Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Evangelicals toying with the idea of getting in bed with Obama need to ponder the question of who else they’d be getting into bed with.

I guess that’s true of just about anybody.  How does Marcotte’s association with Edwards justify the warning about Obama?

If you’re considering switching sides of the aisle because you like Obama, you ought to pause to consider who else you’d be joining up with. Just as I would expect a Democrat thinking about supporting John McCain to consider whether she really wanted to be on the same side as, say, Ann Coulter (although, of course, Coulter solved that problem by succumbing to extreme McCain derangement syndrome).

Put another way, if you’re picking sides, you need to consider not just the QB but the whole team.

If netroots bloggers are part of the “team” then you’ll have to stay home on election day because there are only 2 parties on the ballot and both of them have more than their share of nuts.

Having said that, Marcotte’s statement seems fairly mild to me - nothing in the ballpark of the hyperventilating hysteria one hears from someone like Coulter on a daily basis.  There are plenty of self-proclaimed evangelicals around about whom that would not be an inaccurate description, e.g. James Dobson, so it’s the word “most” that’s going overboard, but it’s hardly the worst thing one can see on any given day.

I’d agree w/ Cornellian above that Marcotte’s statement here is fairly mild by net standards- certainly less offensive than you can find at Malkin, Captin Ed, Ass of Spades, etc. pretty much any day.  You don’t normally associate yourself with that bunch, for obvious and good reasons.  Given that, and that Marcotte isn’t connected to the Obama (or Clinton) campains, it seems unfair to use her as a sort of boogy-man to scare people with.

Cornellian: A fair point. OTOH, don;t you think it is fair to note that the Marcotte is representative of an important faction within the Democratic coalition that is increasingly stridently secular?

Aren’t the key points to note that: 

(1) Marcotte has never had any association with the Obama campaign other than declaring that she likes Obama?  (Obama certainly has never said that he likes her.)

(2) Her association was with John Edwards.  And even that was extremely brief.  He arranged to get rid of her as soon as the grownups in the campaign realized who she was and what she’d written in the past.