Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Barack-Obama

  • Tolerance: A Value, Not an Absolute

    In watching some of the material on Dr. Jeremiah Wright today, I’m reminded of the potential problem of tolerance–getting it above its proper rank as a value. I have been confronted numerous times in face to face discussions with the statement that I cannot be truly tolerant, because to be tolerant, I must tolerate intolerance.

    But that is a sort of binary thinking that is, quite frankly, the basis for a great deal of stupidity. For me tolerance is not an absolute. Tolerance is something I value. I do not value it above all else. It is the sort of thing that when overvalued can become self-destructive. To illustrate from the physical world, I value my home. But when a hurricane is coming, I value my life and my family more highly than my home. So I evacuate when it’s appropriate. Some don’t, and end up dead or injured.

    There are a number of comments by Rev. Wright that I am quite willing to defend. I’m even willing, as you will have noted, to defend a large part of his “God damn America” speech, while confessing that I would never have expressed it that way myself. I can get behind the rhetoric to a good point.

    But in embracing Farrakhan, I believe Wright steps over that line to tolerating intolerance. Farrakhan has, in fact, done some good things in the African-American community. but he has more than balanced that with hateful speech and acts, and with his anti-Semitism. Barack Obama was correct to reject (and denounce!) his support. Rev. Wright does himself a disservice by embracing him.

    To quote from MSNBC.com:

    At the press club, he jokingly offered himself as Obama’s running mate and embraced Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan even though he said he doesn’t always agree with him. He criticized the U.S. government as imperialist and stood by his suggestion that the U.S. invented the HIV virus as a means of genocide against minorities. “Based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything,” he said.

    To tolerate Louis Farrakhan in this fashion is to tolerate intolerance, and this is a liberal danger. We wish to be so careful not to be intolerant. We want to be even handed, and love all the disadvantaged, underprivileged, and oppressed people. Those are good impulses. But we need to be careful to draw moral lines. We can desire justice for the Palestinians without justifying their killing of Israelis. We can recognize the economic hardships that contribute to terrorist recruiting without justifying the use made of it by terrorists. We can recognize the need for pride in the African-American community without also justifying a new form of hate and racism.

    Besides embracing Farrakhan, who has stepped way over the line, he continues with the claim that HIV was produced by the U. S. government. Based on things done in years past, I would be prepared to hear it if evidence turned up that some secret agency had done this in some way. U. S. government agencies have done some quite evil things. But the key there is the need for evidence. Right now there is no such thing. One of the nastiest ways one can vilify one’s opponents is by suggesting that they have done the things that they are capable of. We are all capable of some form of evil, but we do not all do everything of which we are capable. Evidence should precede accusation; all else is a smear.

    Rev. Wright should be aware of this, considering that around 10% of the American public believes that Barack Obama is a Muslim. The accusation has been made, and it doesn’t matter how much evidence there is that he is not, some of the slime will stick. A pastor, especially should be very careful with his words.

    I am not going to get into the game of blaming associates of associates, i.e. that Barack Obama needs to distance himself further from his pastor so as to be distanced further from Farrakhan. I didn’t like the “associating with people who associated with communists” attitude during the cold war, and this one is certainly no better. But Rev. Wright is responsible for his own words, and along with quite a number of good challenging ones, he has spoken some that are dangerous, hateful, and irresponsible.

  • Bill Moyers Interviews Dr. Jeremiah Wright

    I think we all draw boundary lines between those with whom we disagree, yet consider valid voices in our culture or community, and those whose views we think are so far off the map that conversation cannot continue. For many Americans, Dr. Jeremiah Wright has fallen into the second category.

    I would suggest, however, that in making such a determination one must consider context and intent. The context in which remarks are uttered can completely reverse their effect. Reported by a Jewish writer, “his blood be on us and on our children” (Matthew 27:25) reports on some words, and may express hostility by one group of Jews toward another. Repeated by a crowd of Christians in the middle ages, they became a frequent call to bloodshed.

    I commented previously that I believe that the preaching style was taken outside of the context of the African-American church. Others have noted, and I agree, that many of the comments (especially “God damn America”) were also taken somewhat out of context.

    There remains points on which I disagree, but that is really unimportant. Dr. Wright is a person who has accomplished much of value, and much of what he said is also valuable. In my view, Barack Obama went too far in distancing himself from the pastor who first brought him to Christ, baptized him, performed his wedding, and then baptized his children. I am disturbed that so many Christians seem to believe that is a relationship to be discarded. Dr. Wright was very gracious about it, speaking of the differences between pastoral and political roles.

    I commend Bill Moyers’ interview, which presents what seems to me a much more balanced view of the man, one which accords with my suspicions after tracking down the context of some of the snippets that have been posted.

    I would particularly commend the idea of “arguing with the text” that he mentions late in the second part. Biblical characters were willing to argue with God. If it seems to us that a text is demanding something improper, perhaps we should take a page from their book.

    (Hat tip to if i were a bell, i’d ring for the video link.)

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Obama Campaign and Race

    I think Barack Obama has done a good job of keeping his campaign from being about race. I’m certain this hasn’t been easy. In reading this article from MSNBC.com I was struck that apparently the commentators are holding his campaign to a standard of perfection.

    In my view, whether he wins in the end or not, Barack Obama’s campaign has been very good for the country. I think he has paved the way for many people to give serious consideration to candidates irrespective of their race. There must be pioneers, and he is one. Readers of this blog probably know that I like him, and while I do have policy concerns, they are no greater than with any other candidate; in fact, they are considerably less in his case.

    The expectation that an African-American candidate could run without any signs of race showing up is ludicrous. Obama has done a good job with the options available.