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

I saw part of the speech on the elliptical machine. As delivered it was even more impressive than just the raw printed text.

Having voted for Bush twice, I’m swinging around to vote for Obama this time around.  I wanted to thank you for your fair-minded hearing of his speech. It’s a bit rare on this side of the blogosphere.

And I wanted to underscore the depth of the faith he expresses here.  I really wish he were pro-life, but I’m willing to trade that in exchange for someone who is actually listening to the gospel.  One detail that I particularly liked was his non-Manichean framing of our Original Sin.  He looks at the Constitution and sees its promise, and inscribes the slavery issue into it as a falling away from the constitution’s own ideals.  It’s a signal improvement over the construction which would have the constitution fatally flawed from the get go.  (Or the construction which would have it as ideally instantiated from the get go).  Obama’s view of it is a reflection of the orthodox Christian position that creation is good, but that we have fallen from what we were intended to be.  It’s a view in which hope is not just some fluffery, but rather a load-bearing wall.  That he instinctively sees it that way suggests that his faith really has formed him deeply.

And as you say, that deep Christian formation is too often missing from my erstwhile Christian brothers and sisters on the right. 

Let me close by saying that I can fully respect people who will vote against Obama on the basis of policy issues.

Great speech, ok ... but in what actions of his do you see the Gospel? 

I see a talented “speaker”, speaking. Truthfully, but not nearly the whole truth.  Importantly, but not about the most important divisive issue in the culture war—abortion. ... and promiscuous sex.

Where is his record of action?  Or even of leadership?

In fact, perhaps only a black person would be “allowed” to make such an honest speech.  But I prefer Bill Cosby’s speeches.

Tom,
Perhaps you will see this as just more talented speech, but Obama did take action to remove Democratic boilerplate from his Senate campaign website back in 2004, when a pro-life doctor wrote to him saying that he felt the description of the pro-life position as “right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman’s right to choose” was not fair-minded. Obama seems to have taken that admonition to heart and to have made an effort since then not to put down people whose faith leads them to a different position than his own.

You’re saying that only one kind of voting record—in opposition to legal abortion—can reflect the Gospel. I don’t think that’s true. We are better off with people of both religious and secular beliefs on both sides of the issue, because hopefully those shared beliefs across the policy division will help them find the way to minimize the number of unwanted pregnancies and abortions without resorting to forcing birth on women who do not want it. For example, this might be through legislation that funds and requires women to view a sonogram before receiving an abortion so they are fully informed about the fetus’s level of development.

As for the problem of promiscuous sex, given that half the major candidates in the 2008 election engaged in affairs or appear to have condoned them (Clinton, Giuliani, McCain), Obama’s apparently not being among them at least allows him to lead by example. Promiscuous sex is not really an issue for the president—I’m not even sure it’s one for politicians.

I lived under the exact same politicians as many of my peers who were having sex in high school, so I think the difference might be how one is raised (in my case, with a holy terror of my parents). Perhaps conservatives should stop blaming politicians for personal ills like sexual promiscuity, and pay more attention to what their children read, see and do. Here’s a hint: in my family, there were no TVs or computers in the kids’ rooms, so my parents saw everything that we did. And my mom used to turn off the TV even if married couples were kissing. She never railed about how there shouldn’t be such things on TV, despite her having been raised in a country where kissing really is seen as inappropriate in public. She never wrote angry letters to the FTC, or pulled us out of public schools (she needed them to do the sex-ed, as the one possible failing of my upbringing is that my parents never even contemplated we needed the info as teenagers—they were right, but still). She just parented with her own values—and did about as good a job passing them on as possible in this degenerate culture Her children now all happily consume the Cosmo, Sex & the City artifacts of that culture, but with a knowledge that they are amused observers, not participants, in it.

I do not think Obama is a crypto racist or bigot, but he definitely has some challenges in the company he keeps.  Associating with Jeremiah Wright has hurt him.  Now I have some friends who I have profound disagreements with, I still love them and do not disown them, but I do not associate with them professionally. 

I can understand African American anger.  But Wright’s comments go way beyond rightous anger into lunacy and conspiracy theory.  Wright’s views are the same as Ward Churchill’s.  That is nuts. 

Jeremiah Wright was part of the Obama campaign until this week.  Obama will pay a price for that.

Joe wrote:  “Wright’s views are the same as Ward Churchill’s.”

False.  Show me where Wright has compared the victims of a terrorist attack to Nazis ("little Eichmanns").

Rev. Wright is a good man with some flaws and some weird views.  Churchill is in an entirely different league, and you trivialize this discussion by pretending otherwise.

Prof - this is the reason I like reading your blog (aside from I’m an avid wine collector!).  You’re straight, but honest.  As for Joe’s comment about Obama being the same as Churchill, I can take that criticism a lot more seriously if he’s just as tough on the Pat Robertsons of the world who say that 9/11 was God’s punishment for homosexuality/abortion/sin in general.

I’d like to know how conservatives manage the neat trick of getting together and deciding which cliche to use in a political situation.  Today this applies to the “grandmother under the bus” bit, which almost every conservative of the “movement” stripe is using.

It must be disturbing to be on the receiving end of one of these lockstep mass-mind assaults.  Naturally no conservatives have considered that Obama’s grandmother has no problem with the remarks herself, or that she may have discussed these matters with her grandson over the years.  Nah, they’re too busy doing the group-stomp thing on the swarthy, uppity liberal Dem.

Moe et al,

I tend to agree. I’m having trouble with the circular logic. Conservatives are saying that Obama didn’t do enough to separate himself from Rev Wright, but “threw his grandmother under a bus”, when he put her in the same class as Rev Wright...people personally important to him, who just happen to have controversial and contrary views to his on America’s policies or race.
Frankly, I hope this amazing speech puts this nascent “pulpit war” to bed. As a church musician, who has played a variety of denominations (both very conservative and liberal), there are plenty of sermon statements on both sides, that could be equally embarrassing as Rev Wright’s rhetoric if similarly taken out of context.

btw, thank you Prof for at least adding a small bit of context as to why Wright damned America. If you substituted “abortion”, or “prayer out of school”, for “not treating our citizens as less than human”, could you imagine someone of the opposite politics, expressing the same thought? I know I’ve heard it.

It was a great speech, as written and delivered.  Almost as good as George C. Scott’s “Patton” speech.

But some more context, please.
Obama’s been supporting, AND choosing, Rev. Wright for 20 years.

You don’t choose your grandmother or uncle. You DO choose your preacher, and Obama chose white-hating Rev. Wright, who preaches hate and “victimhood empowerment”, while also doing some good things for many poor blacks. There is no preacher he has supported more, nor knows better. Nor chosen more often—every week he chose Rev. Wright.  His favorite preacher.

Many folk who confuse an actor’s movie or TV role, with the actual person (Noah of ER on airplane: “I’m an actor who plays a doctor, I’m not a doctor.").

Maggie says: “That he instinctively sees it that way suggests that his faith really has formed him deeply.

And as you say, that deep Christian formation is too often missing from my erstwhile Christian brothers and sisters on the right. ”

Obama has been in denial about Wright for over a year.  He claims he hasn’t heard the worst sermons—do you believe this?  I flatly do not.  I believe he has studied, well and successfully, to pretend to have deep Christian faith.  To pretend to support unity.  He’s a professional, successful politician first, before he’s a deep Christian.

I had a similar feeling with Romney, but also never felt he was nearly as good a speaker.

Obama is a serious black candidate.
His candidacy is making history—because he is black.  Which he knows.
Every time his speeches talk about “making history”, the true message includes, unspoken but between the lines: because he is black, because of his race. Because white people today OWE black people today because of slavery 140 years ago. (The Rev. Wright-type idea)

He denies running a race based campaign. While it’s not exclusively race based, there is certainly a racial basis for it “making history”.
Just as H. Clinton is running a sex based campaign.  Both are OK, but denying either is false.

If we can begin being more honest about it, that would be good!  But G. Ferraro’s treatment, after speaking the truth, seems to be the punishment of Liberal Fascists—which both Clinton & Obama seem to be.  National Socialists, and thought police enforcers.

On promiscuous sex by example, Obama is far superior to McCain (as was Romney); but his support for partial birth abortion is terrible, and worse.