Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • What Decides My Vote (or Silly Experience Arguments)

    McCain has just stirred the pot by making an unorthodox choice for his running mate, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska. Contrary to much of the response on the left, I don’t see this as cynical, though obviously there’s political calculation involved. It’s bold and risky.

    It is, in fact, the first thing that’s happened since the end of the primaries that has made me think better of a candidate than I did at that time. It isn’t enough to make me vote for John McCain this time around, but that’s not because I think Palin is stupid, excessively inexperienced, or someone who would make a bad vice-president. The bottom line remains that I disagree with her on a number of matters of policy, insofar as I know what she stands for. We’re certain to find out much more over the next few days.

    I think my belief that “experience” is an argument you use in favor of someone you already like for other reasons, and against someone you already dislike, also for other reasons, is confirmed by the Democratic response. Republicans who are trying to argue that Palin has a better resume than Obama need a reality check. Democrats who think that they can successfully make her look so much worse on the basis of her resume need to rethink. If there is one thing that has been used cynically throughout this campaign, it is the experience argument, and it’s at a crescendo (at least I hope!) at the moment.

    The most positive thing about this choice, from my point of view is that it shows McCain can still think outside the box. Romney and Pawlenty were candidates that the political commentators would like. Lieberman was to some extent as well, though he had extraordinary negatives as well, being a very recent ex-Democrat, now independent, who had been a VP nominee of the other party, and also one with a substantially liberal voting record would hardly endear him to the Republican party’s right wing.

    McCain stepped out of the standard reasoning and picked someone almost out of the blue. Not that she had never been mentioned, but the vast majority of commentators didn’t take that seriously. She’s conservative, she’s vigorous and forceful, she seems intelligent, and she has also shown integrity in an incredibly difficult decision–her decision to carry her current child to term. Skin-deep pro-lifers might have waffled at that point. She’s living up to her convictions and showing that those are not simply things she believes are true, but things that are part of her being.

    Obama’s choice, on the other hand, was someone the political commentators were sure to like. It was largely media-safe, but rather boring. I’m not saying that Joe Biden would be a bad vice-president. Rather, he’ll be much the same as other vice-presidents.

    Does that change my vote? No, it doesn’t. As I said much earlier in the campaign, all of these other points do impact my vote, but they aren’t at the core. If I was looking at two essentially equal candidates, experience might sway me. If I found one candidate who was consistently honest, that would probably sway me. I count the historic possibility of Obama becoming the first African-American president of the United States as a plus. But if I couldn’t stomach who he is and what he proposes to do, that wouldn’t get me to vote for him. I look with favor on the possibility of having the first woman as Vice-President, but that doesn’t overcome policy disagreements.

    Since the primaries, I have been disappointed. Barack Obama has sounded less like an agent of change, and more like he’s under control of Washington insiders. The decision not to engage in town-hall meetings with McCain, while understandable from the political point of view, took away a great opportunity to change the way campaigns are conducted and perceived. Having the two candidates one-on-one in numerous settings would, I think, go a long way to blunting the effect of misleading negative advertising. It was an opportunity for change, but it didn’t happen.

    Obama waffled on FISA. He was wrong to vote for that bill. I’m extremely disappointed.

    He waffled on campaign finance. Here I agree with the decision, but as best as I can tell, he really approves of public financing, but thinks it is disadvantageous this time around. Now if he would have said that he has proven how the little people can gather the money to overwhelm big money operations in this internet age and thus the value of campaign finance reform has diminished, that would be different. He could then recommend taking the axe to part of the federal bureaucracy.

    McCain, of course, has done his waffling as well, on issue after issue, but he did most of it before and during the primary season. I liked him in 2000. I don’t like him now. There’s apparently a little bit of the maverick McCain spark left, but not enough.

    Now you could take this as a terribly negative view of the election as a whole, but I really feel pretty good about this election, when seen in comparison to others. Choosing a candidate to support is always an exercise in compromise. I disagree with each candidate on some issues. I am disappointed with each candidate, but largely because they are behaving as politicians generally behave. While I would like to see that change, I know how to relate their behavior to the background noise.

    So here are my major issues:

    • Iraq War – I think the Republicans in general have a terrible strategy at all for the war on terror, and McCain is simply following the same. The reality is that our strategy involves invading countries that support terror and retaliating for strikes. I’m amazed that conservatives who recognize the futility of “talking nice” to terrorists because of who they are don’t recognize the fact that retaliatory strikes don’t actually accomplish anything. McCain’s military experience argument is blunted for me by one fact–he apparently doesn’t recognize that we don’t have the resources to fight terror according to the current strategy. Somebody needs to work on a scalpel approach to replace our current sledgehammer.
    • 4th Amendment – I’m still hoping that Obama remembers who he was and will be better than McCain on this point, including warrantless wiretapping, rendition, torture, and all related elements I’m loosely grouping under 4th amendment. McCain has failed to show integrity here, in my view.
    • Supreme Court nominees – Obama is likely to appoint people I don’t like all that much, but they will replace other people and maintain the balance. The idea of a court that is consistently lined up with Scalia and company is horrifying.

    Those are not my whole list by any chance, but I rank those highest. Even though the economy has become more important than the Iraq war to most people, it remains my highest concern. I cannot make the fruitless killing less than #1 in my thinking.

    I would add that there are third party candidates that are options for those who cannot support either of the two major candidates. I don’t regard voting third party as throwing away your vote. I’m not going to do it this time. Those who say that Nader is siphoning off Obama’s votes or Barr is siphoning off McCain’s seem to have the odd idea that someone “owns” or is “due” particular votes. You earn the vote when you convince the voter. It’s only your vote when that voter pulls the lever.

    In summary, I think voting is a matter of priorities and compromise, and I think we do have a field of candidates to work with. I would love to find a year when there was someone out there who thought just like I did. Unfortunately, I’m convinced that candidate would lose, so maybe not so much!

  • Christian Carnival 240 Will Be Here

    I will be hosting the next Christian Carnival on this blog. I have already received a number of submissions and I’m working on them. Get your submissions in soon! The deadline is Tuesday night, midnight, eastern time.

    I’d especially like to invite Christian blogs who haven’t participated in the carnival before to do so. It’s a worthwhile effort in terms of links and traffic, and it also builds on the exchange of ideas for which the blogosphere is so well suited.

  • Culture11

    I received an e-mail from Joe Carter suggesting that I check out Culture11, of which he’s a managing editor. I’d feel real special, but I know that a bunch of my friends got such invitations as well, so probably Joe was inviting all the bloggers with whom he has contact, which is, after all, a good idea!

    I’m checking out Culture11, and thus far I’d say it looks a bit like Facebook, except that it is built around ideas more than light social interaction. It’s not that Facebook is not useful for exchanging ideas, though things tend to move too fast for me there, or that Culture11 doesn’t appear to have all the possibilities for social interaction, but it appears to be designed to keep the focus on ideas.

    Of course, this is just preliminary. I’ve barely started looking. If it is, in fact, an idea centered site, I’ll probably spend some time there. It will be interesting to see how people use it. The atmosphere cannot always be controlled by the management.

    In any case, I’d suggest checking it out, and if you do, look me up. My profile, such as it is, is here.

    Have fun!

  • It’s Raining Books, Hallelujah!

    I haven’t been blogging much for the last two weeks, as I’ve been pretty busy with other things.

    While I was too busy to get right two them, all four books that I had on interlibrary loan arrived at the same time, one of the unfortunate problems of requesting lists of books. Several of them are pretty big as well. Now I have just under a month for the one I have for the longest period of time.

    Some of these were recommended by readers, particularly Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, which was recommended to me by a commenter as a follow-up, hopefully more convincing than What Have They Done with Jesus by Ben Witherington. I owe my readers another post or so on that previous book. Perhaps when I’m done with Bauckham, I’ll compare the two. At the same time, I requested Bauckham’s The Gospel for All Audiences, which looks like interesting reading.

    The same commenter recommended DeSilva’s An Introduction to the New Testament: Contexts, Methods and Ministry Formation. Besides having some comments on the same topic (gospel eyewitnesses), I feel the urge to read another New Testament introduction. It’s useful to do so every so often–it helps me organize my thoughts.

    Finally, I have Waltke’s An Old Testament Theology: An Exegetical, Canonical, and Thematic Approach, which is also a fairly substantial volume. I wanted to read a clearly evangelical Old Testament theology, and this looks like a good option.

    Considering my other reading, I could have wished that the books would have arrived over a longer period of time, but hopefully I’ll be able to do them justice in the time available. Reading on books that are on my own shelves will have to go on the back burner.

  • A Forest of Signs and Waving People

    I headed out to vote yesterday in the Florida primary. We had contests for a number of local offices. I’m registered with no party affiliation, but there was one non-partisan race that needed thinning out and one race that would be settled by the Republican primary. It was a fairly easy task to fill out my ballot!

    I was struck again by the forest of signs around the polling place. There’s a sign indicating how close people can be to the entrance if they are going to solicit people’s votes. Actually nobody was all that close. They had chosen to gather around the entrance to the property Several people not only had signs, but had volunteers with t-shirts and hats who would wave to prospective voters on their way in. My precinct is in a church, so I suspect those folks wasted a bunch of waves on people visiting the church office or something of the sort.

    It’s not my major point, but one guy was standing by the road, and someone, possibly a friend, or perhaps even a political opponent had pulled up beside him in a pickup truck and they were talking. He waved to me and then tried to wave me around the truck, but unfortunately he also waved someone coming from the other direction. It took him a couple of minutes to think of the idea of getting that pickup truck out of the way of voters trying to get to the polls or leave again after voting.

    What I’m wondering is just how much such a display of signs and waving people impacts anyone’s interest in voting. My approach to choosing candidates is to read their web sites, read the literature they send out, read the newspaper interviews or fact sheets on them, and so forth. On local candidates, information can be hard to come by, but usually you can find out something more substantive than the person’s name and the office for which they are running.

    I can’t resist another detour here on the subject of campaign literature. This year I did read one piece of campaign literature that would have impacted my vote if I had been able to vote in that primary. (The candidate involved won his primary.) This was a simple postcard with a list of claims that I could easily fact check, and which appear to have been mostly true. They were negative, but provided good reasons not to vote for his opponent. Negative advertising can be of value. I don’t object to something just because it’s negative; I object if it is inaccurate or twisted and also negative.

    But to reiterate, how much do signs and waving people impact votes? Earlier in the campaign I saw some people holding signs for a candidate on an overpass over the interstate and waving to passing motorists. Is it possible that there is someone out there who doesn’t know who they plan to vote for and lets themselves be persuaded because they saw someone standing on an overpass with a sign and waving? It just seems too bizarre for words.

    Perhaps they just use that to gain name recognition, but then just what value is that type of recognition? You don’t know anything about the candidate. I get the sample ballots our elections office kindly provides and look up each and every candidate. Name recognition has nothing to do with it.

    Oh well, this will be only one of my election season rants. It seems to me that it is such a privilege to actually have a government in which we can each participate, and that any citizen would be willing to spend just a few minutes every couple of years to actually vote based on some idea of who the candidates are and what they stand for. Signs and waving people seem to argue against that.

  • Logos Blog is Back and Free Commentary Offer

    I got an e-mail late yesterday telling me that the Logos Blog is back and advertising a free commentary volume.

    I find the Logos software to be an essential of my Bible study day, and though I know very little about the commentary series that is offered (Cornerstone), the names involved read like a who’s who of evangelical Biblical scholarship.

    In any case, wander on over and check it out!

  • Numbers out of Context

    Here’s a quick example from Metacatholic. See how the meaning changes?

  • Methodists and Evolution

    I reported some time ago that the United Methodist General Conference had passed some resolutions in support of evolution and opposing teaching faith based ideas in the public school science classroom. There’s a story in the Fort Wayne, Indiana Journal-Gazette about how this happened and the role of a local church member.

    I have observed some people trying to get resolutions passed at annual conferences or occasionally at General Conference and the process is somewhat difficult and I know that the individuals involved put a lot of work into the process. It’s nice to see people willing to be that involved. I do note that it seems that resolutions from general conference have little weight in practice.

    I would say that in the four congregations of which I have been a member, for example, the social principles only played a noticeable role in the most recent, and even there many members would probably be surprised to learn that there are social principles. (For non-UM folks, let me note that the social principles are only one area in the Methodist discipline which I’m using as an example, not the full statement of our doctrine and polity.)

    Perhaps it would be a good idea for Methodist pastors, teachers, and church leaders to refer to the social principles and other portions of the Discipline and Resolutions even when we don’t particularly like what they say, as will inevitably happen.

    Two early experiences of mine in the United Methodist Church come to mind. First, after I had read the relevant portions of the United Methodist Discipline prior to joining my first Methodist congregation, I asked the pastor about the social principles. I pointed out certain ones with which I could not agree. “Oh, the social principles,” he said, “we don’t really pay that much attention to those here.”

    The second was teaching in the same church, when I was asked to teach about the Wesleyan doctrine of Christian Perfection. I was raised Seventh-day Adventist, and SDAs have a substantial bit of Wesleyan in background and doctrine, so I was acquainted with Wesleyan theology. I looked up what we had in the Discipline, and included it on slides for the class. I found that of those attending (perhaps 40 or so), only the pastor and I were aware that there was such a thing as the doctrine of Christian perfection.

    It’s the Methodist doctrinal position with which I am probably least comfortable, but I would have thought more people would be aware of it. My guess is that pastors know their members are not comfortable with “perfection” in just about any form and just prefer to let that one slide.

    And just to get back to the topic in the title, I suspect evolution comes under the same heading. Why get into the debate if you don’t have to?

  • He Wouldn’t Be on my Long List

    . . . but Barack Obama has chosen Joe Biden as his running mate.

  • Added to Blogroll: Biblical Theology

    The new Biblical Theology blog looks like a good new source of things to talk about from posts written by highly qualified contributors. (HT: awilum.com.)