that even death by stroke simply had to be the result of political calculation by Nixon, not a natural or spontaneously occurring event.

So observers could be forgiven, perhaps, for taking the cynical view of the motives of the man who placed "I am not a crook" in the American political lexicon.

And if that were as far as it went, there probably wouldn't be much to write about here--it would be just one more way that Richard Nixon was one of a kind.

But Glenn Greenwald puts a sharp light on the self-congratulatory conventional wisdom of the Beltway Class, showing, as they scurry for dark corners, that such a level of cynicism is no longer an attitude reserved for the Nixons of our world, but Is instead their standard mode of understanding the world.

Nowhere is this clearer, says Greenwald, than in the case of Russ Feingold, who announced over the weekend that he won't be seeking the presidency in 2008.

Greenwald writes:

When Russ Feingold announced in March that he would introduce a resolution to censure President Bush for breaking the law by eavesdropping on Americans without warrants, a clear two-pronged consensus immediately arose among Beltway pundits and politicians -- including Republicans and many Democrats as well:

(1) Feingold had just disastrously handed a huge "gift" to Republicans, because opposition to Bush's warrantless eavesdropping would doom the Democrats politically, and,

(2) Feingold had introduced this resolution not because he really believed anything he was saying about it, but only as a "political stunt," selfishly designed to advance his own political interests (at the expense of his party) by shoring up the "liberal base" for his 2008 presidential run.

As for premise (1), Democrats spent all year opposing warrantless eavesdropping (mostly mild and reluctant opposition, though in some cases passionate). That opposition culminated in a House vote just 6 weeks before the election where 85% of Democrats voted against a bill to legalize warrantless eavesdropping.

Thereafter, Republicans did everything possible to make that an issue in the campaign, and Democrats just crushed Republicans in the election. As but one example, 12-term GOP incumbent Nancy Johnson made her support for warrantless eavesdropping (and her challenger's opposition to it) a centerpiece of her campaign. She was easily defeated.

As for premise (2), Russ Feingold announced today, definitively, that he is not running for President in 2008.

It is hard to overstate how ignorant and wrong Beltway pundits are about everything, and how barren and corrupt inside-Washington conventional wisdom is.

Russ Feingold has spent his entire idiosyncratic political career espousing views because he believes them, even when those views are so plainly contrary to his political interests. He infuriated his entire party by being the only Democratic Senator to vote against dismissal of the Clinton impeachment charges prior to the Senate trial. He pursued campaign finance reform hated by incumbents in both parties.

It's true--lord knows, some of Feingold's decisions have infuriated me. Even though I intellectually understood his reason for voting to confirm John Ashcroft as Attorney General, I found it astonishing that the man could draw his lines of principle so narrowly that the obvious disaster for law enforcement in America that Ashcroft represented would be left out of consideration. (And, in fairness, Feingold was among the first and fiercest to butt heads with Ashcroft once he was confirmed. Except that, by then, Ashcroft was no longer a political joke, a former Senator who lost his re-election to a dead guy; he was a sitting Attorney General.)

But as exasperating as that was, no one could doubt that it was, nevertheless, a matter of principle for Feingold, and not some Moriarity-like calculation to advance his own career.

Well, almost no one. Actually, quite a few can doubt that--the pundits, insiders, hacks and hangers-on who determine Conventional Wisdom in American politics. Those guys--yeah, they can doubt it. Energetically. With gusto. Greenwald continues:

[W]hen Feingold stood up and advocated censure -- based on the truly radical and crazy, far leftist premise that when the President is caught red-handed breaking the law, the Congress should actually do something about that -- the soul-less, oh-so-sophisticated Beltway geniuses could not even contemplate the possibility that he was doing that because he believed what he was saying. Beltway pundits and the leaders of the Beltway political and consulting classes all, in unison, immediately began casting aspersions on Feingold's motives and laughed away -- really never considered -- the idea that he was motivated by actual belief, let alone the merits of his proposal.

That's because they believe in nothing. They have no passion about anything. And they thus assume that everyone else suffers from the same emptiness of character and ossified cynicism that plagues them. And all of their punditry and analysis and political strategizing flows from this corrupt root.

Not only do they believe in nothing, they think that a Belief in Nothing is a mark of sophistication and wisdom. Those who believe in things too much -- who display political passion or who take their convictions and ideals seriously (Feingold, Howard Dean) -- are either naive or, worse, are the crazy, irrational, loudmouth masses and radicals who disrupt the elevated, measured world of the high-level, dispassionate Beltway sophisticates (James Carville, David Broder, Fred Hiatt). They are interested in, even obsessed with, every aspect of the political process except for deeply held political beliefs -- the only part that really matters or that has any real worth.

For that reason, when Feingold announced his censure resolution, the merits of it were virtually ignored (i.e., should something actually be done about the President's deliberate lawbreaking? What are the consequences for our country for doing nothing?). Instead, Feingold's announcement was immediately cast as a disingenuous political maneuver and discussed only in cynical terms of how it would politically harm the Democrats.

Republicans gleefully, bullyingly, viewed the censure resolution through the lens of political positioning; Democrats pusillanimously viewed it through the same lens. The conventional wisdom was incapable of considering any other possibility. Only a professional square peg like Feingold could see it, apparently.

Of course, that was then. Now, with Democrats having taken back control of Congress largely because of the convergence of voters' rejection of a failed war, disgust at rampant and casual corruption, and a growing personal dislike and distrust of Bush, we have what interventionists like to call "a teachable moment" for the chattering classes.

Like most of you, I've got my list of things I'd like to see the Democrats accomplish in the coming months. One of them--a fairly recent entry, but one that's rising steadily on the charts for me--is a return, however tentative, to the idea that principles still do matter, that not everything in Washington is reducible to the calculus of the horse-race.

The good news, such as it is, of Feingold's decision not to run in 2008 is that he'll be spending more time around the Capitol as an example to the rest of how it's done.

But until then, the conventional wisdom around the Beltway will be: "Feingold said he's not running? Really? I wonder why he said that?"

Posted by Nothstine at November 12, 2006 01:33 PM