It occurred to me today that though I’ve posted a fair bit about Sarah Palin, it’s been a couple months now since I laid out the reasons that convinced me of the truth of the superficially crazy notion that the best running mate for John McCain is the first-term governor of a small red state that most Americans rarely think about. Given that more and more people are discovering her and starting to consider that superficially crazy notion for themselves, I thought that re-running those reasons might be in order.One, she’s young, just 44; she would balance out Sen. McCain’s age.Two, she has proven herself as an able executive and administrator, serving as mayor, head of the state’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, and now as governor; she would balance out Sen. McCain’s legislative experience (though he does have command experience in the Navy).Three, she has strong conservative credentials, both socially (she’s strongly pro-life, politically and personally) and fiscally (as her use of the line-item veto has shown); she would assuage concerns about Sen. McCain’s conservatism.Four, she’s independent, having risen to power against the Alaska GOP machine, not through it; she’s worked hard against the corruption in both her party and her state’s government. She would reinforce Sen. McCain’s maverick image, which is one of his greatest strengths in this election, but in a more conservative direction.Five, for the reasons listed above, she’s incredibly popular in Alaska. That might seem a minor factor to some, but it’s indicative of her abilities as a politician.Six, she has a remarkable personal story, of the sort the media would love. She’s a former beauty-pageant winner, the mother of five children (the oldest serving in the Army, preparing to deploy to Iraq, the youngest a Down Syndrome baby), an outdoorsy figure who rides snowmobiles and eats mooseburgers—and a tough, take-no-prisoners competitor who was known as “Sarah Barracuda” when she led her underdog high-school basketball team to the state championship, and who now has accomplished a similar feat in cutting her way to the governor’s office. No one now in American politics can match Sen. McCain’s life story (no, not even Barack Obama), but she comes as close as anyone can (including Sen. Obama); she fits his image.Seven, she would give the McCain campaign the “Wow!” factor it can really use in a vice-presidential nominee. As a young, attractive, tough, successful, independent-minded, appealing female politician, though not well known yet, she would make American voters sit up and take notice [as indeed she is already]; and given her past history, there could be no doubt that she would be a strong, independent voice in a McCain administration, should there be one. (Update: for those wondering how she’d do in debates, go here to watch how she did the last time around. Go here to see her inaugural address.)Eight, choosing Gov. Palin as his running mate, especially if coupled with actions like giving Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal the keynote slot at the GOP convention, would help the party going forward. The GOP needs to rebuild its bench of plausible strong future presidential candidates, and perhaps the best thing Sen. McCain can do for the party is to help with this. The party needs Gov. Jindal to stay where he is for another term or two (as, I believe, does the state of Louisiana), but in giving him the convention slot that launched Sen. Obama to prominence four years ago and putting Gov. Palin on the ticket, Sen. McCain would put two of the GOP’s best people and brightest hopes for the future in a perfect position to claim the White House themselves; in so doing, he would make them the face of the GOP for the future.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Does Barack Obama have a woman problem?
I wouldn’t have thought so—he’s married to a smart, strong, aggressive woman whom he clearly loves dearly (though I personally find her rather depressing); but I’m beginning to wonder. He’s certainly been rather inept in his handling of Hillary Clinton, managing to both cave in to her (and/or Bill) and to tick her off; sending the formal announcement of the Biden pick (even though it had already leaked) at 3 am was just over the top. Now people are starting to ask, “Why is Barack Obama so afraid of women?” I don’t believe he is, but with his campaign’s connection to the attempted political hit job on Sarah Palin coming right together with his treatment of Sen. Clinton, it does seem clear that he wants a monopoly on the identity politics in this campaign. He understands that “first black President” has a powerful pull, and that he can use that (and more power to him); in consequence, he doesn’t want that blurred or undermined by a woman in the race. He didn’t want to be upstaged (for which I don’t blame him), so he didn’t pick Hillary; equally, he doesn’t want to be competing in the general election against a woman on the GOP ticket, which would create crossing and conflicting claims in the identity-politics arena. After all, if the Democrats give you the chance to elect the first black man to the White House, and the Republicans give you the chance to elect the first woman (albeit just to the Blair House, the official residence of the VP), then you can make history either way. (And one would have to admit that between the two, the Republicans nominating a woman would be the bigger surprise.)In any case, I’m quite sure Sen. Obama has no problems with women—but it does seem like more and more women are wondering if he does. (Update: the latest numbers from Gallup show his support among women dropping, and especially among unmarried women, from 46% to 39%.) Some of that, again, is his treatment of Sen. Clinton, who hasn’t buried the hatchet—she’s doing her best to undermine him, even when she helps him; some is rooted in the behavior of many of his supporters, a problem Rebecca Traister wrote about in Salon a few months ago; some of it comes from who those supporters are, or at least the most visible ones. Stacy at Smart Girl Politics asks, “One last thought….have you ever noticed how many of John McCain’s spokespeople on the media rounds are women? Have you noticed how many top business women have lined up to support John McCain? How many prominent women can you name in the Obama campaign?” I’m not sure how widespread this sort of perception is, but Sen. Obama had better do something about it, or he’ll wind up seeing a lot more ads like this one:
Afterpastoring
The Aftermath of Afterpastoring
Afterpastors, or clergy who minister in the aftermath of betrayal of pastoral trust, are challenged with a complex and stressful set of circumstances as they assume the leadership of the troubled congregations their predecessors have left behind. The relationships and interactions in their ministries are frequently characterized by distrust and suspicion. Afterpastors often feel misheard or unheard by lay leaders and congregants, and they often report feeling manipulated, coerced, and sabotaged by lay leaders or seeing their decisions co-opted or corrupted by poor process or underhanded leadership. And many say they are often criticized without cause or unwarrantedly berated for incompetence.Nearly all afterpastors describe a general reactivity to their presence or position that encumbers their work and relationships. And some describe reactivity so acute that it makes them lightning rods for every upset, conflict, and complaint—large or small—in the congregation.
Let me tell you, barring someone coming in who knows how to address such situations (which is why trained, gifted interim pastors are so important), those effects can linger for a long, long time.
Sarah Palin: hit magnet
The biggest argument people offer against Sarah Palin as a potential running mate for John McCain is essentially that she’s too obscure. Part of that is the “Alaska’s a 3-electoral-vote state that’s going to vote Republican anyway” thing (which I happen to think the Biden pick has neutralized, since Joe Biden also represents a small state that was already safely in the column), but it seems to me that the driving concern there is really that most Americans don’t remember Alaska’s up there most of the time and don’t really take anything that happens up there seriously, and therefore Gov. Palin might as well be from Guam for all anyone in the lower 48 cares—she’s just too obscure to be a credible pick.Now, speaking as a Seattle Seahawks fan still smarting over Jimmy Johnson’s comment back in 2005 (our Super Bowl season) that nobody cares about the ‘Hawks because “they’re way up there in South Alaska,” I probably take that sort of twaddle rather more personally, and find it rather more irritating, than is truly warranted. My personal reactions aside, though, I think the folks who call Gov. Palin too obscure to be Sen. McCain’s pick are seriously misunderestimating the power of the Internet, especially as an amplifier for good old word-of-mouth advertising. As evidence, I can offer my own experience with this blog. Probably nothing I’ve done in the last two years has done more to attract traffic than when I started talking about Gov. Palin; every time I put up a post about her, I get a spike in hits. What’s more, of the folks who find this blog through searches, over 31% are currently landing here from the search term “Sarah Palin,” and another 7% or so are landing from some variant of that. (For all of you looking for information on Sarah Palin’s church, I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about that.)I would have expected this sort of result had I been posting on someone like Mitt Romney, who’s already understood to be nationally well-known (and who knows, maybe I’ll get a spike from mentioning him, too); to see it connected to Gov. Palin tells me that in fact she’s already a lot better known around the country than those who are skeptical about her think, and that she’s generating a lot of interest and excitement. There’s simply nobody else out there on the GOP side (including, alas, our presidential nominee) who has people that fired up, or who has the potential to fire up that many more people. The other VP candidates have their supporters, but the people who will vote for McCain/Romney or McCain/Pawlenty will vote for McCain regardless, and probably about as happily; they don’t really add anything to the equation (and Gov. Romney turned off enough people during the primaries that I continue to believe that he would be a net drag on the ticket). Based on what I’m seeing, the same cannot be said of a McCain/Palin ticket, which would generate excitement, support, commitment, and ultimately votes that no other possible combination would.(Update: we’re not just holding serve here, we’re seeing this go to a new level; judging by the spike in hits I’ve gotten today, interest in Gov. Palin continues to multiply. Sen. McCain, the excitement is out there: I hope you have the vision and the cool hand to grab hold of it, even if the CW is that naming her would be a gamble. But then, you have the gambler’s nerve.)(Further update: as the log keeps turning over—I don’t pay for StatCounter, so I just get the free 500-entry log—Gov. Palin keeps gaining on the rest of the list; as of now, right around 70% of all the search hits on this blog over that period were looking for Sarah Palin. That’s how strongly things are running right now. The wave is there for Sen. McCain to catch if he will.)
One in Christ
Paul gets bashed sometimes by modern Western types for not denouncing slavery and trying to launch an abolitionist crusade; but if he’d tried, he would only have made things worse. He would have suddenly been taken far more seriously by the Romans as a troublemaker (and most likely executed as a result), Christians throughout the empire would have abruptly been treated with far greater suspicion and hostility, people who already didn’t like Christians would probably have been roused to defend slavery . . . and all in all, the gradual drift of Roman society away from slavery would probably have been reversed somewhat, not speeded up. He was simply too outnumbered and outgunned for a frontal assault to work.In the letter to Philemon, though, we can see how Paul sought to work against slavery in and through the church. He wrote the letter as an amicus domini—a “friend of the master” interceding on behalf of a fugitive slave, in this case Onesimus—and took full advantage of the opportunity as a teachable moment. The keynote of the letter comes in verses 15-16, where he writes, “Perhaps Onesimus was separated from you for a little while.” Note that. He doesn’t say, “Perhaps Onesimus separated himself from you”; he says, “perhaps he was separated.” That’s what’s called the “divine passive,” and you’ll find it all over the Old Testament. The Jews were so careful about not taking God’s name in vain that they avoided using it whenever possible; and so if they wanted to say God did something, they would often write, “It happened.” That’s the divine passive, and that’s what we have here: Paul is gently suggesting to Philemon that it wasn’t Onesimus who did this—it was God.To what purpose? Onesimus’ salvation, for one; more than that, a major change in his relationship with Philemon as a result. We cannot know how Philemon treated his slaves, though given his position in the church one would hope he treated them well; but it seems likely that he treated them, and thought of them, as slaves—people, yes, but definitely second-class, second-tier. Now Paul is saying, perhaps God was at work here so that Onesimus might be saved and Philemon might have him back “no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother” in Christ, a fellow Christian. This is the keynote to everything Paul says in this letter, to his appeal to Philemon to welcome Onesimus back rather than punishing him and all the rest of it: Philemon, this man isn’t just your slave anymore, he’s your brother in Christ; I led him to Christ just as I led you to Christ, and you can’t look at him the same way as you used to. In the world, you own him and he’s your inferior; in the church, Jesus owns both of you, and Onesimus is your equal.This is how the church gradually ended slavery in the ancient world; slaves became members of the church alongside freemen and citizens, and they became elders, and they became pastors, and some even became bishops. About forty years after this letter was written, one Onesimus became bishop of Ephesus; we don’t know if it was the same one or not, but personally, I think it was. And the more people saw slaves as their equals, and sometimes even their betters, the less supportable slavery became, until eventually the Emperor Justinian ended it altogether.Everywhere this dynamic has been allowed to work (rather than being undermined and suppressed by the church itself, as one must admit has happened all too often), everywhere that Christians have learned to see one another first and foremost as people whom God loves, for whom Jesus died, all the distinctions that we use to say this person is better or more important or more valuable than that one have tended to fade away. That’s why Paul could tell the Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”; and we could add, there is neither rich nor poor, black nor white nor Hispanic nor Asian nor American Indian, Republican nor Democrat nor independent, American nor foreigner, not because these divisions don’t exist but because they aren’t what really matters. Jesus is for everyone, and loves everyone equally—that’s what matters in the end. Everything else is just details. Everything else.
One more argument for Sarah Palin
I can’t let the news of the Biden pick go by without noting that Joe Biden on the ticket with Barack Obama is the best argument yet for Sarah Palin on the GOP ticket.Sen. Joe Biden vs. Gov. Sarah Palin
Member of Congress vs. experienced administrator
Pork-winner vs. pork fighter
Washington Establishment vs. Washington outsider
Party insider vs. maverick
Uncharismatic vs. charismatic
“Old” vs. “young”
Unexciting vs. exciting
Hothead vs. cool headUpdate: that last is courtesy of Adam Brickley, who has a brilliant post up on how Gov. Palin would neutralize Sen. Biden, the D. C. attack dog, by making him look like a bratty, mean-spirited jerk (which, with Biden, is exactly what you have to try to do, since that’s the way he usually beats himself). As he points out, she’s done it before.
Joe Biden: Barack Obama’s new backbone
I have to wonder if Sen. Obama’s decision to pick Sen. Joe Biden, party and Washington insider extraordinaire, as his running mate wasn’t solidified this past week when Dick Morris branded him “the new Jimmy Carter.” Certainly, in my opinion and in the minds of many, Morris was right when he wrote,
Last week raised important questions about whether Barack Obama is strong enough to be president. On the domestic political front, he showed incredible weakness in dealing with the Clintons, while on foreign and defense questions, he betrayed a lack of strength and resolve in standing up to Russia’s invasion of Georgia. . . .
Harsh? I don’t think so. As Morris continues,
Consider first the domestic and political. Bill and Hillary Clinton have no leverage over Obama. Hillary can’t win the nomination. She doesn’t control any committees. If she or her supporters tried to disrupt the convention or demonstrate outside, she would pay a huge price among the party faithful. . . . But, without having any leverage or a decent hand to play, the Clintons bluffed Obama into amazing concessions. . . .If Obama can’t stand up to the Clintons, after they have been defeated, how can he measure up to a resurgent Putin who has just achieved a military victory? When the Georgia invasion first began, Obama appealed for “restraint” on both sides. He treated the aggressive lion and the victimized lamb even-handedly. His performance was reminiscent of the worst of appeasement at Munich, where another dictator got away with seizing another breakaway province of another small neighboring country, leading to World War II. After two days, Obama corrected himself, spoke of Russian aggression and condemned it. But his initial willingness to see things from the other point of view and to buy the line that Georgia provoked the invasion by occupying a part of its own country betrayed a world view characterized by undue deference to aggressors.
As indeed he deferred to the Clintons’ aggression. This, I suspect, is where Sen. Biden comes in. Whatever his flaws, he’s definitely a strong character; I think, if Sen. Obama wins in November, that Sen. Biden will be a powerful voice in his ear over the next four years, and a man who will wield considerable influence in our government. Since I happen to believe that Sen. Biden is much more prepared and qualified to be president than Sen. Obama is, I don’t think that’s at all bad. And while I do believe, as I said in the previous post, that selecting Sen. Biden will tie Sen. Obama even more closely to the leadership of the Democratic Congress, at least Sen. Biden represents the realist stream in foreign policy among that leadership. Were I an Obama Democrat, I probably wouldn’t like that very much; as one who generally votes Republican, however, I find that reassuring.Which of course raises the big question which will be answered over the next two months: has naming Sen. Biden to the ticket accomplished anything politically for Sen. Obama besides reassuring people who aren’t going to vote for him anyway? Stay tuned—we’ll find out.
Above his pay grade?
When Rick Warren asked Barack Obama, “At what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?”, here was the Senator’s response:
Yes, he really claimed that having an opinion on that is above his pay grade. But that doesn’t mean he thinks all opinions about abortion are above his pay grade. Listen to the audio from the beginning of this clip, taken from comments he made in the Illinois State Senate as he led the fight against the state’s version of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act:
In other words, it’s above his pay grade to say that an unborn baby is in fact a baby, but it’s well within his pay grade to say that efforts to protect babies who are born alive after an attempted abortion constitute an undue burden on the women who birthed them. Sounds like what’s really above Sen. Obama’s pay grade is challenging Democratic Party orthodoxy—not a good sign for someone claiming to offer a “new politics” and a post-partisan way of doing business.But then, this is becoming the pattern. As Michael Reagan wrote,
During the forum, his struggle to please everybody by straddling the issues was plain for all to see. He showed he was willing to say and do what he believed everybody wanted to hear. When you try to find any real depth in his beliefs you quickly discover he is utterly shallow and soulless, a sloganeer instead of a missionary. He’s just a politician on the make, trying to be all things to all people—an empty suit proclaiming empty promises. Being without real depth, his platform merely floats on a surface of promises categorized as “Hope” and “Change,” neither of which is clearly defined. He assures us that he wants to change Washington and sweep away all that this city represents. Yet one has only to look at next week’s Democratic National Convention to understand that it’s not change, but lots more of the same.
For that matter, now that we know Sen. Obama’s VP pick, one need look no farther than Joe Biden. I understand the pick, as a matter of political calculation; it’s the same calculation George W. Bush made when he picked Dick Cheney so that voters could feel sure there was a grownup in the White House. Sen. Obama is hoping Sen. Biden can be his Dick Cheney, a man who has the gravitas and foreign policy experience and solid judgment that he himself lacks. At the same time, though, Sen. Biden is as much a member of the Washington establishment as it’s possible to be; more than all but a handful of people, he is the quintessence of the Democratic Congress. I’ve argued before that an Obama administration will really be a Pelosi administration, as the Democratic congressional powers will run the show and Sen. Obama will have to fall into line to get anything done; bringing one of them right into the inner circle of the administration will only strengthen that.Sen. Obama got where he is on a wave of excitement, partly because of his racial heritage, but also in large part because of the power of his rhetoric in promising us a new politics and a new way forward, a way out of the polarized partisan warfare of the last decade or three. Right now, it looks like the power to follow through on his promise is above his pay grade.
Blob spirituality
“Spirituality” is a big word these days, a vogue word; even people who don’t like the word “religion” or anything to do with it are often proud to call themselves “spiritual.” I think for instance of the comedian Bill Maher, who says, “I would describe my spirituality as exactly the opposite of having a religious affiliation”; having seen a good bit of his work, I’d agree. Of course, while most people would say that being “spiritual” is a good thing—even that, as the Buddha put it, “Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, people cannot live without a spiritual life”—there’s little consensus on what exactly that is. Which for many is the point; they would stand with the guru Baba Ram Dass (aka Dr. Richard Alpert, Harvard psychology professor and LSD advocate), who declared, “The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can’t be organized or regulated. It isn’t true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.”That statement captures, I think, why so many people set “spirituality” over against religion—religion requires adherence to something outside the self, while it’s perfectly possible, in this view, to be “spiritual” on one’s own terms. For all of that, though, “spirituality” tends to fall into predictable forms. One big one is nature spirituality; the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright, for instance, declared, “I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.” On a lighter note, the Scottish actor and comedian Billy Connolly once said he loved fishing because “it’s like transcendental meditation with a punchline.” Folks like this would agree with the Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki that our spiritual needs “are ultimately rooted in nature, the source of our inspiration and belonging.”Another view might be described as “self-oriented spirituality”—rather than looking for the god in nature, look for the god in yourself. This sort of spirituality can take higher forms, as captured by the American intellectual Felix Adler, who wrote, “The unique personality which is the real life in me, I can not gain unless I search for the real life, the spiritual quality, in others. . . . For it is only with the god enthroned in the innermost shrine of the other, that the god hidden in me, will consent to appear.” Unfortunately, it can also take quite crass forms that simply put a spiritual veneer over complete self-absorption. It’s easy to say, with the Dalai Lama, that “our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness,” but if your self is your temple and there’s nobody but you to tell you whether an act is kind or not, there’s nothing to stop our natural tendency to use what we say we believe to justify doing what we want to do.With the language of spirituality everywhere, it’s easy to forget that this is a relatively recent phenomenon, a reaction against views of life that were either all in the head, all about “definitions, explanations, diagrams, and instructions,” or all about work, consisting of little but “slogans, goals, incentives, and programs”—views of life which, as the pastor and writer Eugene Peterson notes, took over the church as much as anywhere, thus tending to take spirituality out of religion, and out of the life and work of the church. He continues, in his brilliant book Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, with these words:
There comes a time for most of us when we discover a deep desire within us to live from the heart what we already know in our heads and do with our hands. But “to whom shall we go?” Our educational institutions have only marginal interest in dealing with our desire . . . In our workplaces we quickly find that we are valued primarily, if not exclusively, in terms of our usefulness and profitability—they reward us when we do our jobs well and dismiss us when we don’t. Meanwhile our religious institutions . . . prove disappointing to more and more people who find themselves zealously cultivated as consumers in a God-product marketplace.
In consequence, as Eugene notes,
“spirituality” . . . has escaped institutional structures and is now more or less free-floating. . . . The good thing in all this is that . . . hunger and thirst for what is lasting and eternal is widely expressed and openly acknowledged.
The downside is that this is a view of spirituality which is set against religion, which is to say, against any sort of external shape, governance, direction, or even definition; it’s a view which intentionally sees spirituality as formless and unconfined. The problem is, we can’t live without forms, and in the absence of anything else, we tend to take the forms with which we’re already comfortable and familiar. As a consequence, though our spiritual longing is driven by the desire to “liv[e] beyond the roles and functions handed to us by the culture . . . much of it ends up as a spirituality that is shaped by terms handed out by the same culture.” There lies the lost opportunity of American spirituality, and one of the great challenges for the church in our country.
Seneca as advocate for the missional church
For good or ill, I’m something of a quote freak; I like things said with some zing and a point on the end, and when I run across something that’s truly well put, I like to hang on to it. Over the years, I’ve built up a rather eclectic collection of favorites. I truly appreciate, for example, the wise counsel of the great pitcher Satchel Paige: “Don’t look back—something might be gaining on you.” Then there’s the Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra, who stressed the importance of community thus: “If you don’t go to somebody’s funeral, they won’t go to yours.” Lately, as things grow somewhat thin on the back of my head, I’m especially grateful for the Roman writer Seneca, who once observed, “I don’t consider myself bald, I’m just taller than my hair.”Amen.Of course, Seneca’s particularly quotable because he wasn’t just a great wit, he was also a formidable philosopher, and there’s considerable wisdom in his witticisms. He noted at one point, for instance, that one “who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary”—a point to which I can attest from frequent experience. He also declared, “A great fortune is a great slavery”—though I’m not sure how that fits with his statement that “a great mind becomes a great fortune.” His insight that “a well-governed appetite is the greater part of liberty” is one which our libertine society would do well to take to heart, along with his comment that “Modesty forbids what the law does not.” Of all his insights, however, the one I most value is this:
Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he seeks, no wind is the right wind.
This, I think, is something which the church really needs to bear in mind. It’s inevitable and natural that the church should care about numbers—members, attendance, giving, volunteers—because they’re the only concrete information we have about how many people we’re reaching and how people are responding to what we’re doing. That is by no means all that matters about our work, because it doesn’t tell us whether people are growing as Christians or whether we’re doing what God wants us to do, but that doesn’t mean that this information is irrelevant, either. When you factor in that for most churches, the numbers represent our main practical limitation (we can’t do x because we don’t have enough people/money/volunteers to pull it off), obviously they’re going to take a lot of our attention.Where the problem comes in is when we focus on the numbers. As Christians, our focus should only and ever be on Jesus, and our primary goal should always be to be where he wants us to be and do what he wants us to do. Our aim should be to see Jesus and go where he is, and there to do what he’s doing. When (even for the best of motives) we come to focus instead on adding people, or raising more money, or developing more volunteers and leaders, we lose sight of our goal, our plans have no true aim, and we fix our eyes on the means: whatever works to improve the numbers. When we start to think that way, then we begin to seek any harbor that promises to give us more people and more money; and as Seneca said, when we reach that state, no wind is the right wind.