Category Archives: culture

row, row, row . . .

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The swift boating of the Obamas has begun in earnest now. CNN reports that “Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama defended himself and his wife Sunday against suggestions that they are insufficiently patriotic.”

Asked during a town hall meeting in Lorain, Ohio, about “an attempt by conservatives and Republicans to paint you as unpatriotic,” a questioner cited the fact that Obama once failed to put his hand over his heart while singing the national anthem.

The questioner also noted that the Illinois senator does not wear an American flag lapel pin, has met with former members of the radical anti-Vietnam War group, Weather Underground, and his wife was quoted recently as saying she never felt really proud of the United States until recently.

Of course, Obama is being baited and his challenge is to defend himself (and Michelle) without taking the bait. The attack on Michelle Obama is particularly offensive, since it is covertly racist.

Meanwhile, Senator Clinton seems to have had a bad day in Texas last Friday. Here’s the story of her Oak Cliff Rally that almost didn’t happen, courtesy of my Texas friend.

Clinton backers chill out during outdoor rally

The contrast with Obama’s Reunion Arena rally is pretty stark. I wonder if Clinton can’t afford to pay for venues like Reunion now. A couple of recent New York Times stories paint a pretty somber picture of her campaign finances.

Donors Worried by Clinton Campaign Spending
Small Vendors Feel Pinch of Clinton’s Money Troubles

Patrick Healy reports today in The New York Times that the Clinton campaign is falling apart and that morale is low as Clinton “soldiers on.”

There is a widespread feeling among donors and some advisers . . . that a comeback . . . may be improbable. Her advisers said internal polls showed a very tough race to win the Texas primary — a contest that no less than Mr. Clinton has said is a “must win.” And while advisers are drawing some hope from Mrs. Clinton’s indefatigable nature, some are burning out.

Morale is low. After 13 months of dawn-to-dark seven-day weeks, the staff is exhausted. Some have taken to going home early — 9 p.m. — turning off their BlackBerrys, and polishing off bottles of wine, several senior staff members said.

Some advisers have been heard yelling at close friends and colleagues. In a much-reported incident, Mr. Penn and the campaign advertising chief, Mandy Grunwald, had a screaming match over strategy recently that prompted another senior aide, Guy Cecil, to leave the room. “I have work to do — you’re acting like kids,” Mr. Cecil said, according to three people in the room.

Others have taken several days off, despite it being crunch time.

Today Clinton has attacked Obama for a couple of mailings about her health care proposal and her support for NAFTA, calling the mailings “false and discredited,” and challenging Obama to meet her and debate them — more obvious baiting.

Obama has denied Clinton’s assertions that the mailings were false.

“There’s nothing in that mailing that is inaccurate,” he said, adding that he was puzzled by the sudden scrutiny since the mailers had been around for days, if not weeks.

“We have been subject to constant attack from the Clinton campaign, except for when we were down 20 points. And that was true in Iowa. It was true in South Carolina. It was true in Wisconsin, and it is true now,” Obama said.

He described Clinton’s anger as “tactical” and defended his campaign.

“The notion that somehow we’re engaging in nefarious tactics I think is pretty hard to swallow.”

Here’s Clinton soldiering on today in Ohio.

Obama in Texas

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A friend from Texas has sent me a couple of stories about last night’s Obama rally in Dallas:

Obama’s Dallas crowd not short on passion
Barack Obama fires up thousands at Dallas rally

“The bandwagon does seem to be rolling,” as my fiend said. One story estimates the size of the Dallas crowd at around 17,000. That and the crowd’s makeup suggest to me that the Dallas rally was very much like the one in St. Louis I wrote about a while back. There’s an interesting video attached to the first story, with lots of interviews with young people. It breaks up quite a bit, but if you stick with it you get a sense of the issues that younger voters are responding to, many of them concerned about the Iraq war and proud of Obama’s opposition to it.

The second story documents some of the attractiveness of Obama to older voters. “Beverly Love, 51, a Garland nurse, had never been to a political rally.”

“It was fantastic. I don’t want to leave,” she said 10 minutes after Mr. Obama had departed. “He speaks from the heart, with so much passion.”

The first story quotes one young person who thought Obama’s speech ended too soon. (I’m remembering that I thought the St. Louis speech was a little long, perhaps because I was standing and I’m old; but the young people I met on the train afterwards thought the speech was wonderful). Anyway, the young woman quoted in the first story above laments, “Why didn’t he do, ‘Yes we can’?” . . . as if a concert had ended, the biggest hit not performed.”

If you look around for what various detractors are saying about Obama, most are echoing themes of the Clinton and McCain campaigns as they attempt to turn Obama’s success against him. Obama is an empty windbag, riding a wave of mere celebrity. To the extent that he has proposed anything in the way of policy, his proposals are either ridiculous or naïve, especially where foreign affairs are concerned. He’s dangerous in the way that other charismatic leaders have been dangerous–I’ve heard Jim Jones mentioned, etc., etc. But Obama seems to go from strength to strength (someone will surely accuse me of plagiarising from Tennyson).

I’m thinking that the content of Obama’s campaign is pretty obvious in spite of his detractors’ claims to the contrary. He’s trying to create a movement because he’s trying to create a new majority that can be mobilized behind a list of policies and programs that can be found laid out on his website. But right now he needs to keep the movement going. I’m impressed–and not just because I’m a kneejerk liberal.

I’m impressed because Obama’s success has been a triumph of organization and skill at communication. He’s taken on not just the Clintons but the Democratic Party establishment and run rings around them. When he’s made mistakes he’s recovered quickly. It’s the most impressive political campaign I’ve seen since, well, since the earlier Bill Clinton. And Obama has succeeded so far substantially without the sort of ad hominem attacks that the Clinton’s are known for. To the charge that he is inexperienced and potentially ineffectual he seems to say, “Watch me run this campaign,” or maybe– “Eat my dust!”

more on the ABC

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The Lead this morning at the Episcopal Cafe directs me to Theo Hobson in The Tablet. In a piece entitled “Quiet voice of modernity’s enemy,” Hobson characterizes the Archbishop of Canterbury as an old fashioned Anglo-Catholic whose championing of gay rights in the 1990s “made him seem the liberal he never really was.” Hobson’s commentary on the ABC’s now famous remarks about sharia law incorporate a reading of Dr. Williams that is substantially like my own. What I have interpreted as a kind of theological toryism, Hobson reads as “anti-liberal ecclesiology”:

The liberal state, in this view, offers itself as an alternative community of salvation; it tempts us into supposing that we can dispense with the Church, or at least water it down, and develop a more progressive form of Christianity. This leads to weak forms of Christianity that are unable to resist dangerous ideologies: most obviously, the liberal Protestants of Germany embraced Nazism.

I think it’s at least worth pointing out that it was a coalition of liberal states that ultimately defeated Nazism and that notable Catholics, including Pius XII and Martin Heidegger made highly problematic alliances with the fascists. It’s also true that European Christianity whether Catholic or Protestant has deep and abiding anti-Semitic roots. It was the public idealism associated with liberal politics that ultimately stood against Hitler. Perhaps the Quakers can lay claim to a record without shame with respect to the murder of European Jewry, but no other Christian group can.

Hobson pictures the Archbishop as an anti-modern thinker who regards secularism as the enemy of the human spirit. According to Hobson, the Archbishop has argued that secularism “shuns comprehensive visions of human good,” whereas “[r]eligion addresses the whole human being.”

He sees his role, then, as defender of the various subcultural spaces that resist the logic of secularism, the enclaves within our culture where fully human meaning is made. And of course these are not only Christian. In a curious way his vision echoes Prince Charles’ declaration that he would like to be the defender of faith rather than the faith. He wants to be the defender of the endangered cultural space that insists on the priority of God. If the Muslim form of such space is tied up with sharia law, we must try to accommodate this.

I wonder what the Archbishop would say about a story such as that which Nafisi tells in Reading Lolita in Tehran, or about the novels of Chaim Potok. For better or worse, freedom has meant more often than not in modern, pragmatic terms: breaking out of a constricting, dehumanizing, religious tradition. Outside the ancient world, and that only briefly until Christians came into their own politically, the historical instances in which established Christian communities have advocated for justice and human liberty are few and far between, almost nonexistent until modern times with the rise of modern secular tyranny. We have reread Luther and made him an enlightenment hero, but that image will not withstand a careful perusal of Christian Liberty, not to mention Against the Jews and Their Lies.

To argue that religious communities have a unique ability to entertain “comprehensive visions of human good” flies in the face of too much history to be taken seriously. And even in those cases where Christian critiques have influenced social change, as in the modern abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement, they have done so in the face of serious and determined opposition from religious groups defending the established tyranny. The history of sectarian groups demanding freedom is long, but with few exceptions and some of those problematic, these same sectarian groups have shown themselves quite capable of instituting tyrannies of their own once they attained political power. Americans need look no further than the history of Massachusetts for an instance.

And one more thing. The Archbishop acknowledges a certain difficulty with sharia law in a modern political system suggesting that it “could have the effect of reinforcing in minority communities some of the most repressive or retrograde elements in them, with particularly serious consequences for the role and liberties of women.” If these minority communities were to be restrained from honor killings, etc., what would be the basis of such restraint? Indeed what is the basis for the ABC’s own critique in the sentence I have just quoted? I suggest the basis will be found in the very principles of secular, positive, law that the Archbishop seems to find problematic. And if we’re talking about teasing out “some of the broader issues around the rights of religious groups within a secular state,” we’re talking about a secular negotiation that can only be conceived of inside the framework of the very liberal politics the ABC opposes, or seems to oppose.

Hence, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s remarks about sharia law, though seriously bothersome to me as an anglican, seem quite logical coming from a thinker whose public statements (as I have argued elsewhere in these pages) seem to indicate a political preference for established social practice over the interest of the oppressed. It’s nice to discover an analysis, such as Hobson’s in The Tablet, that seems to agree. But it’s also interesting to see the Archbishop broadening his approach to established practice to include a defense of freedom for marginalized groups, even if he is pretty selective of the marginalized he chooses to defend. And I don’t think this is necessarily bad. As background for my argument and Hobson’s, I might recommend reading the Archbishop’s speeches entitled “Faith Communities in a Civil Society – Christian Perspectives,” delivered last September and “Civil and Religious Law in England: a Religious Perspective,” delivered to the Royal Courts of Justice last week.

getting the white male vote

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Laura McKenna sent me to this New York Times piece this morning. It’s interesting to find out that both my beloved and I are atypical Obama supporters, she being a middle-aged person of the female persuasion and I being a geezerly type of seventy. We are atypical for different reasons, of course–and that’s fun too. Here’s the Times writer’s description of “The Obama Democratic Party.”

The Obama Democratic Party is made up of younger voters (under 44), blacks, white men (to a more limited extent) and independents whose show of support accounted for his victories in states like Missouri. Their level of enthusiasm for Mr. Obama — their excitement about the possibility of an Obama White House — is palpable in their response to him, or in any conversation.

It may be that statewide it was independents whose support accounted for Obama’s narrow victory in Missouri (less than 10,000 votes out of 823,503 votes cast–you can see the raw figures here). But the Post-Dispatch is saying today that as election day played out it was a heavy turnout of African-American voters in St. Louis and St. Louis county that carried the vote for Obama. I am thinking that Obama is doing pretty well at picking up votes outside his base with the exception of one core group that may have been part of John Edwards’ base. Here’s the Times again:

Mr. Obama split the white male vote nationally with Mrs. Clinton, but there was an important geographical disparity there: White men in California voted for Mr. Obama but white men in Southern states like Alabama did not.

And according to the Times writer, “The question is what white men in Ohio will do next month, . . .” This observation, together with the fact that Clinton is generally thought to have a stronger appeal among working class voters, suggests to me that Obama needs to tune his message to appeal to the economic interests of workers in the midwest and south who may perceive themselves to be competing in the labor market with African American and Spanish speaking workers.

The way to do that will not to be with a coded appeal to nativism, something John Edwards steered close to, but with proposals for action to relieve economic distress. Clinton got out front on this one with her program to relieve the current economic crisis. But Obama might reclaim some lost territory if he’s smart and fast.