You know, call me a naive youth, but I’d been holding out a little hope that Barack Obama’s weaselly hedging on the new (awful) FISA bill was just a tactic to allow him to mitigate the risk of voting against a bill the White House, the RNC, and the McCain campaign is suggesting could be the difference between whether hard-working Americans live or die. I.e., Obama could have been trying to make himself sound like the voice of centrist, moderate, non-ideological wisdom, emphasizing his support for the bill in general and expressing his opposition to telecom immunity sotto voce, so that when it came up for a vote, he could claim that the immunity-free legislation he supported was a sensible compromise, and that the Republicans were extremists who insisted on getting 100% of what they wanted or else they’d walk. That might not have been a very effective tactic, given that Steny Hoyer has already quite voluntarily allowed the Republicans to frame their 99% non-compromise as a centrist, moderate, non-ideological compromise, but hey, it would have been consistent with Obama’s usual manner of positioning himself when he takes the liberal side in a lost cause. (Cf. his vote against confirming John Roberts on the Supreme Court.)

But no, it was not to be. Obama will vote to strip immunity from the FISA bill, but if that fails he’ll vote for the bill with immunity included. He won’t even do the standard two-step of voting for cloture (i.e. voting for the bill when it matters) followed by voting against final passage (voting against it as a meaningless CYA exercise). And worst of all (see the video at the link), Obama is conceding to the right two crucial meta-narratives: that security and liberty are essentially in conflict, and that when they conflict, security is the more important value by a pre-emptive margin. Such unforced and unnecessary concessions are not just bad for our political system, but bad for Obama’s own self-interest, since they will augment his opponents’ ability to push him around on the civil libertarian positions on which he digs in. So all that stands between us and another cunning Bush administration plan to save freedom by destroying it, are Senators Dodd, Feingold, (gasp) Reid, and whatever support they can drum up.

What’s really inexplicable, and therefore galling, about Obama’s cave, is that it is far from clear what political advantage Obama expects to derive from caving. After all, he managed to take the minimally decent position on the Boumedienne decision and the broader issues it raised of the importance of “quaint” traditions like the Great Writ, constitutionalism, and the rule of law. The usual suspects on the anti-republican right (emphasis on the small “r”) did their usual bellowing, and none of that prevented Obama from leaping out to substantial leads in recent polls and in the most reliable electoral map projections. Whatever calculus motivated the FISA cave applied to Boumedienne etc., and yet Obama gambled in the earlier case on doing the decent thing, didn’t lose anything on the wager (though he didn’t win anything either — i.e., I doubt his lead is a function of his comments about habeas corpus), and having seen first-hand that decency on liberty and the rule of law doesn’t have to be a losing bet, he caved anyway.

Or look at it still another way. On the assumption that Obama is not under any illusions about what the right thing to do would have been — a safe assumption, I’d think, given his stated views on Boumedienne and habeas and his pledge last fall to join any filibuster of telecom immunity — what risk, precisely, was Obama trying to insulate himself against by caving on FISA? Presumably, the worry is that the McCain campaign and Republicans will portray him as a McGovernite weakling, and voting against telecom immunity will merely fatten their portfolio of oppo materials. And the calculation, given that the FISA bill looks (or looked! thanks, Senator Reid) sure to pass, is that any meaningful opposition would be all downside costs with no upside benefits.

The argument for that conclusion is valid, but the premises that support it are seriously flawed. First of all, the electoral strategy of the McCain campaign and the Republicans is almost entirely to portray Obama as a McGovernite weakling (the small remainder being, of course, preying on racial anxieties), and no decision of Obama’s can possibly deter them from running on that strategy because the mood of the country, the economic fundamentals, and the shape of the partisan divide ensure that it is the only strategy they can employ that isn’t an obviously losing strategy. Moreover, the narrative Team McCain and the GOP will promote to bolster that strategy has already just about taken its ultimate shape, and Obama’s vote one way or another on a particular bill will not have a (non-neglible) impact on even the way his opponents try to portray him as a McGovernite weakling. (On a secondary note, Team Obama is paranoid if it believes that a single vote in June on a bill far too complicated for easy digestion by the public will take on legs as a story for any more than a week or two, tops. Sure, there might have been ads in the fall citing the FISA vote and blaring that “OBAMA VOTED FOR BIN LADEN AND AGAINST YOUR SAFETY,” but there will be such ads, in more or less those terms, citing any number of past Obama votes, positions, and comments.)

Most importantly of all, the GOP’s story of Obama’s perfidious McGovernite pacifism simply does not supervene on facts about Obama, nor does anyone’s acceptance of that narrative supervene on the facts of the matter. That is, the appeal Obama’s opponents are making is not, “here are the facts, which license the reasoned conclusion that Obama is a McGovernite weakling,” but rather, “take a look at that strange fella, he’s not a real American you know, he’s never done anything, he wants to surrender to al Qaeda; now surely you can’t trust him with the safety of your family.” Likewise, this sort of thing works only if the audience relies on gut instincts rather than dispassionate factual analysis to reach its conclusions. Which is not to say it won’t work — on the contrary, gut appeals are vastly more effective in democratic politics than factual and logical presentations, which was Plato’s reason for being an anti-democrat — but rather simply that since the “Obama=surrender monkey” argument is independent of the facts (or at least, any new facts), the facts don’t affect the content of the argument or the scope of its appeal.

To put some quantitative bones on the argument, fully two-thirds of likely voters already describe Obama as “liberal”; the comparable numbers for John Kerry were 45 percent in May 2004 and 53 percent in November 2004. And call me crazy, but I have a hunch that a good chunk of the remaining resistance to calling Obama liberal is not coming from people on his right. In the contest for messaging, narrative, and perception, Obama is freerolling.

In other words, the perception of Obama as a liberal is nearly as solidified as it can be, and any decision he makes — barring dead girl/live boy or equivalent scenarios — is vanishingly unlikely to affect either the strategy his opponents employ against him or the prospects for success of that strategy. Which means that Obama’s entire universe of choices between now and November is risk-neutral, at least with respect to what his opponents do (i.e. not adequately preparing for a debate remains riskier than adequately preparing), and with respect to the pervasiveness and political costs of public perception of him as a man of the left. That gives Obama enormous freedom in how he conducts himself. While he has to remain on guard against gaffes and pratfalls, and be vigilant in countering smears (and laying blame for them at the doorstep of McCain HQ for as long as McCain stays silent on them — fairly or not, that is just political reality), his opponents will attack him as as a pacifist pinko, and the electorate will buy that line to the roughly same extent, whether he votes for telecom immunity or filibusters it. Mutatis mutandis for whatever comparable issues come up before the election.

Instead of taking full advantage of that freedom, the Obama campaign is running a schizophrenic game. One day they will put the candidate out front in an effort to fundamentally alter the discourse of security and war and peace, change the assumptions about what constitutes “seriousness” and strength, shift the ideological center away from reflexive hawkishness and contempt for what Jonah Goldberg once aptly called “legal niceties,” etc. etc. The next day, they’ll be so absurdly risk-averse that they avoid low-to-no risk gambles and forfeit considerable utility in the process — and even create new risk for themselves unnecessarily, as with Obama’s aforementioned concessions to the security trumps-liberty-framework. Another way of putting this is that the Obama team hasn’t thoroughly plotted the distinction between triangulation, which is conceding substantive ground to one’s opponents in order to augment one’s own political power, and the very different idea of Reaganism, which means using sunny and conciliatory language to force one’s opponents to make the concessions. (To be sure, Reagan himself wasn’t always a Reaganist in this sense.) Smarter strategists or a better candidate on the Republican side could take advantage of the vacillations, though given the underlying dynamics of the election, it may be that nothing could give the GOP a realistic chance of success.

Meanwhile, those of us supporting the Democratic nominee need to understand that we can’t necessarily depend on him to defend liberty if the short-term political calculus tells strongly against doing so, or even if there is a strong perception that the short-term political calculus tells strongly against defending liberty. Fortunately, Obama supporters do by and large understand that. We just also understand that he has demonstrated the capacity to defend liberty in the face of political risk, which is more than one can say for anyone in his position in a long, long time. That is why the notion that his supporters are brainwashed victims of some sort of cult of personality is such a stupid slur. When the average caliber of politicians has been so abysmal for so long, the candidate who comes along and regularly (if not consistently) does and says many of the minimally decent things every politician should do and say, quickly becomes an appropriate bearer of various superlative terms — and not because he has cleared any particularly impressive hurdles.

For the definitive story of the Democratic leadership’s unforced, craven submission to bullying, check out Julian Sanchez in the American Prospect (the decisive capitulation came on the House side, and Obama wasn’t party to it). While you’re there, check out David Weigel on Larry Johnson’s deterioration into a sputtering lunatic furiously scribbling out, in his own shit on the walls of his rubber room, a prophecy of Obama’s transformation into the anti-Christ Blackzilla and enslavement of the white race (hint: the signs have been there for a while). Question for the road: Is Reason’s invasion of TAP more like The Outsiders’ invasion of WCW, or the WCW/ECW invasion of the WWF? (Don’t pretent you don’t know what I’m talking about.)