But remember too that the ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt. It is the belief in things not seen. It is beyond our capacity as human beings to know with certainty what God has planned for us or what he asks of us, and those of us who believe must trust that his wisdom is greater than our own.
This doubt should not push us away from our faith. But it should humble us. It should temper our passions, and cause us to be wary of self-righteousness. It should compel us to remain open, and curious, and eager to continue the moral and spiritual debate that began for so many of you within the walls of Notre Dame. And within our vast democracy, this doubt should remind us to persuade through reason, through an appeal whenever we can to universal rather than parochial principles, and most of all through an abiding example of good works, charity, kindness and service that moves hearts and minds.
For if there is one law that we can be most certain of, it is the law that binds people of all faiths and no faith together. It is no coincidence that it exists in Christianity and Judaism; in Islam and Hinduism; in Buddhism and humanism. It is, of course, the golden rule — the call to treat one another as we wish to be treated. The call to love. To serve. To do what we can to make a difference in the lives of those with whom we share the same brief moment on this earth.
I may lack the faith to believe in this kind of Christianity, but I would be proud to stand alongside those believers who profess this faith.
Turns out Jeannine and I will not be attending the presidential inauguration. We didn't get the inaugural tickets as we hoped, finances are pretty tight, and Jeannine was scared off by the size of the crowds and the weather. So no D.C. vacation for us, although it does free me up to attend the January Mini-Con at Endgame. Woo-hoo.
According to the LA Time's nifty gadget, Proposition 8 now sits at 52.4% Yes vs. 47.6% No, with 62.8% of the precincts reporting. There's no true comfort in believing that most of the No on 8 leaning precincts have votes left to report, as the real hope there was LA County, which, at halfway reported, is actually trending towards Yes. My county in Contra Costa, where I put in the work this morning, is admirably trending No and is only half reported; still, my gut tells me that this won't be enough and the writing is on the wall: Prop 8 is going to pass.
This is shameful, but it would've been so much worse if not for Obama's victory tonight. There is some relief now that, if and when the issue of gay marriage does make its inevitable way to the Supreme Court, there will be Obama-appointed justices to see that this kind of hate legislation is overturned and expunged in the manner of Loving v. Virginia. And there is a deeper resolve, engendered by the Speech, that, though this is a setback, we can and will overcome it simply by the consistency of our effort.
This is not over. There will be a day when all Americans will share the same freedoms, the same rights, and bear the same respect. There will come a day when America will live up to its own ideals.
It's not yet up on the Barack Obama Youtube channel or I'd embed the Speech. There is nothing that I could say that could anyway express what I'm feeling after I heard Obama's first speech as the President-Elect of the United States of America. I just wish I could embed it here and simply post "Listen".
Jeannine and I donated, we pamphleteered, we phonebanked, we wrote postcards, and we voted for him. We didn't always do these things together - sometimes it was me on the cellphone and Jeannine writing the postcard - but I couldn't have done any of that without her and she without me. We did this together.
And we did not do this alone. Obama is a good man, and I believe he will be a great President, but this movement was always more than one man, more than one party, more than one color, maybe even more than one nation. I trust that Obama will lead us to a more perfect union, to the America that we have so long been promised but never deserved, not because I believe him to be better than us, but because I believe him to be one of us. We did this, and my heart sings for what we might do tomorrow.
You're wasting your time, brother. You can't tell me nothing that'll make me vote for that son-of-a-bitch.
That quote, from an old angry Iowa man, and the one Pennsylvannia woman who, when I called for her much younger son, stated with quiet desperation that "no one in this house is voting for Obama," amounts to the full amount of NObama response I received when I phonebanked for Obama this morning. I went through many sheets of phone numbers from Iowa and Pennsylvannia, and while I mostly talked to answering machines, a surprising percentage of the human beings I did connect with happily passed on that they had either already voted for Obama or were planning to do so tomorrow.
What brought on this last-minute scramble to do something for Obama was a poll I read on FiveThirtyEight.com on Sunday evening, which, for the first time in weeks, gave McCain more than 200 electoral votes in their projection. This ended up being an outlier, as Monday's polls have pushed those projections back down, and once I learned that most of the polls that give Obama only slight leads in the battleground states don't use voters with cellular lines, it's become certain to me that the only question for Tuesday is whether Obama will enjoy a landslide or just a simple victory. Nevertheless, by then I had already signed up for a full 8 hours of phonebanking on Monday.
It wasn't fun, although it was so very encouraging. In the middle of a workday in Walnut Creek - rich, white, and as close to Republican as it gets in the Bay Area - the phonebanking room was filled wall-to-wall with folks of all ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds, so many that people ended up being forced outside to phone under tarps in the rain. If re-evaluating the polls had not encouraged me, that turnout finished the job. That said, it was really tiring work, and when my fully-charged phone finally died out, I was kind of relieved. I can't say I feel satisfied that I did everything I could in this election cycle - either for Obama or for No on Prop 8 - but it was nice to get in a little more activism before this all ends on Tuesday.
There's a great article this morning by Joe Klein (he of Primary Colors infamy) on Time's Swampland blog. First he discusses how Obama's early days might parallel the rookie mess of the Kennedy Administration (probably wrongly*), but he then goes into how, as it did with JFK, such calamities might not change the national mood, which will brighten and become less cynical about its institutions:
Why? Because Kennedy changed the American zeitgeist. He was a rebirth of American youth and vigor--or, as he pronounced, vigah--after a very hard midcentury slog. His arrival announced the coming of age of a new America: where most people owned their own homes, where a much larger number of people went to college, where the prejudices of the past regarding race and sex--and eventually sexual orientation--had no future. He embodied the return of prosperity, optimism and idealism (a bit too idealistic and optimistic, in fact--in Vietnam). He changed the way the world looked at America, and changed the way we looked at ourselves. He inspired my generation to join the Peace Corps, march for civil rights, get involved in politics. The nation became more adventurous, bolder, sexier, more prosperous and more powerful.
Klein expects Obama will engender much the same cultural changes as JFK, and I agree. My generation has been defined by a cynicism that has been toxic, both culturally and politically. We expect our politicians to be frauds, and thereby wallow in an apathy that self-confirms our worst fears. As for our postmodern culture, irony has replaced insight, leaving us satisfyingly hollow but with little human feeling. When was the last time you saw a film or read a book that presented a vision of the world that was neither depressingly cynical nor some by-the-numbers manufactured pablum? When was the last time we had a political campaign that was any different?
I realize that hope and change might be too ephemeral to truly put a stake in the cynicism that has marked my generation. We have been indoctrinated that all politicians are used-car salesmen, that nothing really changes except to get worse, that everything exists in shades of gray and that "good" and "evil" only exist for the blind fanatics of intolerance and ignorance. Now we accept these cynical tenets as facts, as "common sense", without realizing that they are as much based on faith as hope and change are.
Obama might not live up to the faith people like me are putting in him, but that's not entirely the point: that I have hope for the future gives me peace in the present. On Friday, for the first time in the six presidential elections I've been allowed to vote, I (early) voted for a candidate that wasn't the lesser of two evils, wasn't the one I felt the least cynical about, but for someone that I truly believe in, both out Faith and Reason. Win or lose, succeed or fail, Obama and the rest of us who have created this movement gave me that moment, and that is the kind of change that I believe in.
* History is not cyclical - historians are, because comparative analysis is always the easiest available tool. It's a common but lazy effort to equate our current leaders with those of the past, one that I am definitely guilty of, but the truth is that Obama will be, like those before him, something completely different. I don't expect him to be as radical as FDR, though I expect he will supercede JFK in many substantive ways (LBJ was responsible for much more policy action - both good and bad). We are heading into dark times full of peril but thereby offering much opportunity, and no one can really say how Obama will react, except, IMHO, with significantly greater competence and ethics than anything we've seen in the past 16 years. He is his own man, and will be his own President.
I think it was a waste of money. It sounded like a great idea, a way for Obama to control the narrative heading into the homestretch, and, considering how little traction McCain/Palin are getting with their latest fearmongering, maybe that's how it's actually working out. The media is trying to keep the tension up (and their ratings) by making much of the slight tightening going on in the polls, but the outcome doesn't really seem in doubt: Barack Obama will be the next president, and the $3 million spent to run the ad would probably have been better spent helping the DNC with Congressional races to push a 60-senator mandate for Obama. The actual ad was too vague, too simplistic, and ultimately too short to maximize its emotional appeals to have any significant effect on undecided voters.
That said, in its final moments (when it hits 26:42 on the clock), Obama's parting words perfectly encapsulate why I have faith in the man. It's not simply that he's a Democrat, not just that he represents change from the baby boomer incompetence of the past 16 years, nor that he embodies racial transcendence: it's that I believe him when he says that he will listen to the American people, and I trust that his judgment to act upon what he hears from us.
Ever since I heard a panelist on The McLaughlin Group pass on that Lawrence Summers is all-but-assured to become Treasury Secretary under the new Obama Administration, I've been doing more reading and thinking about what the Obama Cabinet will look like. If it were anyone else (i.e. Hillary), I'd be a lot more worried: Summers is an acolyte of Robert Rubin, Treasury Secretary under the Clinton Administration who bears no small role in engineering the current financial crisis. Furthermore, Summers, while President of Harvard, made some remarkably sexist statements, implying that innate genetic differences between men and women play a role (but not the only role, or even the most important role) are responsible for the gender imbalance in science and math careers.
Now there is an article in The New Yorker that supports the hypothesis of Summers as Treasury Secretary, as well as details other possible members of the future Obama Cabinet. The article reveals (to me, at least) the place of Rahm Emmanuel within the Obama think-tank, placing him almost as close to Obama as his confidante David Axelrod. Emmanuel is a leading figure in the DLC, tried to torpedo Howard Dean as chairman of the DNC, and then tried to frame the 2006 resurgence of the Democrats in Congress (which Dean's 50-state strategy deserves significant credit) as a triumph of conservative "blue-dog" Democrats rather than the netroots and new progressive-derived supporters of the party flexing their muscles.
Essentially, the article paints a portrait of the Obama Cabinet as riven with Clintonites and blue-dogs, and, like I said, if this was any other man, I would be very unenthusiastic. Not worried, because even these are the worst sort of Democrats, they are still Democrats and are unlikely to lead this country down a sequel to the eight years of hell that Bush and the Republicans who've supported/rolled over for him have brought us. But this is Obama, a man from a deeply progressive and liberal background who has consistently been willing to put pragmatism before dogma without betraying his core ideals: whether it was getting elected president of the Harvard Law Review (achieving the central goal of becoming the first African-American to do so) while disinviting controversy by allowing conservative Federalist Society members onto his masthead, to treating the American public like adults in his "A More Perfect Union" speech but finally repudiating Jeremiah Wright when he couldn't act like one. If Obama is surrounding himself with Clintonites, it makes the most sense for his Presidency as it will have to start running at day one (honestly, he's going to have start running the country from a shadow government on day minus 75), seeing as how they are the last Democratic advisors to hold these positions, and they (hopefully) have learned from their mistakes of Bill Clinton's disastrous early Presidency. As the New Yorker article quotes about Summers, he "knows the building" when it comes to Treasury, and won't need to be brought up to speed before he can start putting the new policies into effect.
Emmanuel's presence remains disquieting, but I can't argue that the priorities he lays out for the Obama Administration - "financial-regulatory reform, tax reform, health-care reform, and energy" - are among the most pressing issues on the docket, moreso than any kind of social reforms (which would define the Obama Administration as the kind of "out of control liberalism" that the Republicans were able to tar the Clintons with that ultimately lead to their taking control of the Congress) or ambitious issues requiring long-term development and full support (i.e. education reform) better dealt after the 2010 Congressional elections (assuming the Dems hold power). While I am getting the sense that Obama, at least until 2010, is going to come off a lot more conservative and measured in his agenda than progressives would care for, and that the netroots that are singing his praises now may start to turn on him starting January 20th, it can't be argued that this is the most responsible thing to do. And that, moreso than "hope" or "change" (or "socialist" or"Muslim" or "terrorist" for that matter) is what has defined the calm and measured Barack Obama up to this moment: responsible.
Succintly, Biden beat the tar out of Palin, but that was expected. What was unexpected was how comfortable Biden has made me as Obama's choice for VP. He would do more than be a caretaker for Obama's movement should something horrible happen, and he is certainly more than just a choice to fill out certain lines in the campaign resume (experience, old white guy). He is a man deeply in touch with the needs and thoughts of middle-class America.
But beyond all that, there was this one moment in the debate where everything about this election was made crystal clear:
I suspect this clip will get a lot of airplay over the next few days, but what should get equal attention is Palin's follow-on response, that being nothing. Biden connects his own personal tragedy with the struggles of middle-class Americans, and her response is to ignore it, keep to her notes, and rattle off some soulless sound-bites about "mavericks". Her response was completely plastic, and that is what McCain-Palin has in store for America: empty rhetoric that doesn't even acknowledge how badly this country has been shafted over the past 8 years.
As for Palin, she was god-freaking awful, but expectations have been brought so low that talking heads will be able to say she did okay until the polls start going even farther south in the next few days. There were few Miss Teen USA moments, although there was a hell of winner when she responded to the question of whether the VP was a member of the legislative or executive branch by talking up her experience as a business executive.
It's obvious that Obama played the debates with much greater skill than I gave him credit for. By not going for the quick kill as I'd hoped, he instead presented himself as calm, thoughtful, and most importantly, presidential. That may not have enthused his base but it also didn't fire up the competition by antagonizing them, and seems to have convinced independents that he can do the job. Now they see that he should do the job through the double-whammy of the economy going into the toilet this week and McCain's ludicrous stunts.
There is a lot of daylight left before the books close on this election, but it is looking extremely dire for McCain. The Obama road to victory was always to win the states Kerry won in '04 plus one extra - not only has he accomplished that, Obama is on track here for as close as a Democrat has had to a landslide in decades. McCain has no option to stop the Obama strategy by taking away his "plus one" state in Pennsylvannia or Michigan; instead, he's got to play catch-up and simply try to preserve traditional red states like Virginia, all the while watching deep red states like North Carolina possibly make the jump to blue. And the Obamamentum may not be over yet: Georgia could also go to him before this all said and done.
McCain doesn't have a lot of chances left to turn this around. The Palin-Biden debate will more likely be a case of damage control than any opportunity for them. The next two debates give McCain some options, but unlike this first debate, they won't be concentrating on his supposed strength in foreign policy. And what McCain really needed to do - break off from the conservative base and appeal to the moderate roots he has become famed for (albeit without reason) - is pretty much lost as he's too long abandoned the maverick McCain of 2000 to ever regain that edge. All he has left is an October Surprise, and there really aren't any on the table that could help him. Any serious scandal would've already been brought out against Obama by now, after all the mudslinging, first by the Clintons and now by the Republicans. Another 9/11-style terrorist attack would only show how ineffective the McBush strategy on the War on Terror has been in protecting the country, and would more likely result in an Obama landslide. Invading Iran would do the same, as it would further expose the overstretched American military and bring the issue of re-establishing the draft to the fore. About the only thing that might swing things in McCain's favor is the capture of bin Laden, but we all know where the bastard is (Waziristan) and the only way to get him is to do what Obama has long counseled which McCain has lambasted him for - unilateral military action into Pakistan without that government's consent when the intel is credible.
I don't want to jinx it by saying it's over, as polls can change and Obama's lead is not insurmountable; but, if the fat lady isn't singing yet, she surely is warming up in the wings of the stage.
I just donated $25 at www.barackobama.com. Hopefully he can use that money to go down to his local garden supply store, buy some plant food, pour it on his crotch, and GROW A FUCKIN' PAIR OF BALLS!!!!!!!!!
For fuck's sake, he's supposed to be the next John F. Kennedy. I'm hoping he'll actually end up the next Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Tonight, he's playing like he's going to be the next Adlai Stevenson. Fuck being deferential to the old war hero, take that gimpy bitch out at the knees, and finish this damn thing already.
Let me be clear: I despise the Clintons. I can excuse the race-baiting strategy of Hillary's '08 campaign as part of a legitimate effort to win at all costs, and while I find her incompetent - from the health-care and fundraising debacles during Bill's administration to the blindly overconfident manner in which ran her campaign (whose pig-headed "stay-the-course" strategy brings uncomfortable comparisons with our current President's leadership style) - my distaste for the Clintons focuses almost entirely on Bill. I don't hate Bill Clinton because of the right-wing mudslinging on his sexual mores or his own sleazy relationship with the truth, but because of what he failed to do while in office: this was a President with the cowardice to ignore genocide in Bosnia, to actively attempt to hide even worse genocide in Rwanda, who forced our military to engage in lies with "don't ask-don't tell" rather than have the bravery to end that bigotry outright, and then institutionalized that bigotry with the Defense of Marriage Act, who back-stabbed the industrial middle class with NAFTA, and worst of all, became the leading example of the DLC philosophy (pro-corporate, anti-progressive) that betrayed everything the Democratic Party has stood for since FDR brought us a New Deal. While Clinton-lovers deify him for leading the party out of the wilderness of losers like Dukakis, Mondale, and Carter, Clinton the DINO did much more to harm the party in the past few decades than anything else, damage that can only now be healed by the truly progressive values and populist strategy of Barack Obama.
That said, I think there is a very strong case for Obama to take Hillary as his running mate. It has nothing to do with what I think Hillary adds to an Obama Administration, nor what she could do to bring her supporters in-line with Obama's presidential bid. The current polls as they stand show that Obama can beat McCain, narrowly but at a time when the Clinton backlash is at its strongest. Those numbers can only get better for Obama as he nears the convention, so I don't find a lot of legitimacy in the idea that Obama somehow needs Hillary to win this. However, Hillary can do a great deal of damage to torpedo Obama's chances in November, and indeed, considering her age and better chance to win in 2012 than in 2016, it may be in her interests to see Obama lose. That is the most compelling reason for Obama to make her his nominee: Hillary as Veep would mean that if Obama loses so does Hillary, in such an open and irrevocable manner that even Hillary (and Bill) would understand that she can't safely torpedo Obama without sinking her own chances to win at a later date. Keeping her within the campaign would also mean keeping an eye on her and Bill, so that they can be kept on message. It follows the basic philosophy of keeping your friends close but your enemies closer.
My only concern is how much this might alienate some Obama supporters, particularly among Independents and Republicans. The charge that Hillary will dilute Obama's "change" message by allying him with such Washington old guard as the Clintons has little weight when we look at the alternatives: with the exceptions of Kathleen Sebelius, Janet Napolitano, and Claire McCaskill, every other potential Obama Veep is an old white male whose going to dilute the "change" image just as much (if not more) than Hillary. As for those three, Napolitano is probably a lesbian (I dearly wish my bigoted country were ready for that, but I'm afraid they aren't... yet), McCaskill would be fantastic but she's a serving Senator in a seat the Democrats can't yet afford to lose, and Sebelius would be nearly 68 when she runs for her own presidential seat in 2016 following a successful two-term Obama administration. Honestly, I would still be very happy with Sebelius, but I don't think her advantages outweigh the opportunity to keep the Clintons in the fold and unable to make as much mischief.
And there is still this: if Obama takes Hillary as his veep and wins the Presidency, she is most likely to want to spearhead the administration's universal health care proposal. Hillary's current plan has zero chance of getting through even a Democratic-controlled Congress, and all evidence points to her inability to create bipartisan compromise. So I believe that if Obama gave her enough rope to hang herself with this, she'd do so, her health-care proposal would go up in flames, laying the groundwork for Obama to step in and get his more reasonable plan passed. This would also give Obama the excuse to ask her to step aside in 2012, allowing him to almost bloodlessly replace Clinton with a second Veep during his second term, perhaps Sebelius or (my hope) someone from his same generation that could maintain the youthful vigor and progressive values he is bringing back into the party.
I just put down the reservation on the hotel for a trip to see Barack Obama sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America on January 20th of next year. Yeah, I'm that confident, and watching the speeches tonight makes me only more so. By the most accurate polls, Obama is narrowly beating McCain by slightly less than ten electoral votes and has been doing so consistently for weeks now. This is when his support among Clinton Democrats has been at its nadir, and as it begins to sink in that Obama is the undisputed nominee and that McCain only offers to ensure all the policies that Hillary Clinton has worked against, those numbers can only get better. Obama may suffer some wear-&-tear in the debates and there may be some hiccups if he poorly chooses his Vice-Presidential nominee, but after seeing this guy weather the Clinton machine, Revered Wright, and Bittergate only to come out stronger, I have faith in the man.
Only problem is, that because so many hotels around Dulles Airport are already booked up, we had to settle for a place all the way out in Prince Frederick, Maryland. That'll mean a couple of hours of driving from the airport to the hotel, and then nearly an hour of driving back into Washington, D.C. Still, the die is cast and Jeannine and I are set: we're going to watch history made as what I believe may be the best president this country has seen since FDR begins his own first Hundred Days in office.
So this is why nobody seriously tries to build a time machine. It's not because of causality paradoxes or the lack of traversable wormholes. No, it's because why would anyone bother when stuff like this clearly proves that everything before Al Gore invented the Intertubes sucked balls:
So Obama did an interview on HBO's Real Sports, discussing his love of basketball, and said:
No, but I do think you can tell something about people from how they play basketball. For example, people who keep on shooting even though they have no jump shot. You can tell that there's a certain self-delusional aspect to their game. Right? That says something about who they are.
Another reason why Obama is my horse in this race: not only does he come off as human and likeable, but he also finds the most subtle ways to get in digs at his opponents.
"Just flip it for a second," Mr. Rendell said. "Let’s say Senator Clinton was ahead by about 110 delegates and ahead by less than 1 percent of the vote cast, and she and her supporters started to call on Senator Obama to get out. Just picture what the media would be saying. They’d be saying you’re being racist, you’re being everything in the world. It’s nuts! It’s nuts!"
Forget the fact that the mainstream media, in all their racial sensitivity, has been using the Wright controversy to hammer Obama as a dangerous black man come to roost his chickens because whitey gave us all the AIDs. That alone makes me suspect they'd be less likely to call an Obama a consumate survivor and scared to declare his chances over, even if the math makes it so - which has been the MSM line on Clinton even in this late hour.
No, the most salient point here is that the right course for alt-Obama is the same one for the Clinton in our timeline: quit. Alt-Obama would be in the same position, whose only hope is that alt-Clinton stumbles into a scandal big enough to wreck their inevitable victory. And, presuming that alt-Michelle Obama doesn't engage in gender-baiting after their upset loss in South Carolina and alt-Samantha Power doesn't spew bigotry about how the only way alt-Clinton got her position was because she was a woman, alt-Obama would actually be in an even better position than actual-Clinton, because he'd still have enough goodwill to negotiate a vice-presidency.
Clinton is quickly waning as a threat to Obama, so whether she stays in or quits really only hurts her at this point. And it is hurting her - dirty politics has manuevered her out of the vice-president position on Obama's ticket (unless he seriously swallows his pride and offers it to shore up the base); she is quickly destroying her goodwill in Congress through hard-selling the superdelegates, which creates enemies that block her chances of eventually becoming Senate Majority Leader; and if Obama does go on to lose in November, she will be painted as the Democratic Nader, whose political ambition caused her to tear the party apart, so that she has no chance of coming back to win it in 2012. She might still salvage her career by going after the governorship in New York, but does a state that has now had one governor fall and another one tarnished by sex scandals really want to invite Slick Willie to Albany?
So Politico, and at least one Clinton staffer, is admitting what anyone not sticking their head in the sand has realized since the Potomac primaries: "Hillary Rodham Clinton has virtually no chance of winning." It has long been improbable that Clinton could make up her deficit in the popular vote with Obama (which would have illegitimate even if she had, considering that the caucuses, mostly won by Obama, don't calculate well for an honest popular tally), but with the failure of Michigan and Florida to create a re-vote those odds go from improbable to impossible. Barring video footage of Obama cooking a baby while fellating Osama bin Laden, he's going to win the popular vote, the delegates, and maybe, with his own set of political miracles, reach the magic number of 2025 before the August convention.
The only narrative for victory left for Clinton is that she will have momentum in the last rounds of this fight, that Obama is too flawed to win November and that the people who would have supported him now have buyers' remorse. The problem with this fantasy is, firstly, that the national polls show recent decline for Obama but nothing apocalyptic; so, barring another Wright-style scandal, Obama is still in control and his momentum will continue. Secondly, and more importantly, Pennsylvannia is going to be followed directly by Indiana and North Carolina on May 6th, states that Obama is still likely to carry. And if Obama does carry those major states in the same overwhelming manner he did before the Texas and Ohio votes, Clinton will not simply be done but will be crushed in a humiliating manner. West Virginia on May 13 will probably be a repeat of Pennsylvannia, but the real contests will be in Kentucky and Oregon on the 20th, a match-up that will, at worst, be a tie between them. Puerto Rico, Montana, and South Dakota end the primary season, and while Clinton can pick up a lot of delegates in Puerto Rico, it won't be enough to give her the lead (or probably even narrow the margins). Looking at these contests, even the most optimistic Clintonite has to admit that April and May will be, at best, see-saw battles, and certainly not the landscape by which Clinton will be able to claim signs of momentum in her favor.
All that she can hope for is that Obama will implode through some monkey business, but even there she is setting herself up for failure. The kitchen-sink attacks and negative campaigning by the Clintons, continued today by Bill's not-so-sly disparagement of Obama's patriotism, is putting HRC in the position, not of saviour of the Democratic Party, but as the lesser of two evils, unlikely to mobilize the base and quite possibly setting November as a massive failure when the African-American and youth vote simply stay home on Election Day. While I agree with Politico that Clinton has no chance to win this thing, rather than wanting to see her drop out of the race, I'd rather see her run a clean campaign that focuses on the issues, respects her Democratic opponents, and builds momentum by taking McCain, not Obama, to the woodshed. If she did that, then if the heavens part and her chances are saved by an Obamaplosion, she will be in the proper position to take advantage of it.
On a seperate matter, Richardson's endorsement of Obama has lead into some discussion on the blogosphere as to when John Edwards will finally endorse, one way or the other. Looking at the primary schedule, my gut is telling me that Edwards will endorse Obama after Pennsylvannia but before North Carolina. That's his home state, where he can have the most effect. And perhaps more importantly, I think both he and Obama realize that his endorsement is unlikely to change the outcome in Pennsylvannia, and don't want to repeat the media chattering that the Kennedy and Kerry endorsement failed because Clinton won in Massachusetts, ignoring the enormous deficit that Obama shrank, giving him significant delegates even when he didn't win - which was the real story of the Super Tuesday primaries.
So yesterday my Mom (an alternate delegate for Clinton in the Nevada caucus) emailed me to ask how I, as an ardent Obama supporter, felt about the Reverend Wright speeches that are getting such play on cable news networks. I responded that Wright is speaking from the previous generation, one that suffered a level of discrimination and humiliation that we cannot imagine, and that while Obama states that he cannot discount the importance of the man to his own life, he shares neither those views nor that perspective.
Then I came across the following, the much-more complete versions of Wright's two controversial sermons. Having heard his words in context, I have changed my mind on Wright. This is not simply a man trapped in time and is certainly not the manic anti-American ogre depicted in the press; rather, he is a man of Christian values with a rational and reasoned message that speaks truth to power.
This is not an anti-American statement (and the most controversial part is actually the quotes of a white American Ambassador named Edward Peck, a Reagan appointee). Wright is simply warning the nation that "violence begets violence, hatred begets hatred, terrorism begets terrorism", a sentiment that America needed to hear in the wake of 9/11 and one that, had it been heard, could have avoided our current predicaments. Wright justifies this with episodes from American history (slavery, the destruction of Native Americans, the Hiroshima bombings as well as Bill Clinton's own irresponsible bombing of a chemical factory in the Sudan), and his interpretation of those events are neither controversial nor untrue. Wright's point ultimately speaks not to the evil within the American nation but that which he believes resides in the hearts of all individuals. He does this to urge his congregation to examine their own relationship with God rather than simply and solely condemning the sin in others, a very common and completely uncontroversial sentiment in Christianity.
Wright's other speech infamously cries out "God damn America", and make no mistake that Wright is stating that God has damned America. Yet he is not stating that God has always and will always "damn" America, and the central point of the sermon is "but governments change" while God itself is immutable. Rather than a condemnation of America, what Wright is really asking us to do is recognize that our nation has committed acts in the past that, by scripture, are worthy of damnation, but it is likewise capable of blessing, by virtue of the fact that it can change, for better and for the worse. Unless we recognize when America has been "damned" - if we blasphemously exalt this flawed human construct that is America to the level of divine worship - how we will ever see our faults to change them, and bring our country to a state where we can say, not out of blind patriotism but in the bright light of truth, "God bless America."
And then there is this: Wright describes Bill Clinton as "an intelligent friend" that turned into "a dumb Dixiecrat, "a rich Republican who has never held a job in his life, against affirmative action, against education, against health care, against benefits for his own military, and gives tax breaks to the wealthiest contributors to his campaign." That is one part of the speech I've seen no play of, and that's a shame; because, Wright almost perfectly captures why I do not want to vote for another Clinton Administration.
So I was wrong about Wright. Reverend Wright is NOT a tragic figure locked in the past, a victim of the racism heaped upon his generation and unable to free his mind from that history. He is instead a Christian man who recognizes that his faith requires more than moral piety to "traditional family values" but also a commitment to social justice. As a lapsed Catholic, I may not share his faith but I do share his intent, that when faced with the deep and complicated problems that beset our great nation we cannot be as children lead by those hypocrites in both blue and red, those who would herd us by our irrational fears rather than lead us through our better reason. Instead we should stand as adults, fully-aware of our own faults - of when we have been damned, of when our wrong begets only more wrong - so that we might lead our nation ourselves, through reason and truth, into that which Obama describes as "a more perfect Union." That is at the heart of the speech that Obama gave on Monday, and that is at the heart of why I support him, not simply out of a hatred of Clinton's duplicity nor a fear of McCain's agenda; but rather out of the reasoned hope of where Obama might lead us, where ultimately we can lead ourselves.
UPDATE (06/11/09): Right... so, all that stuff about Jeremiah Wright not being a tragic figure locked by his own past unable to free himself of the racism that marks his history... turns out, that is exactly what he is. I stand by what I wrote, because the media at the time had a very limited focus on the subject and really should've broadcast the entire sermons; but, yeah Wright's a nutbag.
