Editor’s Note: The following article is written by Steve Bergstein, Planet Waves’ in-house civil rights lawyer and blogger for our Psychsound area. Today, he weighs in on the Obama presidency and the effects a constitutional law professor will have on the Supreme Court. –RA
WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? No one knows. People on my side of the political spectrum have never experienced this before. All we’ve known is failure and disappointment. I’m too young to remember Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974. That must have been euphoric: the fall of a White House criminal. It’s been downhill ever since. Jimmy Carter generates no nostalgia, and Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 was fine as far as it went, if only because he ousted the first President Bush, but Clinton was a moderate centrist who sold out his values each and every day.
The way we feel about the election of Barack Obama will stay with us for a long time. He is not a bullshitter like Bill Clinton. We know he sees the world the way that we do, but that through necessity he will have to make compromises to work within the system and to avoid over-reaching. But as I wrote a few weeks ago, we know this about Obama: he will not start any bullshit wars like Iraq, and even if he is merely adequate at appointing federal judges, any of his choices would be an improvement over George W. Bush, who remade the federal judiciary in his own image.
Much will be written about the meaning of Obama’s victory. Let me talk about what it means to me. As a civil rights lawyer and a student of American political history, there is nothing more important to me than the court system. It was the federal courts in the 1950s and 1960s which made this country free. It was the federal courts which breathed life into the Bill of Rights, expansively interpreting the First Amendment, the rules against unreasonable search and seizures, false arrest, racial justice and all the other values that truly separate this country from the despotic regime that Dick Cheney fantasizes about when he goes to sleep at night.