And didn’t Barack Obama win? And if so, shouldn’t somebody clue him in so he can stop campaigning and start governing?If you’re wondering that, too, after President Obama’s appearance in our neck of the woods to campaign for the so-called “stimulus” bill, take heart, because we’re not alone in our reaction. Granted, he’s a very effective campaigner, and his campaign appearance might do the trick—this time. Over the long haul, though, you can’t govern a country by giving stump speeches. Making your case to the American people is an important part of the process, true (Ronald Reagan was a past master at this), but while that may help you get the rudder over to keep the nation on the course you want, it’s not going to do much to propel the ship. The president needs to have more in his arsenal than going out and holding campaign rallies if he wants to have a successful term in office.The question is, why is President Obama still operating in campaign mode rather than in governing mode? I’m tempted to say that it’s because campaigning privileges style over substance, and that plays to his strengths. He knows how to campaign effectively, but when it comes down to getting things done, put me down as one of the increasing numbers who don’t believe he really knows what he wants to get done, let alone how. How else do you explain the fact that he articulated an ambitious plan for the stimulus package, then not only didn’t have anyone in his administration draft legislation to enact his plan, but rather let the House Democrats write a vastly different bill that doesn’t meet any of the standards and qualifications he laid out—and is now laying all his political capital on the line to defend that very different bill? This is bad governance; but it’s right in line with the way he ran his campaign. Unfortunately, now it’s time and past time for him to stop campaigning and start governing.
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This makes sense
One of the things that’s been hard for me to understand about our president is how all his talk of bipartisanship—and his apparent firm belief in his ability to work in a bipartisan fashion—squared with his extremely partisan voting record. In her column today, Carol Platt Liebau makes a point that I think explains this:
From his days on The Harvard Law Review forward, Barack Obama gained a reputation for “bipartisanship.” The problem? His much vaunted bridge-building was always a matter more of style than of substance. He would treat those who disagreed with him with great politeness and civility, listen their views, and then ignore them.In environments like a law school campus, or Chicago city politics, or Illinois state politics—where liberals overwhelmingly outnumber conservatives—bipartisan words, without action, are enough. Where conservatives are otherwise completely disregarded and routinely treated with contempt, respectful words can secure their support and even a certain degree of affection. Throughout his life, Barack Obama has blossomed primarily in liberal hothouses; perhaps it’s no surprise that he concluded that a little lip service would fulfill the demands of bipartisanship. . . .Perhaps that’s why the President believed that simply talking to Republicans would be enough to secure their support for the stimulus package, even though the final product reflected none of their input.
Of course, as she goes on to note, real bipartisanship requires more than that—and more than that the Obama-Pelosi administration wasn’t willing to give. You can always find a few marginal members of the GOP to pick off, but that’s all they could manage; the result isn’t real bipartisanship, it’s what we might call “RINO bipartisanship” (kudos to Glenn Foden):
Coming home empty
And [Jesus] said, “There was a man who had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of property that is coming to me.’ And he divided his property between them. Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took a journey into a far country, and there he squandered his property in reckless living. And when he had spent everything, a severe famine arose in that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed pigs. And he was longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate, and no one gave him anything.“But when he came to himself, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.”’ And he arose and came to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet. And bring the fattened calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate. For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’
And they began to celebrate.“Now his older son was in the field, and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. And he said to him, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fattened calf, because he has received him back safe and sound.’ But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and entreated him, but he answered his father, ‘Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!’ And he said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive;
he was lost, and is found.’”—Luke 15:11-32 (ESV)
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Another of the high points of this year’s Worship Symposium for me was Mary Hulst’s sermon on this passage. I actually would have liked her to go further in talking about the grace of the Father and the gracelessness of the older son, but even so, her message was a powerful evocation of God’s grace and love, coming straight out of the fact that, as a pastor preaching to a congregation of pastors and other church leaders (which is to say, people who play the “older son” role for a living), she knew us cold. I encourage you to listen—especially, but not only, if you’re another one who does the church thing professionally.
Rivers in the desert
“Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old.
Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”—Isaiah 43:18-19 (ESV)This is one of the more startling moments in Scripture. It’s startling because this section of Isaiah is full of appeals and references to “the former things,” to all the things he’s done for them in the past; indeed, immediately before this, God has anchored his promise to bring his people back home in the story of the Exodus, in the reminder that he’s done it before. And then he says, essentially, “But forget about all that.” So what’s the deal?It seems safe to say that God isn’t commanding his people to collective amnesia; nor is this a license, as many Western theologians want to think, to throw out all that stuff that God says about sin (at least the sins we don’t want to believe are wrong) and judgment. Rather, this is hyperbole designed to jolt Israel into opening their eyes and ears and actually hearing him, and seeing what God is doing. God is not only present and active in the past, but also in the present—theirs and ours—and they had no sense of that. They had no concept of what God was doing in their own time, or what he might be calling them to do; they knew all about the Exodus, they’d heard about it a million times before, and they would no doubt have told you they believed God had delivered their ancestors from Egypt. What they didn’t believe was that that had anything to do with their lives and circumstances. They believed God had saved, but not that he would save—and that makes all the difference. It’s not that hard to believe that God has done miracles in the past—but that he’s still in the miracle business now? That’s another matter.And so too often, we as Christians in this country are like those Jews in captivity in Babylon—we have this nice little box labeled “God” full of all sorts of things God did a while ago, and it really doesn’t have a lot to do with how we live our daily lives. We pray, though maybe not that much, and we read our Bibles, at least a little, but when it comes to the issues we face and the choices we have to make, a lot of us are functional atheists—we do things just like the world does. Not only do we not ask God to guide us, a lot of the time, we don’t even take him into account—we base our decisions solely on “practical” considerations, things we can see and touch and quantify. And that’s not how God wants us to live. God wants us to remember, in everything we do, that we are children of the Lord of the Universe, that he loves us, and that he’s working for our good—including in ways we can’t predict, or see coming. He wants us to walk by faith, not by sight. He wants us to hear him saying, “See, I’m doing a new thing—it’s springing up right before your eyes. Don’t you see it? I’m making a road for you through the wilderness, and streams of living water in the wasteland. Can’t you see? Look. Open your eyes. See.”
Redefining evil for convenience
Here’s Judea Pearl, UCLA professor of computer science and father of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, on “the normalization of evil”:
Somehow, barbarism, often cloaked in the language of “resistance,” has gained acceptance in the most elite circles of our society. The words “war on terror” cannot be uttered today without fear of offense. Civilized society, so it seems, is so numbed by violence that it has lost its gift to be disgusted by evil.I believe it all started with well-meaning analysts, who in their zeal to find creative solutions to terror decided that terror is not a real enemy, but a tactic. Thus the basic engine that propels acts of terrorism—the ideological license to elevate one’s grievances above the norms of civilized society—was wished away in favor of seemingly more manageable “tactical” considerations. . . .The clearest endorsement of terror as a legitimate instrument of political bargaining came from former President Jimmy Carter. In his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” Mr. Carter appeals to the sponsors of suicide bombing. “It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Road-map for Peace are accepted by Israel.” Acts of terror, according to Mr. Carter, are no longer taboo, but effective tools for terrorists to address perceived injustices. . . .When we ask ourselves what it is about the American psyche that enables genocidal organizations like Hamas—the charter of which would offend every neuron in our brains—to become tolerated in public discourse, we should take a hard look at our universities and the way they are currently being manipulated by terrorist sympathizers.
Wal-Mart Confidential
Charles Platt, a former senior writer for Wired, went to work at a Wal-Mart in Flagstaff, Arizona and wrote about it for the New York Post. He has some interesting things to say about his experience:
My starting wage was so low (around $7 per hour), a modest increment still didn’t leave me with enough to live on comfortably, but when I looked at the alternatives, many of them were worse. Coworkers assured me that the nearest Target paid its hourly full-timers less than Wal-Mart, while fast-food franchises were at the bottom of everyone’s list.I found myself reaching an inescapable conclusion. Low wages are not a Wal-Mart problem. They are an industry-wide problem, afflicting all unskilled entry-level jobs, and the reason should be obvious.In our free-enterprise system, employees are valued largely in terms of what they can do. This is why teenagers fresh out of high school often go to vocational training institutes to become auto mechanics or electricians. They understand a basic principle that seems to elude social commentators, politicians and union organizers. If you want better pay, you need to learn skills that are in demand.The blunt tools of legislation or union power can force a corporation to pay higher wages, but if employees don’t create an equal amount of additional value, there’s no net gain. All other factors remaining equal, the store will have to charge higher prices for its merchandise, and its competitive position will suffer.This is Economics 101, but no one wants to believe it, because it tells us that a legislative or unionized quick-fix is not going to work in the long term. If you want people to be wealthier, they have to create additional wealth.To my mind, the real scandal is not that a large corporation doesn’t pay people more. The scandal is that so many people have so little economic value. Despite (or because of) a free public school system, millions of teenagers enter the work force without marketable skills. So why would anyone expect them to be well paid?In fact, the deal at Wal-Mart is better than at many other employers. The company states that its regular full-time hourly associates in the US average $10.86 per hour, while the mean hourly wage for retail sales associates in department stores generally is $8.67. The federal minimum wage is $6.55 per hour. Also every Wal-Mart employee gets a 10% store discount, while an additional 4% of wages go into profit-sharing and 401(k) plans. . . .You have to wonder, then, why the store has such a terrible reputation, and I have to tell you that so far as I can determine, trade unions have done most of the mudslinging. Web sites that serve as a source for negative stories are often affiliated with unions. Walmartwatch.com, for instance, is partnered with the Service Employees International Union; Wakeupwalmart.com is entirely owned by United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. For years, now, they’ve campaigned against Wal-Mart, for reasons that may have more to do with money than compassion for the working poor. If more than one million Wal-Mart employees in the United States could be induced to join a union, by my calculation they’d be compelled to pay more than half-billion dollars each year in dues.Anti-growth activists are the other primary source of anti-Wal-Mart sentiment. In the town where I worked, I was told that activists even opposed a new Barnes & Noble because it was “too big.” If they’re offended by a large bookstore, you can imagine how they feel about a discount retailer.The argument, of course, is that smaller enterprises cannot compete. My outlook on this is hardcore: I think that many of the “mom-and-pop” stores so beloved by activists don’t deserve to remain in business. . . .Based on my experience (admittedly, only at one location) I reached a conclusion which is utterly opposed to almost everything ever written about Wal-Mart. I came to regard it as one of the all-time enlightened American employers, right up there with IBM in the 1960s. Wal-Mart is not the enemy. It’s the best friend we could ask for.
On this blog in history: January 1-20, 2008
Spiritual discipline?
Considering whether blogging can be a spiritual discipline, and if so, how—a question I revisited last month.The fantasy of the Real
On Chesterton, Tolkien, and the value of fantasy and science fiction.Gospel witness
A comment on what it means to bear witness to Christ.God’s own fool, part II
On the preposterous idea of a crucified Messiah.God’s own fools
On being fools for Christ.
Faith in action: George W. Bush’s greatest legacy
He doesn’t get much credit for it from the country—it wasn’t in the interest of his political opponents or the media to let that happen, since it would have interfered with the narrative of all the bad things they wanted you to believe about the man—but what George W. Bush did to fight the HIV/AIDS pandemic and other diseases in Africa was an unprecedented good on an amazing scale; and for all the difficulties with the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, that effort on the part of his administration has done a great deal of good as well. Eventually, once the politics are out of the way, he’ll get the credit for these things that he deserves.
Could the political pot boil over?
I haven’t posted on Yuval Levin’s essay on “The Meaning of Sarah Palin,” in part because for all the things he gets right, he makes one critical error: he mistakes Gov. Palin as “handled” and portrayed by the McCain campaign for Gov. Palin as she actually is. He thus ends up blaming her for failing to do things which in fact she was prevented from doing (or attempting to do, at any rate) by folks like Nicolle Wallace. I was, however, quite interested by William Jacobson’s comment on Levin’s article:
The politics in this country is like a simmering pot. The boiling water represents the desire of people to be left alone and to make their own way in life. The cover on the pot is the set of liberal assumptions which tells people that they have no right to lead life the way they want, and that those who have assumed the reigns of power know better. My sense is that the tighter that lid is pressed—by attacking people like Sarah Palin, by forcing government into every aspect of our lives, by appointing people like Tom Daschle who have milked the system dry—the more likely it is the pot will boil over.
The one point where I would disagree with him, regretfully, is that I don’t think we can simply call those assumptions “liberal”; functionally speaking, the GOP has operated in much the same fashion over the last number of years—which is probably why the last two elections have pretty well blown the party out of the water. (Plus, of course, while conservatism explicitly disavows the idea that “those who have assumed the reigns of power know better,” our liberal critics would accuse conservatives of being those who “tell people that they have no right to lead life the way they want,” and there are certain areas in which they have a case; only the purest of libertarians could really duck such a charge completely.) Taken as a whole, though, I think Dr. Jacobson is on to something; if he is, we might have another Jacksonian revolution coming. (This time with a woman of the frontier in the lead, mayhap?)
Do what to one another?
I was scrolling down on the Rev. Dr. Ray Ortlund’s blog to rewatch the video of Aretha Franklin singing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” at the inauguration (easier than looking it up on YouTube), when this post of his from the same day, which I’d missed, caught my eye; it’s titled “‘One anothers’ I can’t find in the New Testament”:
Humble one another, scrutinize one another, pressure one another, embarrass one another, correct one another, corner one another, interrupt one another, run one another’s lives, confess one another’s sins, disapprove of one another . . . .”Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” Ephesians 4:32
Dr. Ortlund, if your aim’s as good with a deer rifle as it is with a blog post, I can’t imagine it takes you long to fill your quota every year. There actually are biblical senses in which “correct one another” (2 Timothy 3:16-17) and “confess one another’s sins” (Daniel 9) may be appropriate, but in general . . . yeah.