President Obama politically hedges with SOPA opposition

While there were collective cheers amongst the anti-SOPA alliance following Saturday’s press release, in which three Obama technology officials stated opposition to the bill, it was not quite what was required. Rather, it was far too muted and well-timed: who pays much attention to political news on a Saturday, not to mention a day so occupied by NFL playoff fever?

Even I, with a fairly strong awareness of political goings-on, only encountered the press release by early evening, after a day begun with skillet eggs in a frenzied restaurant and the S&M adventures of psychoanalysis pioneers C. J. Jung and Sabine Spielrein in “A Dangerous Method.” But for the fact that I compulsively lug my laptop around in a back-pack, I wouldn’t have even known of the press release until this morning. This is problematic.

Indeed, if someone who has spent the last two months railing against SOPA, Protect IP Act, and the chief architect of these internet blacklist bills Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) only noticed the news after half a day, can anyone seriously imagine the vast multitude of Americans were alerted to the statement, let alone knew much about the bill in the first place?

And so one can imagine Obama’s press team, in a predictable bit of political hedging, relegating the administration’s anti-SOPA statement to the trash heap of Saturday political news. What is called for, however, is a much more direct address to the American people. Not a primetime pre-emption of broadcasting with a White House address, mind you, but something more substantial than three technology officials speaking on behalf of Obama, who remains silent. Here, the cowardice is only matched by cunning.

President Obama himself should dedicate an entire press conference to the subject, given the legislation’s censorship potential, noting why the domain name system (DNS) blockade was so controversial and ultimately excised from the bill this past week by Patrick Leahy and Lamar Smith. (Even the GOP’s golden boy and “budget guru” Paul Ryan voiced opposition to SOPA, due perhaps to some pressure from Reddit). Then he might also speak to the question of whether it is, in fact, American to empower the Department of Justice (DOJ), acting on behalf of private entities, to financially blockade foreign websites—if this sort of power is sensible and representative of liberty. After he’s done that, Obama might then address the absence of due process in the legislation: which directly relates to the previous sentence, in which the DOJ can blockade websites without respect for legal rights.

The statement’s authors, Victoria Espinel, Aneesh Chopra, and Howard Schmidt, do a good enough job of this in the press release, but Obama should not delegate such tasks to his underlings. He must explain to both the American people and the entertainment industry that opposition to SOPA is not, in fact, equivalent to disregard or contempt for copyright holders. That online piracy is a problem but that SOPA is not the way to go about the task. Only then will we actually get somewhere legislatively.

As it stands, though, the administration’s response is something of a microcosm of the Obama presidency: the private belief that an action is wrong, but a lack of will and conviction to rail against it publicly.

One almost wishes for the exuberant, fuck-all arrogance of George W. Bush at times such as these.