By Nicholas Kristof, NY Times: “In this presidential campaign, we should at least aspire to be as open-minded as 16th-century Germans.”
Tag Archives: Barack Obama
Whoa.
NY Times: Barack Obama won the Idaho Democratic Caucus with just shy of 80% of the vote.
Caucused tonight
Just got back from the Latah County Democratic presidential caucus – it was packed with people despite impending snow. Lots of college students, lots of everyone – a line out the door just before the cutoff time of 7:00pm. I left early because my candidate, Barack Obama, was leading strongly – upwards of 70% – which meant I didn’t have to worry about making a second choice. Hillary Clinton was flirting with the “non-viability” limit of 15%; a few stubborn souls also showed up for John Edwards. According to NPR, Latah County is a good microcosm of the state as a whole – Obama 75%, Clinton 24%.
Caucusing tonight
Tonight, I’m spending my evening at my first-ever presidential caucus, for the Idaho Democratic Party. It’s open regardless of party affiliation, which is cool. Between Moscow’s generally weedy liberalism and his heavy advantage with lefty U of I students (including yours truly), Barack Obama probably has Latah County wrapped up, but I really have no idea who’ll win the state as a whole. Democrats in southern Idaho tend to be more blue collar (mining and manufacturing-associated union folks), which is supposed to favor Hillary Clinton. But she’s never even visited the state – whereas the big O stopped in at Boise State U over the weekend.
Will Huckabee kill the Christian Left?
The results from yesterday’s Iowa caucus: Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee are the winners in their respective parties, by solid margins. It’s an interesting pairing, because the Democratic victor represents a response to a kind of conservative politics that the Republican victor has abandoned.
Obama is a good representative of the Christian Left – explicit about his religion, but understanding the Gospel to be about economic and social justice, not condemning abortion and homosexuals (neither of which is discussed by Jesus himself). The most public exponents of this position are Jim Wallis and his organization Sojourners.
The political strategy of the Christian Left has been to combat the Christian Right by attacking its wholehearted embrace of mainstream conservative stances on economics and the role of government as un-Christlike. Wallis’s favorite image is of a Bible with every reference to the poor cut from it: basically, a pile of shredded paper. This critique is valid and important, but it also allows the Christian Left to leave more divisive doctrinal positions of liberal Christianity, like acceptance of homosexuals and acknowledgment of the fact of evolution, in the background. Focusing on economics lets Sojourners be bipartisan, because while the Republicans have actively made life worse for poor Americans, the Democrats haven’t exactly made it better.
Huckabee poses a problem for this strategy – he rejects the post-Reagan ties between conservative Christianity and big business interests in favor of a distinctly liberal-flavored populism. But theologically, and on social issues, he’s very conservative: anti-abortion, anti-gay, and anti-science. And there’s the problem – on the issues the Christian Left has emphasized, Huckabee looks to have conceded the point. For Jim Wallis and Co. to oppose him without getting nit-picky about specific policy (though Huck’s “fair tax” looks ripe for nit-picking), they either have to start talking about more than economics, or they have to endorse (or at least not oppose) Huckabee.
So what will the Christian Left do? As of now, Sojourners’ “God’s Politics” blog has two responses to the Iowa result: one, by Diana Butler Bass, that identifies the Obama/Huckabee contrast; and one, by Wallis, that cheers the bipartisan victory of economic populism. Neither takes a position for one candidate over the other – which they don’t really need to this early in the campaign, admittedly. The question is, how long can they wait to choose?