Don't Blame the Religious Right, It's Republicans Who Lost the 2008 Election

There's a lot of bickering, finger-pointing, and maybe even a little soul-searching going on in the Republican party about why the John McCain/Sarah Palin ticket went down to defeat. Many political observers have pointed out that by holding on to their socially conservative religious base, the party lost the support of moderate, independent voters who were more concerned about their economic well-being than abortion or gay marriage.

Members of the religious right argue defensively that they turned out in record numbers, just not enough, to overcome the record turnout of voters who were energized to vote for Barack Obama and not against him.

I am not a political pundit or a poll-taker, and I have little sympathy with ideological stances of the religious right, but in this case, I have a strong sense that they are not to blame for their party's defeat.

Rather, I feel that the Republican party has generally treated its base like the “safe” girl or boyfriend you can depend on to take you to prom, even as you secretly hope and hint for someone more glamorous, albeit more fickle, to ask you. But in 2008, Republicans nominated John McCain as their candidate, someone not beloved by the religious and socially conservative wing of the party, and you could almost sense the underlying anxiety of campaign advisers that their “safe” date to the prom might choose to stay home on election day rather than go with John McCain as escort.

This led to the brash and ill-conceived gambit of persuading McCain to choose Sarah Palin as the pretty new face of social and religious conservatism, with her star appeal intended to complement the wisdom and experience of the not-so-lovely, not-at-all-youthful man at the top of the ticket.

The problem for Republicans turned out to be the rest of the American electorate, who were not taken in by appearances but actually wanted some substance beneath the “hockey mom/former beauty queen/Jane Six-Pack” exterior. When Sarah Palin turned out to have little understanding of foreign policy, domestic issues, or the constitutional role of the vice-president, the public found her wanting as a candidate, not to mention a poor reflection on her running mate's judgment.

But worse, the choice of Sarah Palin as the best the Republicans could do for a vice-presidential candidate confirmed the impression that many across the political spectrum have gained of the party's deeply cynical attitude towards voters in general and its inherent contempt for the intelligence of the American public.
Perhaps having succeeded in passing off George W. Bush as the answer to American fears about terrorism, Republican strategists believed that they could sell any candidate to voters, so long as that person was attractive, personable, and able to read a teleprompter with ease.

The election of 2008 proved those strategists wrong, but it make take yet another election cycle for those in charge of the party to stop pointing the finger at their socially and religiously conservative base of supporters, and take a more probing, honest account of their own failures to put forward candidates who have less style and more substance.

Carpool Censorhip, Or Letting Kids Talk about the Election

Today I read about the ugly aftermath of the recent election that will bring the first African-American president to power in the United States. The Associated Press reports that the number of death threats against President-Elect Obama far exceeds the usual number that follow an election. In Snellville, Georgia, Denene Millner reported that a boy on the school bus told her 9-year-old daughter the day after the election: "I hope Obama gets assassinated." Second- and third-grade students on a school bus in Rexburg, Idaho, chanted "assassinate Obama," a district official said.

I've been thinking about these incidents because I've been increasingly upset about a directive I received from other parents the day after the election. I had driven nearly three hours to pick up my son and other 4th graders from a camp where they had been staying in Coloma, California, the town the originated the 1848 Gold Rush.

"There's to be no election talk. It's absolutely verboten," one mother told me in the bathroom as I prepared to pack up the car for the return three-hour trip. "They're absolutely obsessed with the election," she added, but then informed me that we weren't to tell them who won. "They can't handle it."

"Says who?" I thought to myself, furious that I was receiving this information from another parent rather than from my son's teacher directly. When I signed up to drive for this field trip, I certainly didn't sign away my first amendment rights at the car door, and I felt both foolish and resentful as I rushed to cover the morning papers I had placed on the front passenger seat.

Of course, the kids saw the headline that proclaimed Obama's electoral victory. And why shouldn't they see it? Why should I have to feel guilty that I had the morning's newspaper on the front seat of my car?

No one had informed me in advance that election talk was to be absolutely "verboten" in a private car, or asked me if I agreed to that policy before I agreed to spend six hours in my car, chauffeuring kids on the day after the election.

And of course, the kids were obsessed with the election. So was every American citizen and just about everyone else on the planet. Why shouldn't they be excited about one of the most historic elections the world had ever witnessed? And why should they be denied the right to know the outcome of that election? Or to discuss the election freely with one another?

I disagree absolutely that nine and ten year olds are not prepared to handled the discussion of an American election, especially one that changed history. Properly mediated by a responsible adult, there is no better occasion for children to exchange views, respectfully, civilly, but also openly and truthfully, with one another.

Yes, somebody's feelings may be hurt. But this is not about emotion but about teaching children how to back up emotion with fact and reason. All three recent presidential elections have been hotly contested and left hard feelings for those who lost, whether those feelings were warranted or not. The salient point is that the United States has successfully passed the reigns of power peacefully for over two hundred years, and where there have been questions of electoral misconduct, those questions have been referred to the courts, and the majority of Americans have accepted those court rulings, even if they disagreed with them.

I feel very strongly that we do a disservice to ourselves and to our children if we censor their discussion of a hotly contested election. If there was ever a "teachable" moment in history, this election was one, and not to address it openly and frankly, in my opinion, is an act of cowardice.

Yes, people are angry that Barack Obama won, but those children who chanted, "Assasinate Obama," will not become more reasonable or rational, if they are simply censored rather than engaged. This is the moment to ask those kids, "Why are you saying this? Why do think it's okay to encourage someone's death because you disagree with his policies or don't like the color of his skin?'

Racism will never go away if we simply force people to suppress rather than encourage them to express feelings and then engage them on a rational level.

I remember my own fourth-grade teacher, who is a man I still respect above all others. He spoke to my class after the resignation of Richard Nixon. We were a class of nearly all Republicans with one lone Democrat in our midst. "Don't believe everything your parents tell you," he said to us. "Learn how to think for yourselves."

I know that as a fourth-grader I was ready for this message of encouragement to think for myself. I am furious with myself for letting other parents intimidate me into stopping my own fourth-grader and the others in my care during that long car ride home from finding out just how much history had changed and expressing their views about it.

If you truly believe in free speech, you know that there's no such thing as too much speech. Keep talking and eventually you will find that the answer to hate is simply more speech and more speech and more speech.

Grace Under Fire

On Tuesday evening, Senator John McCain gave the best speech of his campaign: he conceded victory to President-Elect Obama, and more importantly, he acknowledged the historic nature of that win.

Up until this past year, I had admired Senator McCain, and not just for the obvious reasons: the heroism he had shown in war or the principled stances he adopted on campaign finance reform and immigration. I also deeply respected his decision not to engage in the ugly racial smear tactics that were used against him by Karl Rove in North Carolina in 2000 when phone calls suggested that he had a black illegitimate daughter.

McCain made many mistakes in this campaign and in recent weeks stooped to tactics that were not worthy of him. But he never played the race card. There was no Willie Horton in this campaign, and for that I continue to respect him.

But I was also moved and saddened by the emergence of his former self in his concession speech. In the past few months McCain has seemed uncomfortable in his own skin, perhaps regretting his moves to the right to court the Republican base, perhaps unnerved and disheartened by the bigotry displayed at his own campaign rallies from people who called Obama a “Muslim” and a “socialist” as if those were two of the seven dirty words you can't say on the air.

On Tuesday night, McCain hushed the boos from the audience; he took full responsibility for his loss. “The failure is mine,” he said, but not before he had alluded to the seismic change this election represents in American history.

In a contest as long and difficult as this campaign has been, his success alone commands my respect for his ability and perseverance. But that he managed to do so by inspiring the hopes of so many millions of Americans who had once wrongly believed that they had little at stake or little influence in the election of an American president is something I deeply admire and commend him for achieving.

This is the John McCain who believes in the power of American democracy and not just winning elections, the man who can recognize that the expansion of the electorate and the record numbers of Americans who cast their votes, many of them for the first time, was something to celebrate and not something to try to suppress, the man who can acknowledge the “special pride” of black Americans who know that the United States truly is a land of opportunity when a man who might not have been able to vote freely a half century earlier in the American south can now lead this country as its President.

I appreciate Senator McCain's long service to this country and I hope to see the real John McCain, who exhibits grace under fire, continue to serve in the United States Senate for many years to come.

A Day to Celebrate for All Americans

A Day to Celebrate for All Americans

I have just witnessed history. Tonight America elected its first African-American president.

I supported the candidacy of Senator Barack Obama because I felt that he was the best candidate. But I am also proud to have cast a vote for him as a white woman because I feel that his election is an important symbolic and material step towards the healing of America's racial wounds and the ugly legacy of slavery.

Today is a first for me on many levels:

It is the first time my oldest son cast his vote in an American election.

It is the first time in my lifetime that I can face my children and say candidly, “Anyone can grow up to be the President of the United States.”

It is the first time that millions of voters cast their vote for the first time and joined me in the privilege of exercising the right to vote in one of the world's great democracies.

I know that tonight is a moment of disappointment for many Americans, not least of which are many of my family members, who have been Republicans for generations. But I hope that they will join me in my hope that the election of Barack Obama is a moment of healing for America's racial divisions and a step towards the recovery of America's reputation as a leader on the world stage.

Barack Obama's campaign brought millions of new voters to the electoral process, especially young voters, Hispanics, and African-Americans, and whatever your party affiliation, we all can only benefit when the number of register voters expands and the number of registered voters reaches historic highs.

Whatever anyone feels about the outcome of the election, this voting experience is historic on so many levels, and we should all celebrate an election in which so many of us participated and so many could see tangible evidence that another barrier to the Presidency crumbled to the ground.

Mea Culpa – Paying for Advertising I Don't Watch

Mea Culpa – Paying for Advertising I Don't Watch

With only thirteen days left to Election Day, you may be sure that most candidates aren't out there telling you how much they admire their opponents.

Far from it. This is the time of year when the media, the pundits, and especially the voters who haven't put their TV in a closet, complain that the airwaves are saturated with negative advertising.

So I'm sitting here feeling just a little guilty that I've contributed to that saturation. To come completely clean, I admit that over the past year I've made modest monthly donations to political campaigns and political organizations that put up ads on your TV set.

And yet I haven't seen a single political ad myself either for or against any political candidate.

The truth is that I don't watch TV, not out of moral indignation, or fear that it will rot my brain, or any other ideological reason. It's just that when a commercial comes on, and the volume goes up, it's like nails on a blackboard for me, and if somebody doesn't hit the mute button, watch out!

In fact, as I ask myself why I fund a form of communication that I consider as much a form of torture as listening to Celine Dion, I have to confess that I don't have a very good answer.

Who am I trying to convince, after all?

If it's the small sector of undecided voters who still remain undecided after a seemingly never ending presidential campaign, then I have to admit that I pretty much agree with Ezra Klein who wrote that “from a civic standpoint, few creatures are as contemptible” as The Undecided Voter, (“Undecided voters? Studies show that most actually have chosen a candidate,” The Los Angeles Times, October 12, 2008, http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-klein12-2008oct12,0,6236237.story).

After all we've had two years of news articles, TV debates, blogs, internet sites with reams of data, for the undecided to digest, and few could argue that John McCain and Barack Obama present anything other than a definitive choice for two very different ideological approaches to politics.

So why am I spending my hard earned money trying to sway people whose state of indecision I find almost incredible, given the amount of information available about the candidates who are running for office?

And yet as Klein also points out, “Undecided voters are believed to be the decisive slice of the American electorate, so they get the debates and the ads and the focus groups (assuming, that is, that they live in a battleground state).”

I also agree with Klein's contention, based on recent research by political scientists that many of the Undecideds are not really as “undecided” as they claim but are already leaning in one direction or the other, and may in fact not want to state publicly the name of the person they will probably vote for. And sure there are probably a few who just enjoy reveling in all the media attention they get every four years.

The fact is that I consider this particular election to be so important that I will spend my money trying to push a few people over the line towards the candidate they may be leaning towards. I'll press the Republicans who feel embarrassed at John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin to ask them to question his overall judgment. I'll press the former Hillary voters who aren't comfortable with a black man as President to look again at Colin Powell's endorsement. And I'll keep those ads coming.

So apologies to those of you who've already made up your minds. Just keep your finger poised over the mute button. And to all of you, Decided and Undecided alike – Get Out, and VOTE!

All in the Family: Love, Loyalty and Racism

All in the Family: Love, Loyalty and Racism

Today Senator Barack Obama gave a powerful speech to a small group of his supporters in Philadelphia, the “City of Brotherly Love.” Unfortunately, the topic the Senator had to address was not about unity or compassion, but about racial division. He was there in Philadelphia to publicly repudiate some remarks made by his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who had used what Obama termed “ incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation, and that rightly offend white and black alike.”

Yet even though Senator Obama unequivocally rejected the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, he did not reject the man. Instead he said, “As imperfect as he may be, [Jeremiah Wright] has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children.” Senator Obama said that he could no more reject the man, Jeremiah Wright, who had been like a father to him, than he could reject his white grandmother, “a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

Like many Americans, Barack Obama has a family he loves deeply, but whose members may well hold racist attitudes that do not accord with his own. And who among us has not had the same painful experience of hearing loved ones voice opinions at the dinner table that make us cringe, even as we debate whether or not to challenge them or to let things go in order to preserve family harmony or at least not to raise a long, painful, and ultimately fruitless subject of debate? We may not be able to convince them that their views of those with a different religion, or ethnicity, or skin color are wrong, but we cannot help but love them just the same.

I loved and respected my parents, but I recognized their racist attitudes even as a young child. It was brought home to me painfully one afternoon, when the son of our neighbor's black maid drove up beside me to ask if he had the right address for the home where his mother worked.

We all loved his mother, Rosa, who was one of the kindest, warmest human beings I ever knew. But here I was on the sidewalk confronted not just by a stranger, but by a black male stranger with a Southern accent I could barely understand. I took one look and all of my parents' underlying fears of blacks, particularly young black men in the late 60's took hold of my heart, and I fled like the devil was at my heels.

My mother was mortified and scolded me heartily in front of everyone- Rosa, her son, and our neighbors. But I looked at her and saw the fear and the hypocrisy written on her face. If this young man weren't Rosa's son, she would have fled at my heels just as fast.

In later years when I heard Mollie Ivins say, "Once you figure out they are lying to you about race, you start to question everything," I remembered that moment and realized I had found a kindred spirit.

At that moment as a young girl I started to question, if only in my head and my heart, what my parents said about Blacks, Asians, Jews, Catholics – just about anybody who didn't belong to the “right” group – German Lutherans (and even then they had to be “Missouri” Lutheran).

Yet I was also struck by the contradictions Senator Obama noted in his former pastor because they suggested the same contradictions I saw in my parents: “Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect," Senator Obama said of Jeremiah Wright. "He contains within him the contradictions — the good and the bad — of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.”

My parents also often treated individuals of different races, creeds, and ethnicities, far better then they talked about those groups in general. When the first black family moved in across the street from us in our modest home on the east side of Detroit, I trembled at how my mother would behave. But she walked across the street, welcomed them, and mentioned that she had been a school teacher and was available for tutoring if any child needed her. My father's funeral was attended by men he had worked with who were from other races and religions, even though he supported the candidacy of a man like Alabama Governor George Wallace because of his stands against integration of public schools.

It was as if my parents could kept two concepts of race simultaneously balanced in their minds and hearts-- their negative views of Blacks, Latinos, Jews etc. in general-- and the exceptions that they made for so many individuals in those groups whom they welcomed as colleagues and even friends.

It is for this reason that I sympathize with the dilemma of Senator Obama who will have to pay a political price for the snippets of Pastor Wright's sermons that get played over and over on YouTube.com and Fox Television.

But before Americans condemn Senator Obama for his loyalty to his former pastor, they should ask themselves: How many family dinner conversations would I be comfortable posting on YouTube.com? How many racist comments by family members have I let slide? Can we ever get past the issue of race without acknowledging that many of those we love and respect as individuals occasionally express views we would disavow, even though we could never reject them as members of our family?

If we begin to consider such questions honestly, we may have a chance of going into the 2008 presidential election without making a race a divisive issue but rather a fruitful one: an opportunity to address our past and our prejudices openly and without fear, no matter what the color of our skin.

With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies?

John McCain: With Friends like These Who Needs Enemies?

As of the Texas primary, Senator John McCain was able to claim publicly that he had sewn up the Republican nomination. As one who is rightly proud of having made it to this stage in his political career by sticking to his convictions, it seemed more than a little odd for McCain immediately to make a pilgrimage to the White House to obtain the political endorsement and blessing of the very man whose campaign used very ugly tactics to knock him out of a bitterly contested primary race in the South Carolina primary of 2000.

President Bush demonstrated just how strange this meeting of two former foes really was when he observed in his inimitable prose: "If my showing up and endorsing him helps him, or if I'm against him and it helps him -- either way, I want him to win,” http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/03/20080305-4.html, March 5, 2008). Well, at least Bush has made it clear that he doesn't want to blamed for being the single greatest reason that Republicans are at their most vulnerable in a presidential election since Nixon's resignation in 1974.

McCain, for his part, was very gracious to his former rival: "I'm honored and humbled to have the opportunity to receive the endorsement of the President of the United States," he said and went on to declare his "respect and affection" for George W. Bush.

Yet McCain was also quick to state that he would welcome President Bush's help in his campaign by noting that the President could help him “as it fits into his busy schedule,” a caveat he repeated at least three times as if to signal his intention to distance himself from the White House as soon as this endorsement ritual was over.

McCain faces a difficult balancing act in the next few months before the Republican convention in Minneapolis/St. Paul. As the man many social conservatives love to hate, McCain is going to be tap-dancing away from positions he strongly espoused in his 2000 campaign and as recently as last year, namely: voting against the first two Bush tax cuts; supporting campaign finance reform; acknowledging that climate change really exists; and offering undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. Add to this that he has been a fierce critic of the administration's abandonment of the Geneva Conventions, and you have a man whom social conservatives find hard to stomach, even if he shares their convictions on abortion, the Iraq War, and increased military spending.

One reason that McCain has a problem with social conservatives is that he is not a fundamentalist Christian like Governor Huckabee, nor one to wear his religion on his sleeve like Governor Mitt Romney. In February 2000, McCain referred to leaders of the Christian Right as “agents of intolerance,” (Republican Says Bush Panders To the 'Agents of Intolerance' : McCain Takes Aim At Religious Right, International Herald Tribune, February 29, 2000).

In February 2008 McCain seems both desperate and slightly inept as he seeks the endorsement of a controversial televangelist like John Hagee, a man who refers to the Pope as “the anti-Christ” and who avows that Hurricane Katrina was God's retribution for a planned gay pride parade in New Orleans, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hagee). McCain's courting of social conservatives thus far has yielded mixed results as pundits like CNN's Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and others have strongly rejected him, and many of them are not yet ready to forgive and forget, even in the fact of an acknowledged Republican front-runner, (“McCain’s Critics on Right Look Again,” The New York Times, February 1, 2008).

A second challenge for McCain arises from the support of independents, particularly independent male voters, who often claim to have as much interest in Barack Obama as they do in John McCain, and who are less likely to moved by McCain's shift to the right on social issues. Similarly, McCain's remark that he could envision having American troops in Iraq for 100 years is not likely to win him support among the many Americans who want to hear concrete proposals from candidates about how they plan to bring U.S. soldiers home as quickly as possible, (“McCain defends '100 years in Iraq' statement,” CNNPolitics.com, February 15, 2008).

So John McCain has a delicate balancing act ahead of him in the months leading up to his party's convention. How can he rally the Republican base without alienating independents, much less the majority of the country who favors an end to the Iraq War and who are more concerned about their own individual economic woes than moral issues like abortion or gay marriage? And if social conservatives stay home next November, or even if they favor McCain with an anemic turnout, will he be able to muster enough support among independents and cross-over voters to overcome the loss of at least part of the Republican base?

Finally, in trying to steer a middle course between social conservatives and independents who find McCain's “straight” talking attractive, does he risk undermining that very reputation for independence and integrity if he runs too far and too fast from positions he has held for the past four years?

Certainly McCain is currently trying to distance himself from at least some of his positions on taxes, immigration, climate change, and the use of torture against alleged terrorists etc. But if he changes his views too radically, he opens himself up to the same charges of “flip-flopping” that proved so devastating to John Kerry, another presidential candidate with a sterling military record. And if he hews too closely to the current administration policies in order to court the socially conservative wing of his party, he also risks being labeled John “McSame as Bush” as one independent anti-McCain advertisement has already charged, using images of Bush and McCain embracing as well as slow-motion Photo Shop exchanges of the two men's head shots to reinforce their assertion that McCain's famed independence is a myth, (“Anti-McCain: McSame As Bush,” YouTube.com).

So John McCain finds himself placed between the rock of political realties—voters are concerned about "the economy, stupid," and they also want out of Iraq now—and the hard place of social conservatives who don't trust him and who want complete capitulation on their core issues before they embrace him with anything more than a lukewarm endorsement.

McCain might well be asking himself: “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”

Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

This past week as I was driving I found myself listening to a recording of Dr. Martin Luther King's final speech, the one he gave in Memphis the night before he was assassinated.

Towards the end of the speech, I was struck by his use of the story of the Good Samaritan, which he presented as a parable of a man reaching across racial lines. He described the Samaritan as “a man of another race [who] came by [and who] decided not to be compassionate by proxy. [Instead] he got down with him, administered first aid, and helped the man in need. Jesus ended up saying that this was the good man; this was the great man because he had the capacity to project the “I” into the “thine,” to be concerned about his brother,” even if that brother was a man of a different race.

At the very end of the speech, Dr. King told a cheering crowd: “ I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.”

The very fact that today in 2008 we have a white woman and a black man running serious campaigns for President suggests that we are a good deal closer to the “Promised Land” of racial and gender equality that Dr. King evoked. We may even have a chance of hearing the shattering sound of one or another glass ceiling in November if we elect the first black or the first female president of the United States.

However, the emergence of race and gender as weapons to be used directly and by proxy in both the Clinton and Obama campaigns raises disturbing questions about their effects on voters. Not just black female voters who may feel deeply torn between their allegiances to the advancement of women and to the advancement of all people of color, but all voters who are excited by the prospect of having such strong candidates to choose from, and yet dismayed by the inevitable political tendency to go negative.

When the Clinton and Obama campaigns take their jabs at one another, I can't help thinking of the Old Testament tales of sibling rivalry that so often ended in disaster – Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers. It's clear that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama deeply and even desperately want to win the nomination of the Democratic party, but it may be time for the party leadership to suggest that each risks alienating voters that may be vital to Democratic success if they try to destroy each other's reputation in the primaries.

One thing is certain: whether Clinton or Obama becomes the Democratic nominee, that nominee will face a tidal wave of mud-slinging across the airwaves that is likely to make the Swift Boat attacks look like a school-yard scuffle. There is no need for either of them to give this opposition more ammunition in advance.

Since Clinton and Obama are both self-proclaimed Christians, I'd suggest that they consider another Gospel parable, that of the woman taken in adultery. Not that I'm suggesting that either of them is guilty of the sin in question, but they might want to take Christ's advice to heart when he answered the scribes and the Pharisees: “Let anyone among us who is without sin be the first to throw a stone” (John 8:7).

Dr. King responded to death threats by saying that he had been to the mountain and seen the Promised Land, and he died prophesying that all of us as a people would get there. In 2008 the Democratic party has its best chance in years to help achieve Dr. King's vision if its candidates can keep their eyes on the prize and not get bogged down in the political mud.