Entries Tagged 'Politics' ↓

If you are going to vote for Barack Obama, please state your case for doing so.

Some rules for this thread: A “negative ad” is defined as one that mentions your opponent. So don’t mention how your candidate is better than anyone else. Give the positive reasons for why you think Obama would make a good president. Also, I don’t want arguing. If someone posts a reason that you dispute, don’t say so. Just let it go.

I’d like this to become a compendium for readers trying to make up their minds.

If you are going to vote for John McCain, please state your case for doing so.

Some rules for this thread: A “negative ad” is defined as one that mentions your opponent. So don’t mention how your candidate is better than anyone else. Give the positive reasons for why you think McCain would make a good president. Also, I don’t want arguing. If someone posts a reason that you dispute, don’t say so. Just let it go.

I’d like this to become a compendium for readers trying to make up their minds.

Don S summed up well in one of his posts to the “Republican captivity” post why conservative Christians tend to vote Republican:

I identify with the Republican party more than the Democratic party because it still at least tolerates my values, and at least some office holders and candidates support them. Very few Democratic leaders will stand for absolute right and wrong standards, because they do not want to offend contituents, and they villify me as a “hater” for declaring a sin a sin. They want to grow government to help the poor, but at the same time push any expression of faith from any area of society into which government expands. They use faith to justify the growth of government for this purpose, but deny any individual responsibility to respond to the claims and commandments of Christ, and deny the concept of sin. I am human. If one group of people stands opposed to everything I believe in, and the other group does not, I will stand with that latter group.

Should the Church specifically align with the Republican party? By no means. Can Democrats be Christians? Of course. Will any human government ever achieve heaven on earth or a perfect society? We know the answer to that one. We should never let political involvement distract from our primary purposes of sanctification and evangelism here on Earth. But I don’t think there is a problem with promoting the election of public officials which are more likely to support a governmental environment which will not oppose us in those missions.

One of the other good points that came out of that long conversation is that the mainstream churches (Methodists, Disciples, PCUSA, ELCA, Episcopalians) are definitely in captivity to the Democrats and the whole liberal agenda. (Notice how irrelevant the mainstream liberal churches are, to garner almost no attention through all of this.)

I know many of us conservative Christians used to be Democrats, even liberal Democrats. (I know I was.) Then the party was taken over by 1960’s activists. They ridiculed and demonized our moral conservatism and our pro-life convictions. THAT is what drove us to the Republican party.

We became “Reagan Democrats” and then we shouldered our way into the Republican party. Despite some continued disdain from its country club faction, the party really needed our votes.

If the Republicans become “pro-choice” on the abortion issue, many conservative Christians would abandon that party in a heartbeat. Many would gladly switch to the democratic party if it were pro-life. (I just cannot take seriously all of the Democrats’ rhetoric about helping the poor, the downtrodden, and the little guy, given their stance on abortion.)

But there are other issues that inhibit conservative Christians from the Democratic party. Political liberals today are open to not just political and economic progress, as they used to be, but they also push moral and cultural change. They accept homosexuality, with some even advocating gay marriage. They embrace feminism, even in its most anti-family variety. They tend to be hyper-secular.

In short, conservative Christians were driven out of the Democratic party.

Mark Steyn makes a case against the Democratic presidential nominee in Obama makes a better symbol than president:

The senator and his doting Obots in the media have gone to great lengths to obscure what Barack Obama does when he’s not being a symbol: his voting record, his friends, his patrons, his life outside the soft-focus memoirs is deemed nonrelevant to the general hopey-changey vibe. But occasionally we get a glimpse. The offhand aside to Joe the Plumber about “spreading the wealth around” was revealing because it suggests a crude redistributive view of “social justice”. Yet the nimble Hope-a-Dope sidestepper brushed it aside, telling a crowd in Raleigh that next John McCain will be “accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten.”

But that too is revealing. As John Hood pointed out at National Review, communism is not “sharing.” In a free society, the citizen chooses whether to share his Lego, trade it for some Thomas the Tank Engine train tracks, or keep it to himself. From that freedom of action grow mighty Playmobile cities. Communism is compulsion. It’s the government confiscating your Elmo to “share” it with someone of its choice. Joe the Plumber is free to spread his own wealth around – hiring employees, buying supplies from local businesses, enjoying surf ‘n’ turf night at his favorite eatery. But, in Obama’s world view, that’s not good enough: the state is the best judge of how to spread Joe the Plumber’s wealth around.

The Senator is a wealthy man, mainly on the strength of two bestselling books offering his biography in lieu of policy and accomplishments. Many lively members of his Kenyan family occur as supporting characters in his story and provide the vivid color in it. But they too are not merely two-dimensional cartoons. His Aunt Zeituni, a memorable figure in Obama’s writing, turned up for real last week, when the dogged James Bone of the London Times tracked her down. She lives in a rundown housing project in Boston.

In his Wednesday night infomercial, Obama declared that his “fundamental belief” was that “I am my brother’s keeper.” Back in Kenya, his brother lives in a shack on 12 bucks a year. If Barack is his brother’s keeper, why couldn’t he send him a $10 bill and nearly double the guy’s income? The reality is that Barack Obama assumes the government should be his brother’s keeper, and his aunt’s keeper. Why be surprised by that? For 20 years in Illinois, Obama has marinated in the swamps of the Chicago political machine and the campus radicalism of William Ayers and Rashid Khalidi. In such a world, the redistributive urge is more or less a minimum entry qualification.

The government as wealth-spreader-in-chief was not a slip of the tongue but consistent with Obama’s life, friends and votes. The Obamacons – that’s to say, conservatives hot for Barack – justify their decision to support a big-spending big-government Democrat with the most liberal voting record in the Senate by “hoping” that he doesn’t mean it, by “hoping” that he’ll “change” in office. “I sure hope Obama is more open, centrist, sensible,” declared reformed conservative Ken Adelman, “than his liberal record indicates.”

He’s “hoping” that Obama will buck not just Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank and the rest of the gang but also his voting record, his personal address book and his entire adult life. Good luck betting the future on that. The “change” we’ll get isn’t hard to discern: An expansion of government, an increase in taxes, a greater annexation of the dynamic part of the economy by the sclerotic bureaucracy, a reduction in economic liberty …oh, and a lot more Chicago machine politics.

Australian journalist Greg Sheridan observes the American presidential election and criticizes both sides, the media, and the American people in general for succumbing to the cult of celebrity:

THIS has been the worst US presidential campaign I’ve ever seen. Vacuous, fatuous, misleading, dishonest, trivial, at times unhinged in its disconnect from reality.

The politics of the world’s greatest democracy has taken something weird in its Kool-Aid.
How can I say this when both candidates are so attractive and so articulate?

There is your first clue. The quality of a politician is frequently in inverse proportion to their good looks. Give me John Howard’s baldness, Paul Keating’s hatchet face, Kevin Rudd’s Harry Potter tonsure. The greatest US president of all, Abraham Lincoln, proves the point. He once remarked that he could not possibly be two-faced: “If I had another face, do you think I’d wear this one?”

This election marks the triumph of celebrity as the essential organising principle of US politics.

His whole analysis is revealing and despite the third paragraph is not just about “good looks.” (I had to include that in my quotation due to the great line from Lincoln.)

“I just hate what the Republican Party has done to Christianity.” So said tODD, who had stopped posting for awhile, fed up with the harsh tone of our political discussions. I’m glad he’s back. (And despite his defense of democrats and what some of you have accused him of, he is NOT an Obama supporter after all. He wrote in an early vote for Ron Paul, who is both anti-war and pro-life!)

Isn’t it true that the secular public is confusing conservative Christianity with conservative politics, just as many conservative Christians are doing?

Has the Christian alliance with the Republican party helped the cause of Christianity? Or prevented people from taking it seriously?

Has the Christian alliance with the Republican party helped the cause of political conservatism? Or prevented people from taking it seriously?

I predict that in the likely Republican defeat that seems imminent that Republicans will blame the conservative Christians in their midst.

I further predict that many Christians will retreat into the neo-monastic stance of not wanting to contaminate themselves with the world since politics is dirty, which would also be wrong.

What should Christians learn from all of this, and how should they respond?

So, did you see the Barack Obama commercial, when he commandeered a half-hour of prime time on seven of the major networks? I didn’t. If you did, please report.

He sure has a lot of money to burn, unlike John McCain, the father of campaign finance reform. It is ironic justice that McCain is now hampered by his own free-speech-denying rules.

The Kenyan reggae artist Makadem has recorded this song, “Obama Be Thy Name.” At least it is a good song, catchy and memorable, easily the best of the political works of art to come out of this campaign. I offer it here to offset what some have called my partisanship. Also to note the Lord’s Prayer allusions, not just in the title and refrain, but in the line “Thy will be done.” But also to note the cheerful, idealistic, laudatory view of America that Makadem displays.

For information on the artist go here. His style is described as “Afro-Fusion” and is an alternative in Africa to American-style hip-hop. I like it! Setting aside politics and the religious cult, I would buy this album!

Obama supporters think it wrong–an example of “negative campaigning”–to draw attention to this 2001 radio interview, in which the future presidential candidate contemplates how to redistribute wealth. But a candidate’s beliefs and political philosophy are surely far more important than isolated policy prescriptions. I would like to concentrate on the constitutional theory that this former constitutional law professor sets forth:

If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court. I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order as long as I could pay for it I’d be o.k. But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society.

To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.

First of all, is there anything more important than knowing what a presidential candidate believes about the Constitution that he must swear to defend and protect? Second, isn’t it significant that Obama wants to “break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution”?

If you agree with that, fine, but we all need to realize that this is what he believes. That includes a big government that goes beyond constitutional restraints. And that one of this big government’s roles is “redistributive” change. Civil rights are not enough, since those are constitutional, and property right is a civil right.

Would that the debates, questions, and media attention focused more on such “theoretical” issues.

UPDATE: I see in finally checking the comments that FW has commented on this under “Conservatives for Obama.” He says this is just judicial conservatism, reflecting the limits of what the courts can do. But he is surely opposing here the philosophy that the government should be limited to what the constitution says it should do, which is one of the hallmarks of a conservative political theory and, indeed, of the rule of law. And “redistributive change” is not just talking about a progressive income tax!

The conservative movement has come apart, with all sides blaming each other for Obama’s ascendancy and trying to claim the title as true conservative. So chronicles this conservative site: American Thinker Blog: Conservative Civil War well underway.

One problem, I think, is that conservatism for many people has become an identity rather than a belief. Thus, an ostensibly conservative administration has started nationalizing sectors of the economy in flat out defiance of conservative economic theory. Perhaps these conservatives have become convinced that conservative economic theory is not true. Fine, but then they have stopped being conservatives. Instead, these actions were justified for pragmatic reasons. But pragmatism is philosophically opposed to conservatism!

Similarly, evangelizing for Democracy by military force had heretofore been what progressives had done (Wilson, Kennedy, Johnson). Running huge budget deficits had been the mark of liberals. So had increasing the size, power, and reach of government.

Perhaps, in our probable exile, conservatives could use their time to study what their ideology is. That will require reading Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk, to start with.

Some well-known conservatives, such as Christopher Buckley and Ken Adelman, have jumped on the Barack Obama bandwagon. So have some of you readers. What is the conservative case for Obama? Or, put another way, in what sense can you support Obama and still consider yourself a conservative?

First Things, the magazine, has a fascinating article on conservative champion Russell Kirk, who would have turned 90 on October 19. Excerpt:

The problem Kirk faced, along with most conservatives, was that the Enlightenment, with its universalizing equality, secularism, and blinkered rationality, was already destroying traditional Western culture. How can a tradition be preserved if it is already dissolving into what theorist Zygmunt Bauman called “liquid modernity?”

Kirk’s answer was twofold. First, he uncovered (some would say, “created”) a counter-tradition, one that rested not on the rationalism of the Enlightenment, the ideological fervor of the French Revolution, or the modern vogue for limitless “rights.” Rather, it began with Edmund Burke’s defense of the lived experience of Britain as a bulwark of liberty and the protection of rights. Moreover, Kirk claimed that this tradition connected Britain and America, and included such varied figures as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Henry Newman, Orestes Brownson and Benjamin Disraeli, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, John Adams and W.H. Mallock. . . .

As early as the 1950s, he had become convinced that liberalism would exhaust itself because it could not inspire and sustain what he called the “moral imagination.” For conservatives to buy into its premises would seal their defeat. Something else would replace liberalism eventually, and Kirk offered a richly imaginative vision of conservatism that could survive liberal modernity’s collapse. One element of that vision was a revived respect for religious faith.

As early as 1982, in an essay for National Review, Kirk suggested that “the Post-Modern imagination stands ready to be captured. And the seemingly novel ideas and sentiments and modes [of postmodernism] may turn out, after all, to be received truths and institutions, well known to surviving conservatives.” He went so far as to state that he thought that it “may be the conservative imagination which is to guide the Post-Modern Age.” (One of the earliest uses of the word postmodern was by the conservative Episcopalian cleric Bernard Iddings Bell, in a book of that title published in 1926; not surprisingly, Bell was an early influence on Kirk.)

Kirk had little patience for the trendy radicalism and sometimes simply nonsensical expressions of postmodern hacks. Nonetheless, he saw in postmodernism a chance to escape the strictures of liberalism and reconnect with the older, pre-Enlightenment tradition of the West. This approach has its weaknesses–Kirk, for example, too often simply assumed the existence of historical continuity, and perhaps did not sufficiently confront the corrosive effects of liberalism on the kinds of social forces he believed could sustain tradition. Nevertheless, his work stands as a stark alternative to a much bleaker postmodern future.

This is not the same as “postmodernISM,” of course, just a different way of taking advantage of the collapse of modernism. I fear though that we are on the verge of something beyond postmodernism, a new age of aggressive certainty in a completely different direction.