Threads from Henry's Web

Category: 2008 U. S. Presidential Election

  • It Looks Like Obama is Going to Educate

    Yesterday in my first post on RedBlueChristian.com, I referred to a conversation with my wife in which she suggested that Barack Obama has an exceptional opportunity to educate and help America grow.

    I just read an article on MSNBC.com talking about his proposed speech in Philadelphia on the topic. If he does this right, it could be great.

    This paragraph struck me as precisely what I was thinking:

    The fact is Wright is the man who brought Obama to Christ. He is the one who married him and Michelle Robinson. He is the one who baptized their children. He is the one who helped supply a sense of community rootedness and black identity that Obama, by his own account, says he so yearned for as the credentialed but confused son of a racially mixed marriage.

    Absolutely! And those are good things that Dr. Wright supplied. Obama certainly should not deny the great things he got from his church. He needs to explain to white America the value that he gained there, and also why he is moving forward to a new approach, without making light of or putting his church in a negative light. It will be interesting to see how well he does that.

    I’m delighted that he is going to try. His ability to communicate is a strong positive characteristic; one of the reasons I’m supporting him. He needs to display that ability in full measure in this speech.

    Fineman, in the article already cited, notes:

    But Obama can’t — and should not — try to deny that the church and the Rev. Wright are the essence of who he is. Obama has said as much, in memorable prose, in his two books. And there is no need to jettison him entirely.

    Fineman is absolutely right. Those who are getting shrill about these sermon snippets would like him to deny and toss Dr. Wright out with the garbage, but that is not the right thing to do even though it may seem the way to make the problem go away. I hope that in this speech we will all learn something about how people grow, what they need, and how we can deepen our understanding of one another–even of one another’s anger.

  • Another Jeremiah

    I recalled Micaiah before I thought of Jeremiah in this case, even though Dr. Jeremiah Wright shares the great prophet’s name. Micaiah is the prophet of who never prophesied anything good about Ahab (1 Kings 22). Jeremiah, on the other hand, was definitely an anti-patriot. Very little that he said was appreciated by the hierarchy of Judah, and he certainly was not an advocate of dialogue.

    Which brings me to Barack Obama’s former pastor, who doesn’t speak in terms of dialogue, and doesn’t sound like a great American patriot. But leaving aside message for a moment, he definitely does have the tone of a prophet. Prophets tend to have an abrasive personality, or else they are driven to abrasiveness by the messages they are called upon to deliver. I remember one church at which I taught on the gift of prophecy. After I had discussed rebuke as an element of prophecy, one of the members told me that they didn’t do rebuke at that church; they preferred encouragement. All I can say is that if you prefer encouragement, you probably won’t like the tradition of the Hebrew prophets.

    (more…)

  • Race and Obama’s Success

    I have watched the stories about Geraldine Ferraro with some interest. She was one of the pioneers, suffering a loss in 1984, but nonetheless being part of a historic candidacy. Though I have at times thought the Clinton campaign wants to introduce race into the campaign, they have at a minimum done so subtly. Ferraro seems to have gotten caught in a fairly innocent set of observations. I think she has a right to discuss the issue of becoming a candidate because of her pioneering effort. Nonetheless I think she is wrong that Barack Obama’s success is due to his race. In part, I suspect this is because she is thinking more of 1984 than 2008.

    I recall the Howard Dean campaign and its early successes in 2004. There was a great deal of excitement over this liberal governor from Vermont. Many young voters were involved, and new voters were being brought to the table. Here was a man who was talking their language and they went out to support him.

    I don’t have solid studies on this point, but I think a major downfall of Howard Dean’s campaign was that he didn’t have sufficient discipline. Off the cuff remarks got out of hand, and he began to appear to be a loose canon.

    Enter Barack Obama this year. Many of the same people support him. His first victory is in Iowa, where the African-American vote is negligible. But Obama and his campaign stay disciplined, remain on message, and with occasional exceptions fail to provide the kind of fodder for the press that Howard Dean did. One of the reasons for press friendliness is simply that the Obama campaign has been more disciplined.

    Also ignored in all the arguments over the size of states that each candidate has won, and whether they are red or blue, is the Obama campaign’s success in getting out the vote and in getting people to caucuses. That again is simply good campaign practice and discipline. Out of the remaining three candidates, Obama has demonstrated the best handling of campaign management, I believe.

    So there’s a great deal other than race here, and there’s a great deal more than rhetoric. I would like to add that there are worse traits in a candidate than the ability to communicate and motivate. Bringing the country around to one’s ideas is important. There’s a good argument to be made that the Bush administration failed to communicate the need for the Iraq war to the public, and thus failed to keep them on board. In a democracy, continued public support is an essential to the success of a war, just as much as military personnel and equipment. That failure to communicate may have been critical. I tend to think that the reason such communication failed is that the war is such a bad idea, but in reality, good PR can make up for some very bad ideas.

    Does race play a role, however, in Obama’s success? I would guess that there is a role. I know that I believe it would be a good thing for us to have a president who is not a white male. Nonetheless, that is the very last in my list of considerations. I would only give consideration to race if I was dealing with two candidates who were otherwise evenly balanced in my mind. Then I’d tend to weight my choice in favor of diversity.

  • Voter Ignorance about the Iraq War

    The Pew Research Center has published a poll, reported on CQ Politics that indicates amongst other things that only 28% of the voters can pick the number of casualties we have incurred in Iraq to the nearest thousand (4,000 as of the poll time).

    Here’s where I tend to feel more of an affinity for war proponents than I do for that vast body of sheep whose interest in the war and support for it vary according to the latest news stories. I can understand how one can think that we ought to finish the job and make things work. Of course I can understand my own position, which is that we have defined a task for our military that they can never finish, and we should therefore realign our expectations and act accordingly. What I can’t understand is how the war can become unimportant to so many people.

    I’ve watched it fade as a major campaign issue. Now we find that only 28% have a solid idea of how many casualties. Most of the rest underestimated the number of deaths. As a veteran I realize that people tend to forget wars after they are finished. There was a huge response to those of us returning from the first gulf war, though that started fading in a few months. But what we cannot afford to do is to forget about the fact that our young men and women in uniform are fighting and dying for us over there right now. (AP reports the current number as 3987 as of yesterday.)

    That should be our first concern, more than personal comfort, our economic well-being, or a variety of social issues here at home. I heard one commentator, whose name I forget, say that the Republicans tend to make economic issues into security issues, while the democrats tend to make security issues into economic ones. Barack Obama has been doing the latter with the war, assuming that if we aren’t spending the money in Iraq, it will be available for a domestic agenda. Though on balance I support Obama, on this he’s likely wrong.

    The reason I think we need to get out of Iraq is because we’re spending lives and resources without adequate return. But we are going to have to spend some lives and resources somewhere. We need to improve intelligence capability, especially training people in the languages and cultures of the middle east. We need to train more troops for quick strikes hunting terrorists. We need to spend more money on security here at home.

    But all this is a digression on my part. The critical thing is that the American people need to remember and keep paying attention to what is going on in the world, because whether I’m right or wrong about what we should do, it is important to be thoroughly aware of this issue. The lives of those who have volunteered to defend our country shouldn’t be a secondary issue.

  • Health Care Must be Produced

    I read this article on CQPolitics.com that deals with some of the issues of handling health care costs, and also suggests to me that my feeling may be right that the types of savings claimed by the candidates as part of their health care programs may be much more complicated to attain than they would have us believe.

    There’s a fundamental qualitative difference between saying that someone has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and saying that someone has the right to free health care. While there are costs for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, once won, they impact very broadly. In the case of medical care, someone has to produce the care, in fact, many someones. There are physicians who spend huge amounts on their training and go into massive amounts of debt for the privilege of treating us. Drug companies do make profits, but they also must expend a great deal of time and energy on research and development. Those who produce medical equipment again have huge investments. Then we turn around and say that everyone has a right to their services.

    Now those who have been around this blog for some time may want to remind me that I have called for universal health care, and this post sounds like I’m arguing against it. But I hope you’ll also recall that I have mentioned the contradiction. The problem is simply this: We’re not going to deny people treatment at the emergency room door. What happens as a result? We do cover those least able to pay but in one of the most expensive and least effective ways possible.

    Since we’re going to spend money here–and as a Christian I believe I should do what I can to see that these people are cared for–the question is how are we going to do so more effectively. The article I cited at the beginning lists a number of excellent points. I’m not going to try to reiterate them or argue with them. I confess that I am finding the details confusing, and I don’t think I’m that easily confused.

    Here’s the direction my thinking is going. I think we need to define basic medical care that will be universal, and provide the necessary subsidies for that care, possibly through a type of credit on taxes. Then we need to leave the more advanced and experimental care ideas in private hands to be developed over time. As a technique becomes ready for the mainstream, we could change the boundaries of basic medical care.

    I believe Nurse Practitioners are one way into the future. I often wonder how people from non-medical families do it. I can call my wife, sister, mother, all RNs, or my brother the cardiologist, and say, “Here are my symptoms, do I need to go see the doctor?” Generally the answer is no. A little sensible care at home and I’m up and running again. Just consider this: Friday was probably the most miserable day I’ve ever experienced in terms of illness, and today I’m sitting here typing, no visit to the doctor involved.

    People are concerned with lawsuits, but that is something that could be managed legally as well. Preventative care would be important and could be pursued through more accessible primary care.

    But health care plans that simply deal with distributing care won’t provide a long term answer. We need to keep in mind how good health care is produced, and what any new plan will do to that production. Medical practitioners are not merely distributors of an existing good, like water. They are producers, and if we want them to produce we’ll need to deal fairly with them as well.

  • Enabling Media Bias

    Walter Shorenstein is decrying media bias in favor of Barack Obama. The only surprising thing here, in my view, is that someone felt they needed to write a memo–and I favor Obama myself. The question is just how media bias works, and what the bias is.

    First, while I think there is a natural tendency to bias a story in favor of one’s own political views, and journalists tend to be more liberal than the overall population (I believe), I think the strongest bias in the media is towards the unusual and the exciting. What do the most people want to watch and hear about. For example, I suspect that many people who may well not vote for Barack Obama have been more interested in how he will perform. Here’s where Hillary Clinton’s experience and time in the public view works against her. We know more about her than about Obama. If she wins, though it’s historic, it’s what was expected originally. Obama, on the other hand, is unexpected.

    But second, I think there is a simple fact about media coverage that enables media bias. There are very few actual facts reported in the media. What actually happens is that we get claims, followed by hour after hour of analysis by different experts. Sometimes the position of these “experts” is entirely predictable; they are the spin doctors for the campaigns or parties. At other times they are more unpredictable, because they are from political science professors or unaligned political consultants.

    There is time to actually examine and analyze facts, but that time is instead taken up by getting more and more opinions. Why is this? Well, this comes down to my big objection to what I would call “practical postmodernism.” This is the view that all ideas are more or less equal, they are just part of someone’s story, and the way to be properly unbiased is to make sure that every opinion gets expressed.

    This results in a rudderless program, free of actual analysis, while filled with reams of apparent analysis. Now there are many things I can say about this, but my key point today is that this approach to journalism allows media bias to occur and to be concealed under the veneer of the balanced approach. Consider the headlines about various polls, for example. Is 46-44 a slight lead for candidate A, or is it a statistical tie. If the next day it’s 45-45 is candidate B moving up on candidate A, or is it statistically insignificant. (Statistically both are within the margin of error and one would best regard them both as a tie. There isn’t necessarily any trend here.) But what viewers want, and the media wants to supply is news, and that means they have to spin it in the direction of change.

    I would prefer more reporting of facts, and there are plenty of those missing. I’ve been researching health care plans, for example, and while there is a great deal to read, very little of it is in the mainstream media. Media outlets could do the voters a great favor by researching the numbers in those health care plans and seeing whether there’s any likelihood that the projected savings can occur and asking what will happen to things like experimental treatments, for example. I admit that in my part-time look at this I’ve failed to make heads or tails of it all. I just continue to have this feeling that the claimed savings are, to put it mildly, optimistic.

    I’d prefer to see media representatives admit their bias and report what they believe to be true. Then it’s out on the table, and I have a better basis for analyzing their statements. I’d prefer more experts producing information and analysis, and less expressing generalized opinions. In other words, I think we’d be better off with journalists researching what they believe to be facts, reporting those facts, and get our balance either by reading or watching other journalists, or by analyzing those facts for ourselves.

    The implied standard of media fairness seems to be whether each candidate or “side” gets a similar amount of time and attention. I think that if a candidate commits a whopper, that candidate ought to get disproportionately negative coverage, and vice-versa. I think most of us are aware that the idea of an unbiased media is an illusion. It’s an impossible dream. Let the fact wars begin instead.

    I can’t end a post like this without reference to two sites that are perhaps the strongest contrary evidence, Politifact.com and Factcheck.org, who seem to be managing to be the most unbiased folks I’ve encountered, and are doing fact checks. I do think that we need something like what they do, only that goes a little deeper, but they are providing a valuable service to the public, and I present them as evidence that maybe I’m wrong, and maybe it can be done. Note, however, that in doing their job, they definitely run contrary to the “all ideas are equal” camp.

  • A Conservative Christian Republican for Obama

    I found this post via if i were a bell, i’d ring, and find the arguments used interesting. Not being as conservative as the the post author, I have less policy concerns with Obama than he does, but I find his arguments very interesting.

  • Stump Speeches and Empty Rhetoric

    I’ve watched with some interest the debates over Barack Obama’s rhetoric. He has been charged with using empty rhetoric instead of presenting actual solutions.

    I have a bit of a problem with this. Stump speeches generally are mostly fluff. They’re designed to encourage and excite the faithful. They’re supposed to be emotional. I haven’t seen all that much substance in anybody else’s stump speeches either. I looked around, but I can’t find any sort of analysis, and I’m not certain how it would be done.

    I do think there’s about as much substance in this campaign as in any, and I believe with a number of tools on the internet that there it’s even easier this year to get at the candidates’ views and records, irrespective of stump speeches. It seems to me that all the complaints about Barack Obama’s words derive form the fact that he delivers low substance lines so much better than anyone else in the campaign.

    As I’ve said before I’m not 100% satisfied with Barack Obama as a candidate. As an independent in a closed primary state I didn’t have anything to say in the Democratic nomination either. But I see no reason to reject a candidate because he delivers a stump speech very effectively. I think his opponents should find something else to talk about.

    They could always try more substance themselves.

  • Ralph Nader Running for President

    . . . according to this MSNBC.com story. He had an exploratory campaign for about a month. Normally an exploratory campaign is designed to see if you ought to run. Now here’s what I want to know. What would he have had to discover to persuade him not to run?

  • Of Rules and Fairness

    When I was in my early teens I remember playing a game (I can’t remember what) with a younger cousin. I was old enough that my idea of fairness was that you followed the rules and that was fair. It didn’t matter how many wins each person had. My younger cousin, after losing a few times, told me that I was not being fair. He should win as often as I did. I was obviously not wise enough to realize that fairness might also involve my being older than he was, and that perhaps I should have introduced a handicap. But he would have been satisfied with nothing other than an even number of wins and losses.

    I was reminded of that incident when I read this poll in which there is a substantial, and perhaps significant dip in Barack Obama’s popularity against John McCain in Florida. The article suggests that his stance on Florida delegates might just be to blame.

    I live in Florida, but I’m registered independent, so I don’t have a dog in that particular hunt. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to watch. Americans have very little tolerance for procedures and rules. Like my young cousin, they like fairness (evenness?) in the results. Our court system is more interested in procedure, in following the rules. Justice has to take a back seat. On first look, that tends to offend many people. But you should consider the opposite. Supposing that the rules could be set aside so that a particular judge’s idea of justice or fairness would prevail. What would happen then? We would certainly not have much fairness in the way different people were treated before different judges.

    This kind of attitude comes into play in the issue of Florida’s Democratic delegates. We have too basic arguments that clash. The first argument is that the rules were set, everyone knew them, and Florida didn’t follow those rules. I have great sympathy with that particular argument. The second, however, is not at all like the first. It says that everyone’s vote should be counted, that people have a right to be heard, and that the process has left Florida’s Democrats without a voice in their party’s convention.

    It is not coincidental, either, that the campaign that would benefit most from Florida’s delegates is advocating their inclusion, while the other campaign, well, not so much! It might be that one or the other campaign is arguing from principle, of course, but self interest is fairly obvious. Clinton is not arguing that the delegates should be seated. It’s funny that she and her staff didn’t make that argument in Iowa or New Hampshire, where it would not be well received. In fact, we don’t hear about seating those delegates until she has won both Michigan and Florida, and is behind in the delegate count.

    But there is a large constituency for that type of fairness argument. Government campaign financing involves it. Spending limits for campaigning, which I regard as egregious violations of free speech (in principle–the Supreme Court seems to think otherwise, and for some reason people listen to them instead of me, go figure!), are also based on the idea of the getting the fairest results. The better fundraiser is limited in the benefit he can get from his better fundraising. At the last election there were people prepared to roll out arguments on both sides if someone didn’t win the popular vote and yet won the electoral college. The electoral college is one of those procedure things. It doesn’t seem “fair” to many Americans.

    Of course, we could go back behind the rule that Florida violated, and ask whether that rule itself was fair. But for that we have to ask the same question. Are we concerned with whether it was properly proposed and passed, or whether it adheres to some other standard of fairness, such as “count all the votes.”

    I don’t think these issues are very easily resolved. Despite being a Florida resident, my own feeling is that the rule that Florida violated was a bad rule, but it was the rule nonetheless. Florida’s politicians would have done well to try to get it changed, but violating it was a bad idea. I wouldn’t seat the delegation. That’s my feeling, but I can think of many arguments against my own position.

    More importantly, I think that Americans need to learn more about procedure and process, and their importance in producing reasonable fairness and justice. They may not work all the time, but their absence would result in much less fairness. We may have little patience for procedure. We laud the person who cuts through the red tape and gets the job done. But sometimes those hoops we have to jump through have a purpose. Even if the system looks troubling, consider what might happen without it.

    Let’s reform the rules and procedures wherever they apply, but let’s not just bypass them in the interest of the moment’s notion of fairness.