A PANG OF SHAME FOR AMY SULLIVAN?

I will admit that it is interesting to see "insider" Democrats unveil some of their opening volleys in preparation for the 2008 Presidential election. Naturally, of particular interest to me is Senator Barack Obama -- a clear shining star among the Democrats. And it is quite obvious to me, Hillary Clinton and her crowd desperately want Senator Obama available to run on her ticket should she make it through the primaries. Amy Sullivan opines about a recent speech by Senator Obama that she believes has been misunderstood despite generating much discussion. Sullivan writes:

Obama began with a story about his 2004 campaign for the Senate. In the last months of the campaign, Obama's opponent, the volatile Republican Alan Keyes, declared that "Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama." Against the counsel of his political advisors, Obama fired back. He now admits that his volley was weak. "I answered with what has come to be the typically liberal response in such debates," he told the crowd at Jim Wallis' Call to Renewal conference. "I said that we live in a pluralistic society, that I can't impose my own religious views on another." Obama's statement was reasonable, but he now thinks it was the wrong one. "My answer did not adequately address the role my faith has in guiding my own values and my own beliefs," he said last week.

Thirty minutes later, Obama concluded his remarks by quoting an e-mail message he received from a pro-life voter during the campaign, a man who had expressed his disappointment that Obama called abortion opponents "right-wing ideologues" on his campaign Web site. "I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion," the e-mailer wrote, "only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words." "I felt a pang of shame," Obama acknowledged.

If it's hard to imagine a speech like this from George W. Bush, he who in a notorious 2004 press conference could not name a single mistake he'd made, that's the point. Obama used the anecdotes to set up a larger theme, about the nature of faith and doubt. And whatever else pundits and bloggers say about the speech, that may be Obama's lasting message and impact.

For the past six years, the most prominent Christian in America has been the president. His belief is not of the "God said it. I believe it. That settles it," sort that fundamentalists embrace. Rather, Bush subscribes to a syllogistic doctrine of presidential infallibility: God works through Christians; I am a Christian; I have decided to do X; therefore, X is God's will.

Woman, please.

For a good read and good insight into the continuing problem on the left-wing that cannot be glossed over via some kind of slick preparation for a political campaign, check out this back and forth from 2004. Amy Sullivan made some good initial points in response to Andrew Sullivan (click here for an archived version of the post -- scroll down to "A MANDATE FOR CULTURE WAR") but her all-too-typical resort to "racism" as a reason for the Republican Party approach to the South is unpersuasive. Amy Sullivan wrote then:

Hate to point this out (no, actually, I don't--I've been saying this for a while now), but the "huge fundamentalist Christian revival" took place about thirty years ago, not last month, and it has always been explictly political. If I may condense a few decades of history into one sentence, the perfect storm that led to what we now call the Christian Right was this combination:

[1] Angry reaction by conservative evangelicals to court rulings on school prayer, Bible-reading in public schools, and abortion motivating them to enter the political realm for the first time
plus
[2] Outrage among Catholics, who had previously kept kind of quiet while focusing on assimilating amid anti-Catholicism, after Roe v. Wade, mobilizing them into a politically active force
plus
[3] The realization by Republican strategists that they need to form a cohesive electoral block and that their best bet for winning the South was partnering with white church leaders, since those institutions were the last acceptable bastion of racism
equals
[4] Rock-solid coalition of Christian Right and Republican Party.

Hasn't every American political party that wanted to actually govern endeavored to create a cohesive electoral bloc? Or several of the same? I mean, isn't that what it's all about? More importantly for me, however, is the necessary glossing over of an extreme political mistake made by African Americans for which we, as a readily-identifiable group with remarkable patterns of virtual unanimity in voting, have never been held responsible for -- much less even queried about.

Up until the 1960s, the Republican Party was "our" political party. Then, with significant political help from the Republican Party, federal civil rights legislation was passed and . . . African Americans proceeded to promptly walk right away from the Republican Party to the one party established throughout the Solid South -- the Democrats. This just happened to be the very party that had consistently applied poll taxes and other more egregious tools (in Florida, I don't believe African Americans were even allowed to vote at all in the Democratic Primary, even if a registered voter with taxes paid, etc.) designed to hold back black political power.

This was a phenomenal mistake that "we" created. Take another look at Amy Sullivan's points one and two -- who can really deny them? Who can even deny that points one and two constitute to this very day bedrock, mainstream opinions in the black community? Yet all of the talk, all of the gloss is always on these supposedly racist Republicans.

Unfortunately, there is something fundamentally unserious about African American religious beliefs and how those beliefs interact with our choice for membership in political party.

So, yeah -- nice try, Senator Obama. Keep on dancing, Amy Sullivan. For most folks, especially most black folks, it's surely going to work. But I ain't buying. If you want to impress me, show me that you're going to effectively deal with that Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party that remains so dismissive of my mother and her religious beliefs while desperately needing her vote and those of so many other folks who believe the hype and fail to see just how much your party disrespects them.

Finally, one question for Amy Sullivan: given that you reduced President George W. Bush to nothing more than a robotic religious simpleton, just as Senator Obama earlier reduced his pro-life e-mailer as a "right wing ideologue," how about it baby -- a pang of shame, perhaps?