Once upon a time in this country the Presidency was assumed to possess a certain moral authority called the 'bully pulpit'. Carl Schurz, a Radical Republican and former European revolutionary who'd immigrated to America after the wave of 1848, wrote to Abraham Lincoln during the height of the controversy over Emancipation that "
our personal influence upon public opinion is immense; you are perhaps not aware of the whole extent of your moral power."
Formerly progressives were identified with this ideal. Theodore Roosevelt made perhaps the best use of it, and did not shirk from throwing the weight of his opinions around in public. Lyndon Johnson, for all of his personality flaws, turned the assassination of Jack Kennedy into the spearhead at the front of the campaign for civil rights. Yet somewhere the Left ceded the bully pulpit, and with it all pretention to a moral high ground, to the reactionaries. To speak of the right as the right in those circles is regarded as passe at best and as conservative at worst.
If Obama had been genuinely interested in killing this, he could have. He would have linked it to the PATRIOT Act and to government overreach in general in the wake of the War in Iraq. That it would require dipping his toes in the language of small-government is beside the point; indeed, it would have been a fine way to reach across the aisle to certain segments of the conservative coalition.
Instead - he flinched. As usual. And if SOPA dies, it will not be because of anything he did.
