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Considering the president’s legacy

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At this point, it’s a virtual certainty that George W. Bush will leave the presidency with a very low public approval rating. Though I’m sure that hurts, I believe he’s wise enough not to take that too seriously. The president who would govern well does so not for the opinion polls but for history (which is why the Founders hoped for citizen politicians rather than the professional political class we ended up with), and sometimes that leads to the choice between the popular course and the best course. Say what you will about the President, he’s never hesitated to be unpopular if he thinks it’s the right thing to do (though he’s often hesitated to defend himself effectively for doing so); in that respect, he’s a lot like another man who left the office wildly unpopular—Harry S Truman. Like President Truman, though not to the same extent, I believe President G. W. Bush will fare much better in the judgment of history than in the judgment of journalism.One reason for this is that Iraq is turning out well. As I noted a while ago, it’s the only real bright spot in this administration’s foreign policy, and even this only comes after several badly-handled years—one of the ironies of the Bush 43 administration is that it owes this victory in large part to John McCain—but when it’s all said and done, unless Barack Obama wins and manages to throw it all away, the last several years will have seen Iraq transformed from a nation suffering to enrich a bloody, terrorist-funding tyrant to a stable democracy and a potentially invaluable ally in the Middle East. That’s an ally we’ll need badly when the inevitable collapse of the Saudi ruling family finally comes. Unless you have an a priori commitment to pacifism—a commitment I respect, when it’s truly principled, but do not share—that’s clearly a good thing.I suspect, though, that history’s judgment of President G. W. Bush will rest equally heavily on two things not much considered now: the two great domestic political failures of his administration. The first is the attempt to reform Social Security—this, not the Iraq War, was the political disaster that wrecked so much of his second term. Our struggles in Iraq certainly didn’t help, but they only carried the force they did because the President had spent so much of his political capital on this issue. Put me down as one who thinks Social Security is doomed, and that this administration’s initiative, politically stupid as it was, was nevertheless noble (in a Quixotic sort of way) and very important. Twenty or thirty years from now, I suspect the narrative on this one will be “man of foresight brought down by the forces of reaction.”The second is the failure to pass a comprehensive energy policy. As Investor’s Business Daily notes,

When the Democrats took control of Congress in 2007, and oil was $50 a barrel and corn $2 a bushel, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid promised an energy plan. We’re still waiting for it. Today, crude oil is $134 and corn is $6.50.It’s pretty clear who’s to blame: Congress. In fact, House and Senate Democrats have obstructed any progress in America’s fight to regain some semblance of energy independence.

But that’s been the pattern. This administration started trying seven years ago to implement the kind of energy plan the Reid-Pelosi leadership said they would deliver; it didn’t happen, in large part, because of Rep. Pelosi and Sen. Reid. If it had, we wouldn’t be looking at $4-a-gallon gasoline, and our economy would be in much better shape; we’d also have critically important work underway to modernize and revamp our national electrical grid, and programs in place alongside them to shift our electrical production away from fossil fuels and toward other energy sources. The Democrats in Congress killed it, and so we are where we are today. Again, I suspect the future will blame the President much less than does the present.As a side note on energy: nuclear power plants have worked well for decades in Western Europe without any significant problems, while ongoing improvements in drilling technology mean we can open up massive new oil reserves—in ANWR, the continental shelf, the Green River Basin, and the Bakken Formation—with minimal consequences. I agree that both these things need to be approached with strong concern for environmental preservation—but they can be. I believe we need to set aside the hysteria and the absolutist positions and try to come up with workable compromises.HT (for the IBD editorial): Carlos Echevarria

Further thought on Sarah Palin

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Chris Cilizza, in the Washington Post, broke down John McCain’s VP options this way:

McCain’s choice is whether to throw a “short pass” or a “Hail Mary.”The short pass candidates are people that McCain is personally close to or would fit an obvious need for him. Choosing a “short pass” candidate would be a signal that McCain believes he can win this race without fundamentally altering its current dynamic. Among the “short pass” names are: Govs. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and Charlie Crist of Florida, former governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, former Rep. Rob Portman of Ohio and South Dakota Sen. John Thune. The “Hail Mary” option would suggest that McCain believes that he has to shake up the race with an entirely unexpected and unorthodox choice that would carry great reward and great risk. It’s the opposite of a safe pick. Among that group: Govs. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Sarah Palin of Alaska.

He then proceeded, for the first time, to list Gov. Palin as one of the top five possibilities as Sen. McCain’s running mate.Here’s my question: where’s the risk? I agree that either Gov. Jindal or Gov. Palin would offer potentially much greater reward than anyone on Cilizza’s “short pass” list; honestly, if you want to find someone you can put in that category who would offer Sen. McCain any significant benefit at all, I think you have to go to SEC Chairman and former California Representative Chris Cox. What I don’t see is what makes either of these governors (and though I clearly prefer Gov. Palin, I do think Gov. Jindal is one of the party’s bright hopes going forward as well) significantly riskier than anyone on that first list, let alone all of them. For my money, the riskiest choice Sen. McCain could make for VP is Mitt Romney—and I say that as someone who previously hoped to see Gov. Romney win the nomination. I think Gov. Romney has an excellent record of accomplishment in the Massachusetts state house and as a businessman, I think he would add enormous financial and administrative acumen to the ticket—and based on his primary performance, I think the Democratic attack machine would slice him to ribbons and make him a drag on the ticket anyway. Gov. Romney would give them a figure they could attack in ways in which they can’t go after Sen. McCain, and those attacks would hurt his campaign badly. Not providing an easy surrogate target should be one of the chief qualifications for McCain’s running mate; on that score, I can’t think of anyone who fills the bill as well as Gov. Palin who also offers as many plusses as she does (plusses which I’ve laid out here, and Carlos Echevarria has listed here).I don’t think Gov. Palin’s a “Hail Mary” (which is a good thing, since I’m pretty sure she’s not Catholic); she’s more in the nature of a perfectly-timed draw play, or perhaps a Patriots go route, Tom Brady to Randy Moss. Something good’s going to happen if that play gets called, and it could be all the way to paydirt.

Ministry in emerging adulthood

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I’ve been mulling over these links for a while, and I haven’t really come to a clear sense of what I want to say about them; but somewhere in there, I think, are some important things about what it means to be a young pastor in a time when more and more people in their twenties and early thirties are finding the transition into adulthood long, disorganized and uncertain (such that sociologists are now labeling this stage of life “emerging adulthood”). The pastor of a church is, essentially, the Adult in Chief; that’s a hard role to fill if you haven’t yet come to see yourself as fully an adult and the peer of all those grizzled, experienced, opinionated, strong-willed folks who most likely make up the lay leadership of the church you serve. That’s a problem, because if you don’t see yourself as their peer and equal, they won’t either . . . and if they don’t, you’re toast.Emerging AdulthoodEmerging Adulthood IIThe Father Pfleger ShowSFTS Experience

Thought on Sarah Palin

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We know Sarah Palin is interested in being John McCain’s running mate; we know that enthusiasm for that prospect is growing, to the point that even skeptics are taking notice. Gov. Palin’s most eager supporters are urging Sen. McCain to name her his running mate soon, for maximum benefit. I can think of at least two reasons why he hasn’t, however, even if he is in fact leaning that way (as I hope he is).The first is no doubt the charges recently raised by Andrew Halcro that Gov. Palin has abused her office in some unusually inappropriate ways. Given that Halcro is one of the politicians Gov. Palin beat two years ago in winning the governorship, the charges have rather the appearance of sour grapes, but until such time as they’re refuted (as I would hope and tend to expect they will be), obviously, Sen. McCain won’t put her on the ticket. Should she come through these charges unharmed, I would think that would only strengthen her chances.The second, which is more speculative, comes from my father-in-law, a lifelong Michigander who’s been touting Gov. Palin for VP since back when I was still hoping for Condoleeza Rice. He notes that one of the governor’s major accomplishments was the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act, and suggests that she probably doesn’t want to leave Juneau until the pipeline contract is done. If that is in fact an issue, I’d be interested to see Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin play it this way. Let Sen. McCain name Gov. Palin his running mate, and let the governor announce that she has a few matters to finish up before she can go on the road. Then go back to Juneau and tell the legislature that if they want to help the Republican candidate win the White House, they’d better get the lead out. I suspect that at that point, they’d be very willing to finish up whatever she wanted done.(Update: now that I’ve finally had the chance to see Adam Brickley’s video responses to Halcro’s charges—plus the additional thoughts in the third comment on that thread, from Dave ll—and to read the documents in the case [see the yellow sidebar on KTVA’s website], it seems clear to me that Gov. Palin’s actions were in no wise inappropriate. There are definite suggestions in other articles KTVA has posted that the governor’s office was at least applying some pressure on Walt Monegan, the former Alaska Public Safety Commissioner, to fire State Trooper Mike Wooten, her sister’s ex-husband; on the evidence, however, a) that pressure seems entirely justified, and b) Monegan’s refusal does not seem to have been the reason for his firing. Instead, this episode seems rather like an attempted political hit on Gov. Palin by a disgruntled political opponent, Andrew Halcro, and the state troopers’ union, which was unhappy at her efforts to streamline the budget and cut waste. Taken all in all, if this reading of the situation bears out, this should only make her a more appealing running mate for Sen. McCain, not less.)

Can Barack Obama find a place to stand?

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The Democratic primaries this year reminded me a little of a football game. In football, for a fast running back, one good way to break a long run (if no one’s looking for it) is to outrun everyone to the sideline, then outrun them down the field. That’s more or less what Sen. Obama did: he outran the field to the left sideline, then outran everyone clear to the endzone. On this read, I guess John Edwards was the blitzing linebacker who gets taken clean out of the play by the fullback, while Hillary Clinton was the safety in deep coverage who initially misreads the play and can’t quite get back into it—she laid a hand on Gayle Sayers Obama (need to keep the Chicago tie; I suppose you could also call him Devin Hester Obama) as he streaked by, but that was about it.Now, this sort of thing is a great way to produce exciting results, get the crowd stirred up and on their feet; but unlike for the Chicago Bears, for the Chicago senator, it has some negative consequences: namely, it ties him pretty closely to the voting record that earned him the label of the most liberal politician in Congress. In the primaries, this was a good thing, because most of those who vote in Democratic primaries are liberals; what’s more, this drove an incredible Internet fundraising machine which raked in unprecedented amounts for Sen. Obama from the liberal Democratic netroots. In the general election, however, this isn’t a good thing, because America’s a pretty centrist place; even if Sen. Obama’s the most exciting politician this country has seen in a long time, and even if the chance to elect a dark-skinned President is extremely alluring (even though he isn’t the descendant of slaves), in the end, the most liberal politician in Congress is going to be too far away from most voters to win in November.So, naturally, having won the primaries by running left as fast as he could, Sen. Obama has now attempted to cut back in toward the middle of the field, rather than just taking the ball down the sideline. The problem is, that isn’t always easy to do, and the early returns might suggest that it isn’t working all that well. I noted a few days ago the drop in Sen. Obama’s poll numbers, offering my own conclusion that the main lesson from them is that we don’t know as much as we think we do; for what it’s worth, though, Dick Morris and Ed Morissey, a pair of savvy political operators, have drawn the conclusion that Sen. Obama’s “series of policy reversals and gaffes” were the primary cause. Morris even went so far as to declare that “Obama has carried flip-flopping to new heights.” I think that’s hyperbole, but Morris does have an important point: “As a candidate who was nominated to be a different kind of politician, Obama has set the bar pretty high. And, with his flipping and flopping, he is falling short, to the disillusionment of his more naïve supporters.” This is particularly important given the thinness of Sen. Obama’s record; we really don’t know much about him as a leader, and he doesn’t have much to point us to beyond what he tells us during the campaign. If his actions tell us that his political convictions are at the service of political expediency—which seems to be what a lot of the netroots folks who’ve driven his fundraising are concluding—then that could really hurt him in the long run, especially against a candidate like John McCain who’s broadly respected for his political integrity (and especially if Sen. McCain chooses a running mate like Sarah Palin who will further point up that contrast).Sen. Obama is a formidably gifted politician who’s shown some remarkable instincts, even as he’s also made a lot of high-profile gaffes; he’s still the favorite in November, though I still think it will be close and I’m personally still betting on the underdog. If he can’t find a way to credibly move to the center without looking like just another politician, though, he could lose that favorite status in a hurry. Archimedes is credited with saying, “Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I will move the world.” Sen. Obama has the lever; can he find the place to stand?

A politician of principle

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Eight years ago, I told any number of people that my main problem with the presidential race is that the wrong people were on top of the tickets—I’d rather have voted for either Joe Lieberman or Dick Cheney than either George W. Bush or Al Gore. I’ve admired Sen. Lieberman ever since William F. Buckley formed BuckPac to help him beat Republican incumbent Lowell Weicker in Connecticut, and the subsequent years have proven that admiration well-founded. From everything I’ve seen, Lieberman’s an honorable and principled politician, a man of integrity who’s kept his integrity basically intact, which is hard to do in D.C.; it’s a pity he’s not an exciting political figure, because he’s the sort of person who would serve us well as president.Unfortunately, that integrity, combined with his stubborn loyalty, means he’s now in hot water with the Democratic Party leadership (though he had to run as an independent two years ago to keep his Senate seat, he’s still functionally a Democrat). I can certainly understand where the Democratic leadership is coming from; it’s hard to blame them when Sen. Lieberman is openly campaigning for the Republican nominee, and equally openly critical of their own nominee. At the same time, though, I respect Sen. Lieberman for having the courage of his convictions; and at a time when the Republicans have nominated a man who has angered many in his own party for putting his convictions ahead of party loyalty and party discipline, it would be a sad commentary for the Democrats to disfellowship one of their own for doing the same thing.

Barack Obama, 9/19/01

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Even as I hope for some measure of peace and comfort to the bereaved families, I must also hope that we as a nation draw some measure of wisdom from this tragedy. Certain immediate lessons are clear, and we must act upon those lessons decisively. We need to step up security at our airports. We must reexamine the effectiveness of our intelligence networks. And we must be resolute in identifying the perpetrators of these heinous acts and dismantling their organizations of destruction.We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.We will have to make sure, despite our rage, that any U.S. military action takes into account the lives of innocent civilians abroad. We will have to be unwavering in opposing bigotry or discrimination directed against neighbors and friends of Middle Eastern descent. Finally, we will have to devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes and prospects of embittered children across the globe—children not just in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and within our own shores.(From the Hyde Park Herald, September 19, 2001; quoted in “Making It: How Chicago Shaped Obama,” in The New Yorker.)

I agree that we need to “understand the sources of such madness”—but to do that, we need to understand them on their own terms, not to try to reduce them to contemporary Western touchy-feely-ism. The problem with the 9/11 terrorists wasn’t psychological. I certainly agree that they showed “a fundamental absence of empathy,” but that was the symptom, not the condition—it was the effect, not the cause. Specifically, the absence of empathy and the plot to destroy the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and (I believe) the U. S. Capitol were both effects of a common cause: the murderous ideology of jihadism, the Islamic heresy propounded by Osama bin Laden. The problem isn’t “a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair”; that’s certainly a problem for its own sake and something to be addressed as best as we’re able, but it’s not the root cause here. The 9/11 terrorists, after all, hadn’t come from “poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair”—they were middle-class and well-educated. The problem is a worldview that says that blowing people up because they aren’t Muslims (and the right kind of Muslims, at that) is a good and noble thing to do. There, Sen. Obama, is the source of the madness—there and nowhere else.HT: Carlos Echevarria

The bounds of the canon and the limits of its authors

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I’ve been reading Joseph A. Fitzmyer’s commentary on Philemon (in the Anchor Bible series), preparing for a future sermon series; in the course of his discussion of slavery, which is an essential part of the introductory work on that book, I was interested to read the following paragraph:

What strikes the modern reader of such Pauline passages [as the Letter to Philemon] is his failure to speak out against the social institution of slavery in general and the injustices that it often involved, not only for the individual so entrapped but also for his wife and children. If I am right in interpreting the “more than I ask” of v 21 as an implicit request made of Philemon to see to the emancipation of Onesimus, that may tell us something about Paul’s attitude toward the enslavement of a Christian; but that “more” has been diversely interpreted over the centuries and its sense is not clear. Moreover that is an implicit request about an individual case of a Christian slave who could help Paul in his work of evangelization. Would Paul have written the same thing to the non-Christian owner of a pagan slave? Would he have agreed with Aristotle’s view about “friendship” with such a slave [that friendship with a slave considered as a slave was impossible]?

There are two issues in that paragraph. The first, the fact that Paul (and for that matter the rest of the NT writers) didn’t condemn slavery and demand immediate, empire-wide emancipation of all slaves, is a vast subject and beyond the scope of a single post. I will note that we should bear in mind that slavery in the ancient world was a significantly different thing, and quite a bit less vile, than slavery in the American historical context; that said, though, the injustice of it (both fundamental and circumstantial) was still very real. The basic argument here, in a nutshell, is that the system of slavery could only be changed gradually, and that it was Christianity which brought that change—a point made quite clearly by M. R. Vincent in a passage Dr. Fitzmyer quotes:

Under Constantine the effects of christian sentiment began to appear in the Church and in legislation concerning slaves. Official freeing of slaves became common as an act of pious gratitude, and burial tablets often represent masters standing before the Good Shepherd, with a band of slaves liberated at death, and pleading for them at judgment. In A.D. 312 a law was passed declaring as homicide the poisoning or branding of slaves . . . The advance of a healthier sentiment may be seen by comparing the law of Augustus, which forbade a master to emancipate more than one-fifth of his slaves, and which fixed one hundred males as a maximum for one time—and the unlimited permission to emancipate conceded by Constantine. Each new ruler enacted some measure which facilitated emancipation. Every obstacle was thrown up by law in the way of separating families. Under Justinian all presumptions were in favor of liberty.

Beyond that is for another post, or series of posts, or maybe a book or three; and while it’s an issue that offers a lot to discuss, it’s also not a new one. What really struck me in Dr. Fitzmyer’s comment quoted above were his closing questions:

Would Paul have written the same thing to the non-Christian owner of a pagan slave? Would he have agreed with Aristotle’s view about “friendship” with such a slave?

The reason that struck me is because it seems to me there’s an assumption there which needs to be considered: namely, that what Paul thought about such questions matters to us, and thus that if we had the answers to such questions, it would affect our interpretation of Scripture. At one time, I would have thought that was obvious—after all, this is Paul, the guy who wrote half the New Testament; of course we want to know more of what he thought about everything. Anymore, though, I don’t agree with that. After all, as much as I believe that God by his Spirit inspired Paul to write the letters which we now have, that only makes the letters authoritative; Paul, as brilliant as he was, was still a sinful, fallible human being. Just because we affirm that the Spirit inspired the thirteen letters of Paul that we have in the New Testament, it doesn’t mean that the Spirit inspired everything else, or even anything else, that he said or wrote or thought.As such, while I don’t know the answers to Dr. Fitzmyer’s questions, I also don’t care about those answers; I have no problem affirming that if Paul in fact agreed with Aristotle, that that’s the reason God kept him from saying so in any of the letters we have. The idea that Paul might have believed something means nothing to me if that belief is outside the bounds of the canon of Scripture, because I don’t follow Paul as such; I only follow him as he follows Christ. I recognize Paul as a fellow redeemed sinner who had his unrighteous behaviors and his un-Christlike ideas and his limits to his understanding just like me, or anyone else; the key for me is that in affirming the inspiration of Scripture, I affirm that the Spirit kept all those things outside the bounds of the canon. Inside those bounds, within the letters we have, we have Paul at his best, guided and shaped by the Spirit’s work; outside, it doesn’t matter.

Tony Snow, RIP

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It’s been a bad summer for honorable media personalities in this country; though unlike Tim Russert’s death, Tony Snow’s death this week from colon cancer was no surprise. Like Russert, however, Snow was admired for his character, insight, and evenhandedness. As a radio and TV host and columnist, he was praised as a “happy warrior,” someone who argued his strong principles and firm convictions with good will and respect for those who disagreed with him; as the President’s press secretary, he raised the bar for those who succeeded him, and those yet to come. But as with Russert, what those who knew him appreciated about him the most was his good heart, as evidenced (among many other places) in this e-mail he sent last year to a well-wisher. It was for that that veteran NBC White House correspondent David Gregory said, “I really respected him and admired the kind of man he was.” From all the evidence, Gregory wasn’t the only one. Requiescat in pace, Tony Snow.

Thought on the volatility of polls

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I was interested to see, a couple days ago, that John McCain had caught Barack Obama in the Rasmussen Daily Tracking Poll, making up a seven-point deficit in a week, and almost caught him in the Newsweek poll. The latter was particularly interesting since it was that poll last month that showed Sen. Obama with a 15-point lead; now, it has him up just three points. I’m not sure what real significance there might be to all this (especially as today’s Rasmussen poll has Obama back up a few points); I know there are folks out there working carefully to mine every last nugget out of every twitch in the polls, but for my part, I think there’s only two things we can say with any real certainty:

It’s still too early to know anything for sure.

Even when it isn’t, we still know less than we think we do.

The only poll that matters, after all, is the one our various state governments will jointly conduct on the first Tuesday in November. Until then, I suspect all the other polls we take are more likely to give us anti-knowledge than knowledge, unless somebody really fouls up. I realize we aren’t going to stop polling, but I think the best favor we can do ourselves is not to take the results too seriously.

Oh, and Sen. McCain, if you happen to be reading: pick Sarah Palin. Thank you and good night.