No, I didn’t say “Why Barack Obama is doomed”; I don’t think his policy appointments and decisions will help the economic situation any, but I’m not suggesting that John McCain would have had the winning economic strategy. Rather, the point is that there isn’t a winning economic strategy at this point—the forces in play are just too big. Read Michael Lewis’ excellent piece in Condé Nast Portfolio to understand why. It’s long, but well worth it; remember, this is the guy who first identified the roots of the problem 20 years ago in his book Liar’s Poker, returning to autopsy the patient who died of the cancer he originally diagnosed. Trust me, read the whole thing—read it to the end; it will blow your mind. Then read the accompanying article on why there won’t be a recovery for a while yet, despite what the optimists say, and reflect on the fact that presidents always get blamed when bad things happen, whether it’s their fault or not. (George W. Bush can point to the mishandling of Katrina by Kathleen Blanco and Ray Nagin, for which he took pretty much all the blame outside of Louisiana; granted, Michael Brown and FEMA also did a very poor job, but the hit President Bush’s popularity took had far more to do with matters under their control than with things for which he was actually responsible. The only upside for Republicans is that this did lead the people of Louisiana to elect Bobby Jindal the next time around.) The Oval Office is going to be a rough place to be in 2010, and would be no matter who was sitting in it, for reasons which in large part will have nothing to do with its occupant. (At least on the economic side; when it comes to foreign policy, that’s another matter.)HT: Baseball Crank
Author Archives: Rob Harrison
The bottom line on this campaign
is that I ended up thinking a lot less of both the final candidates when it finished than I did when they first started running.Oddly enough, the opposite is true of Hillary Clinton.(I still think she’s a political opportunist, etc.; but I have to admire the spirit and resiliency she showed, even if it was in the service of raw, vindictive ambition. The negative things that she displayed during this campaign didn’t surprise me any, but we also, I think, saw some really positive aspects to her that I at least hadn’t seen before.)
Too little, too late
After sitting sphinx-like as his senior staff impugned Sarah Palin’s intelligence and character, John McCain finally opened his mouth—and this is the best he was willing to do? I’m sorry, Senator, but that’s just plain pathetic. To wait so long to say anything, and then not to address any of the specific lies floating around out there or call out any of the liars from behind their curtain of anonymity—especially given his vigorous defense of Barack Obama against attacks he deemed inappropriate—to fail to defend her against false charges given how hard she worked for you and how badly she was pummeled by your opponents for supporting your cause . . . that’s purely dishonorable. There is no other word for it.
The evangelical temptation to the political heresy
The thing I appreciate most about Phil Johnson’s post on that subject over at Pyromaniacs is that he keeps the lines clear:
My main point is about how the church corporately should be spending her time and resources, not about what an individual who is vocationally (or avocationally) involved in politics should do.
That’s a critically important distinction; losing it renders the whole conversation unintelligible. There is no question that Christians should be politically aware and engaged; the question is what the mission of the church should be. I do believe, obviously, that Christian theology applies to politics, and so I don’t think political quietism is a wise or appropriate Christian stance; that said, as Johnson argues at some length, the preaching of the gospel and the teaching of Scripture must lie at the center of our ministry and must be the core of our testimony at every point. We should apply that to politics as to every other part of life, but our politics—like our behavior in every other part of life—should always flow out of our faith, rather than the other way around. If it’s the other way around, we have a problem. The job of the leaders of the church, in this respect, is to make sure that it isn’t and we don’t.
HT: Bob
The double standard of the Left, in full force
as seen in two very different ways. For one, the Obama campaign has officially gotten away with fraud, which isn’t surprising. What’s rather more surprising is that they’re still getting away with it. Check out Gateway Pundit for the thorough rundown of how the Obama organization has been enabling—and is continuing to enable—significant credit-card fraud in order to fill their coffers. They will, of course, not be audited or investigated—that sort of thing is only for Republicans.For another, my prayers go out to the folks at Mount Hope Church in Lansing, MI who were assaulted—there is no other word for it—by a radical gay group this past Sunday. I know that church, slightly; I’ve never attended there (though I’ve driven by it many times), but we’ve known people who attended there, and know it by reputation. It’s a good church, and didn’t deserve this attack. Don’t expect the MSM to decry the intolerance of their attackers, though—again, that sort of thing is only for Republicans.
The work of holiness
Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming. In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised,
barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all.Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.—Colossians 3:5-17 (ESV)I said yesterday that the bad news is that we’re all sinners, and that we’ll never win free of that in this life. That’s the bad news of the law, for which the good news is Jesus Christ; and for those of us who bow to him as Lord, though we may never know complete freedom from sin this side of eternity, we don’t have to just give up and give in, either. God’s grace is at work in us, setting us free from sin, and while that work is unfinished, he never fails of his purposes. No matter how bad we might be (or might have been) or how holy we think we are now, no matter how old and set in our ways or how young and callow, God is at work in us, and he calls us to work with him, to align our efforts with his. Paul lays out two parts to that in this passage. First he says, all these things that belong to this fallen world and to your old selves, put them to death. It’s much the same thing he says in Romans 8:13, where he writes, “If you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.”This isn’t something we can accomplish in our own strength; our own efforts need to be a part of it, and there’s an important place for spiritual disciplines such as prayer, worship, and silence, but it’s only by the power of the Spirit of God that we can make any real progress in dealing with our sin. The goal is the complete rooting-out and destruction of sin in our lives; we’ll never reach it in this life, but it’s nevertheless the goal toward which we work. It’s an ongoing struggle against the sin in our lives, to weaken and starve it, so that through loss of strength and lack of food, it dies away little by little, losing its ability to draw us into sinful actions. This requires us to know our own sinfulness, to be aware of the ways in which our sin tricks us and overcomes us, if we are to fight against it intelligently; and it requires constant vigilance—but then, as the Irish politician and writer Edmund Burke noted, that’s always the price of true freedom.Along with this, Paul says, “Change your clothes!” The image here is of the old self with its sinful practices as a suit of clothes we wear, and of the new self, which is from God, as another suit of clothes. The more we come to appreciate the new life God has given us, the more we learn to see the old self, those old clothes, for the dirty things they are. Imagine coming home after some fiasco, soaked to the skin, cold to the bone, covered in mud and filth, and taking a long, hot shower, or perhaps a long, hot bath; when you’re warm and clean, are you going to put those clothes back on? And yet that, in a sense, is just what we do whenever we turn back to sin: we’ve been washed clean, and yet we put the filth of the old self back on. Paul says, “Don’t do that—put on the habits of your new life in Christ.”If we put these two commands together, we get a complete picture. As we work to put to death the inward reality of sin, we are also to be at work stripping ourselves of our sinful habits, which are rooted in that inward reality, and replacing them with new ones. For the things we need to set aside, Paul points on the one hand to the disordered desires which lead us to pursue the pleasures and things of the world instead of God, and on the other, to the destructive passions, and the destructive language that goes with them; put those aside, he says, take them off and get rid of them. In their place, clothe yourselves with a new way of living, one which is marked by compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, and a forgiving spirit. These words describe an attitude that doesn’t give way to rage when one is done wrong but chooses to show grace, and is willing to waive one’s rights for the good of others, even when they don’t deserve it. The ultimate example of this is Jesus, who at times spoke quite sternly to the Jewish leaders who had set themselves against him, yet died on the cross for them, with a prayer for their forgiveness on his lips. Just so, says Paul, we should bear with one another and forgive one another just as Christ has forgiven us.Of course, it would be very easy to take these things and turn them into just another legalistic religion, just another way of putting faith in our own ability to be good enough—just work hard enough at being compassionate, kind, humble, gentle, patient, and forgiving, and you’ll please God. But look what Paul says next: clothe yourself with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony, and let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts. In other words, these virtues aren’t individual things to be worked on individually and to be accomplished by stern effort—they’re supposed to be the fruit of the love of God and the peace of Christ in our lives. When are we not compassionate, kind, humble, and so on? When we don’t love the people we’re dealing with, or when we’re not at peace—when we’re in conflict within ourselves, when we’re in conflict with those around us, when we’re anxious, when we feel the weight of our own lives resting on our shoulders. But if we open ourselves up to the love of God—because love, too, is not something we do in our own strength; love comes from God, it’s his gift to us and his work in our lives—and let him fill us with his peace, then these virtues are the result.
For those who served, and serve
I am the son of two Navy veterans, the nephew of a third, and the godson of a fourth. One of the earliest things I remember clearly was the time in second grade when I got to go on a Tiger Cruise—they flew us out to Honolulu where we met the carrier as it returned home at the end of the cruise, then we rode the ship back to its homeport in Alameda. I grew up around petty officers and former POWs. When one of our college students here described her chagrin at asking a friend if she would be living “on base” this year—and her friend’s complete incomprehension—I laughed, because I know that one; my freshman year in college was the first time I had ever lived anywhere outside that frame of reference.In short, as I’ve said before, I’m a Navy brat; for me, “veterans” aren’t people I read about, they’re faces I remember, faces of people I know and love. They are the people without whom we would all be speaking German, or Russian—or, someday, Arabic—but they’re also the people for whom we give thanks every time we see them that they came home, and those we remember who never did. They are my family, and the friends of my family, those who taught and cared for my parents and those my parents taught and for whom they cared in their turn. They are the defenders of our national freedom, and they stand before and around us to lay their blood, toil, tears and sweat at the feet of this country to keep us safe; and for me, and for many like me, their sacrifice and their gift is not merely abstract, it’s personal. May we never forget what they have done for all of us; may we never fail to honor their service; may we never cease in giving them the support they deserve.Dad, Mom, Uncle Bill, Auntie Barb, all of you: thank you.Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.—John 15:13
Sarah Palin in her own words
The biggest problem for Gov. Palin going forward is the number of people out there who are against her because of who they wrongly believe her to be. Unfortunately, there are a lot of influential folks, including media types, who see it as in their best interest to reinforce those false images; fortunately, all she has to do to overcome them is to get her own message out, to be herself where the nation can see her, so that people can see for themselves that the ideas they have are not in fact true.That’s why her interview with KTUU-2 in Anchorage and the Anchorage Daily News has popped up in the national media, and why she has a number of national interviews lined up, beginning with this one with Greta Van Susteren which aired yesterday. It’s amazing how happy she is to talk with the media when she doesn’t have someone else setting her interview schedule, isn’t it?Video below the jump of Gov. Palin’s interviews with Van Susteren and Matt Lauer.
Palin-bashers discover the Law of Unintended Consequences
I took note last Friday of the dishonorable cowards in the McCain campaign who started trashing Sarah Palin before the election had even been held, presumably to try to shift the blame for the loss away from their own performance.It didn’t work. It didn’t work because Gov. Palin made an implausible scapegoat when conservative pundits had been griping in print for weeks about how badly the campaign was being run (with one aspect of that being their mishandling of Gov. Palin). It didn’t work because the conservative base, on the whole, is far more impressed with her than it is with Sen. McCain. Neither of these things should be surprising, as both were eminently predictable.What’s more interesting is the other reason it didn’t work: because other staffers on the campaign wouldn’t stand for it either. Folks like Randy Scheunemann (Sen. McCain’s top foreign-policy advisor), Steve Biegun (who briefed her on foreign policy)—and even the folks believed to be behind the leaks, Nicolle Wallace (a senior campaign advisor) and Steve Schmidt (one of the two heads of the campaign)—as well as longtime Palin staffer Meg Stapleton, a wave of denials has washed away the charges, and left a very positive picture of Gov. Palin behind. Not exactly what they’d hoped to accomplish, I’m sure.
“I’ve been working over 20 years in Washington and I’ve been around literally dozens and dozens of politicians. She is among the smartest, toughest, most capable politicians I’ve ever dealt with,” Scheunemann said. “She has a photographic memory.”————————————Nicolle Wallace, a senior adviser to McCain who helped on the Palin account early on, said Friday on NBC that the governor was “perhaps the most un-diva politician I’ve seen.”Twelve hours before Palin said all she’d ever asked for was a Diet Dr Pepper, Wallace told NBC: “The only thing I’ve seen her ask for is a diet soda.” . . .“Gov. Palin was a breath of fresh air, particularly for those of us who’ve been living in the Washington bubble,” said Tracey Schmitt, the vice presidential nominee’s traveling spokeswoman and a veteran of the RNC and both Bush campaigns. “Because she is a working mom, she brought a real sense of perspective to the campaign trail, which was important.”Schmitt said that Palin’s effort on McCain’s behalf was a dogged one—that she was completely devoted to helping the man who made her famous.“She was tireless on the stump and would have shaken every hand on the rope line if there were time,” Schmitt recalled. “It was evident that this work ethic and enthusiasm was fueled by her sincere commitment to helping Sen. McCain get elected.”Two other McCain aides who were pressed unexpectedly into Palin duty also have only positive things to say about her now.“One of the great developments of this campaign is the addition of Sarah Palin as a powerful and energetic new voice in American public life,” said Taylor Griffin, a McCain press aide who had been focusing on economic issues until he was dispatched to Alaska in late August. “She’s smart, insightful, and has an uncanny ability to ask the right questions.”John Green was McCain’s Capitol Hill liaison for much of the year but was quietly tasked this fall with helping Palin deal with some of her Alaska-related issues, spending significant time there and with her on the campaign trail.“I thought she was an exceptional political person, but more than that an exceptional person,” Green said. “She’s in line with conservative principles and is an everyday Republican—what we’re going to have to find more if we’re going to get back to being a majority party.”————————————In general, according to Beigun, Palin had a steep learning curve on foreign issues, about what you would expect from a governor. But she has “great instincts and great core values,” and is “an instinctive internationalist.” The stories against her are being “fed by an unnamed source who is allowed by the press to make ad hominem attacks on background.” Biegun, who spent dozens and dozens of hours briefing Palin on these issues, is happy to defend her, on the record, under his own name.
Reader’s guide: posts on the nexus of religion and politics
The developing center of this blog, I think, is a core of reflections on the interrelationship between Christian theology and praxis and American politics. As such, I wanted to post this as the first part of an orientation to this blog, and what it’s all about (updated through 5/31/09).
Barack Obama and the case for faith in the public square
This is the first post I ever put up about Sen. Obama; while he hasn’t lived up to my hopes, I still appreciate the call he put forward in his address to the Building a Covenant for a New America conference for “a deeper, fuller conversation about religion in this country.”
The idolatry of American politics
One of my recurring themes: “When our politics shapes our faith rather than the other way around—when our identity is defined even in part by a political party or a political cause—then our political commitments have claimed a place that belongs only to God, and we are guilty of idolatry.”
Moral arguments and the political process
Returning to the theme of “the case for faith in the public square,” and why secularism should not be privileged above other faiths.
Politics in a state of grace
Thoughts on a properly Christian approach and attitude to politics.
Memo to the movement: be careful
On Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, and avoiding the temptation to messianic politics.
Moral psychology and voting right (or left)
On understanding the reasons why people disagree with us (and why that’s more of a problem for liberals than for conservatives).
Put not your trust in princes
On the proper limits of political convictions and commitments.
Keeping perspective on the election
The key is to remember who holds our first allegiance.
Thoughts on the humility proper to politics
On being aware of our own imperfection, and especially with respect to our political positions.
What has Christ to do with politics?
What is the proper connection between the life of faith and political life?
The temptation and peril of theologized politics
The dangers of letting our politics drive our faith.
Using faith for political ends
On the importance of ending the political subservience of religion.