I know you may be sick of politics and the election, but hang on for two more days! The political, the moral, the cultural, and the religious are entwined, for better or worse, and whatever happens tomorrow will have profound significance, for better or worse or both.

I forbade argument in the next two posts. If you want to argue, do it here. Remember, argument, strictly speaking, is an attempt to persuade; that is, an attempt to bring someone who disagrees with you onto your side. The goal is agreement and thus reconciliation.

Name-calling is not argument. Nor are accusations, denunciations, or witty putdowns. Such tactics make the person who disagrees with you defensive and thus make the goal of winning over your opponent less likely.

I am going to TRY to monitor the comments throughout the day, particularly, in these three top-of-the-page posts, and delete the rulebreakers, so as to show you what I mean.

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.)