Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Politics

  • Context for Obama and Dr. Jeremiah Wright

    I commented before on how we’re getting snippets out of context. Peter Kirk has done some looking regarding the God damn America comment. From another angle, my wife thinks Obama needs to say “enough!” and get on with the campaign.

  • Political Purity and Small Political Parties

    With Ralph Nader on the left and Allan Keyes on the right, and the Libertarian Party wherever they may be found, we certainly have options for voting third party this year.

    I have voted for third parties in the past, specifically for the Libertarian Party, though I once offended a roomful of Libertarians who were trying to persuade me to join the party by telling them that the best characteristic of the Libertarian candidate in my view was that he had no chance of winning. For me, voting for a third party is a protest vote, designed to point in the direction in which we need to move, and not to indicate full support for the person I vote for.

    There is a critical difference between all of our current minor party movements and the major parties. The major parties seek some kind of compromise and consensus. As an independent, I often think they do a very poor job of this, but at least coalition building is a goal. The minor parties tend to seek political purity, and to provide a “correct” option for which their supporters can vote.

    A party that remains in that minor party mode will never become a major party. They will remain minor. Political purity is not going to win elections. Compromise is a requirement of political life, and a requirement of governing. Compromise laws and policies will always find plenty of critics. It’s easy to criticize when you don’t have to provide a positive alternative that not only would work, but that could be passed.

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  • Judas Richardson?

    James Carville thinks Bill Richardson is like Judas.

    He could be right, provided that you accept the notion that Hillary Clinton is entitled to the presidency, and that anyone who served with her or her husband has a duty to support her. I suspect instead that Carville isn’t too well acquainted with the story of Judas and just wants a word that is maximally pejorative.

    Oh, and the Obama aid who compared Bill Clinton to Joe McCarthy was over the top as well, but he didn’t use a Biblical name, so I’m less interested. My hopes were and are (though diminishing) that the Obama camp will try a different brand of politics. Problem is, the old version still works.

    We voters need to get that through our heads. Negative campaigns work because voters respond to the negative ads, even when they don’t remember the exact accusations. As long as voters respond, politicians will act!

  • Frank Schaeffer on Dr. Wright

    Frank Schaeffer has produced some stir with his notes supporting Barack Obama, and now he has written something about the imbalance between the response to Dr. Wright’s comments and the response to those of his, Schaeffer’s, father. He says:

    When Senator Obama’s preacher thundered about racism and injustice Obama suffered smear-by-association. But when my late father — Religious Right leader Francis Schaeffer — denounced America and even called for the violent overthrow of the US government, he was invited to lunch with presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush, Sr.

    I’m not going to try to make comparisons. But I would note that there are moments when many, many preachers have pointed to “God’s curse on America” for some moral failing or other. The question just seems to be who’s the pointer and who’s the pointee.

    I’m guessing a number of folks on the right are a bit annoyed with Frank Schaeffer at the moment!

    HT: Dispatches

  • Obama Speech Transcript

    It’s available here. This is for all you other people like me who prefer to read something that long.

  • Causes, Excuses, Reasons, and Justifications

    I’m giving in to my tendency to write about broad principles rather than specific situations, though of course I’ll have to use a few specific situations as examples. I’ve heard this issue raised numerous times in numerous different situations. It can be stated this way: Does finding causes and reasons for an event or an action constitute justifying it or providing an excuse for it?

    We often encounter this in court cases with certain types of “justification” argument. Does the fact that a defendant was abused as a child provide justification for his or her criminal actions as an adult? It is very likely that the way someone grew up contributed to criminal activity later, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a good excuse.

    In politics I’ve heard this frequently in connection with the Palestinian situation. If anyone starts talking about reasons that Palestinians might be angry, there’s a quick negative reaction from supporters of Israel. Somehow we’re supposed to imagine that Palestinians are naturally evil and want to blow as many Israelis up as possible. If we find any reason for their anger and alienation, then we are justifying acts of terrorism. (Note that I refer here to folks in the United States, elsewhere in the world Israel is not so popular.)

    Similarly when we talk about the current war on terror, any discussion of reasons why people might hate us, why they might be angry, and why some might go so far as to try to kill us. But the fact is that terrorists are not born terrorists; they become terrorists. This involves the education to hate that can occur in their culture, but it also results from their experiences or those of folks close to them. Like it or not, if you blow up people’s houses and kill some of them, a certain number will become angry enough to be driven to be more radical than they are.

    The fear, of course, is that if we find reasons why terrorists have become what they are we will diminish the sense of them being evil, and provide excuses for their actions. This would in turn result in appeasement rather than vigorous suppression. But if we ignore the very real reasons why people become terrorists, we can quite easily design methods of responding to them that tend to produce more terrorists rather than less.

    I do believe that there are people who have become evil beyond hope of our doing anything to change them, so they must be dealt with forcefully. At the same time there are many people who have been pushed over the edge, and many sympathizers whose position has not been settled.

    That’s why any anti-terrorism policy needs to include both a diplomatic and a military option, and any anti-crime policy needs to deal both with enforcement and with the causes of crime. It’s easier to think of just one or the other; to propose that we simply hunt down every terrorist and invade and occupy every nation that supports terrorism. Similarly we can propose solely a diplomatic solution. Most unfortunately it seems to be easier to propose the violent solution than the diplomatic one.

    Similarly it’s easier to propose draconian penalties than to deal with education, economic issues, and the quality of enforcement (equipment, sufficient number of officers, and so forth) that might prevent crime before it occurs.

    If we use an examination of the causes to provide an excuse for evil actions, then there will be a significant danger. But we must examine the causes, and we must correct those that we are able, or we risk multiplying our problems as we try to solve them.

  • 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.

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  • 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.