Obama

Regular readers of this blog will recall the claim I made last summer that Reinhold Niebuhr has been a formative influence on Barack Obama’s worldview (see https://thesocietypages.org/monte/2008/08/15/obamas-theologian-and-the-party-of-irony/). That op-ed article has been expanded into a much longer review essay in the current issue of Contexts.

I was pleased to discover yesterday that I was not alone in predicting a Niebuhrian credo in an Obama presidency. In the Washington Post‘s “On Faith” blog, the dean of American religious historians makes a similar case for the president-elect’s new administration.

Martin E. Marty is a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he taught religious history in the Divinity School for 35 years. Marty is the nation’s foremost Protestant scholar and an advocate of “public religion” (an interesting sidebar is that he is the father of Minnesota State Senator John Marty).

Realistic Hope and Hopeful Realism

The election of Barack Obama says—about America and to the world—that it is open to “realistic hope” and “hopeful realism.” Those two two-word phrases paraphrase themes from the mid-century theological great, Reinhold Niebuhr. I mention him because President-Elect Obama is influenced by him and quotes him (as did President Jimmy Carter, the other theologically literate president of our time). Niebuhr is a formidable and sometimes formidably difficult thinker, and some cynics suggest that when politicians quote him, they are just posing Columnist David Brooks checked up and found that Senator Obama could discourse intelligently and expansively about Niebuhr. It is clear to those who know Niebuhr and who read and observe Obama, that he has internalized some Niebuhrian motifs.

I am singling out the combinations of “hope” and “realism” because the nation and the world needs a dose of hope, and hope has been a main theme of Obama the author, who used the word in a book title, and who accurately sensed the need and a hunger for hope. This is as true of a demoralized nation as it is of much of “the world” as it looks on forlornly to a forlorn America. Those of us who have been visited with e-mails from around the world since Tuesday report to each other how consistently correspondents testify to and exemplify a quickening of hope once again.

If “hope” is so manifest also now, after the election, why burden it with the word “realistic?” Or, if you start out with the “realism” that candidate Obama always displayed and will do more so as he begins to come to terms with the presidency in a time whose problems do not need enumerating, though they do get listed by virtually all commentators? Answer: realism can be so realistic that it can breed cynicism, or, as one wag put it recently, we observe that “the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned out.”

“Realistic hope” is a caution against utopianism, naive idealism, the claiming of bragging rights, or politically “not knowing to come in out of the rain.” As author, community organizer, law school professor, state and U.S. senator, and presidential primary candidate, Senator Obama tirelessly invoked and promoted hope–and always coupled his invocation and promotion with cautions. We hear it all the time: righting wrongs and charting new courses in a dangerous world and with a destroyed economy allows no chance to relax and sit back.

Niebuhr liked to quote Psalm 2:4, where the Psalmist witnesses to a God who sits in the heavens and laughs, and holds the pretentious and conniving powerful “in derision.” Yet he kept reminding us that the same God held people responsible and did not dishonor human aspiration.

So: the election of the first African-American president, a choice that went beyond the wildest hopes of most of adult America is only a part of the “hope” package the nation will be opening in the months ahead. And the election of THIS African-American to the presidency means a turning to a leader who may be young, but wasn’t “born yesterday.” His reading of Niebuhr and his experience and observation of life as it is lived in complex times will show up in his “realistic” activity. Or am I too hopefully naive even to hope that this will be the case? Realistically: no.

This post first appeared on the opinion page of the Minneapolis Star Tribune on Thursday, October 9, 2008.

His strategists decided that lawn signs don’t matter. His supporters aren’t happy.

Obama volunteers across the nation are wondering why they cannot get lawn signs for distribution. Signs are an important political ritual in their communities, and they need them to generate a visible cascade of support for their candidate. While their stories vary, what they share is growing frustration with their state and national headquarters.

The sign problem is not due to a shortage of funds, bureaucratic bottlenecks or incompetence. It is deliberate; Obama’s senior staff decided long ago that lawn signs were inconsequential and a waste of resources.

From chief strategist David Axelrod and campaign manager David Plouffe down to state and local campaign officials, the party line has been consistent: Lawn signs don’t vote. Well, neither does a TV ad.

As the election nears, the decision to blow off lawn signs is provoking discontent among Obama supporters. Recently these simmering grievances boiled over in the Washington Post and on national blogs like Daily Kos and FiveThirtyEight.

Bill Hillsman is the maverick media adviser who helped design the upset victories of Sen. Paul Wellstone in 1990 and Gov. Jesse Ventura in 1998. In a recent interview with the Minnesota Independent, Hillsman addressed the unrest among the rank and file.

“The problem with the campaign was that people thought they were walking on water, and they weren’t really willing to listen to any advice coming in from the outside. It’s been a very top-down, command-and-control type of campaign, which is different from what a lot of people expected it to be. They expected it to be very much a grass-roots, broad-based dialogue type of campaign, and it’s turned out not to be that way.”

Since day one, the centerpiece of Obama’s campaign has been retail politics: volunteer recruitment, door-to-door canvassing, phone banks and voter registration. These grass-roots tactics led to stunning successes during the primary season.

Even so, this game plan worked best in caucus states. Large primary states like California, Texas, Pennsylvania and Ohio exposed the shortcomings of the strategy. Clinton’s wholesale politics proved superior in those elections.

Virginia has been particularly hard-hit by a shortage of lawn signs. Yet when the campaign headquarters finally received several thousand signs, the Washington Post reported, it decided to give Obama signs only to volunteers who had knocked on at least 40 doors.

The organizing experiences of a blogger from Missouri refute this logic:

“This isn’t the primary where you are calling on motivated people; this is a general election where you are calling on average voters and you are lucky to get people to go vote and you are really lucky if they want a sign to show their neighbors how they are going to vote.”

The Obama campaign will turn out record-breaking numbers of young and new voters. It will also get the Democratic base to the polls. Nevertheless, this alone will not win the presidency. Independents will decide this election and, as Hillsman highlights, you win their hearts and minds with wholesale politics.

“In order to get independent voters, you can’t get them by field work or volunteer organization or grass-roots organizing, because they don’t exist on any lists. You can’t really mail to them. So the best way to get them is through mass communications, and the Obama campaign has proved to be not that adept in mass communications.”

Presidential campaigns are ultimately about influencing public opinion. There is a mass psychology operating during the last 30 days of a presidential election. During the endgame, wholesale politics trumps retail politics.

If you doubt that axiom, witness McCain’s decision last weekend to go all negative, all the time. McCain’s chief strategist is Karl Rove protégé Steve Schmidt. A master of the politics of fear, Schmidt is turning Halloween into a monthlong event. Brace yourself: For the next 30 days, the campaign will saturate the media with ghouls and goblins—costumed, of course, as Jeremiah Wright the “anti-American racist” and William Ayers the “terrorist.”

Will Axelrod’s and Plouffe’s decision to double down on door-knocking succeed? I hope Hillsman is wrong, but given his political moxie, I will not be betting the farm on an Obama victory.

© 2008 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.

A few days ago I received a letter from Barack Obama, pleading that I “rush a generous contribution” to him. I placed the return envelope in my checkbook.

The same evening I got a call from his campaign asking me to door-knock on the weekend. I already had plans but I agreed to future weekends.

Then I requested a lawn sign. The volunteer informed me that I could buy one at campaign headquarters.

Buy one? Purchased in bulk, a two-color lawn sign might cost the Obama campaign $1. I checked the Obama ’08 Web site. They offer the budget-conscious supporter a generic 26-by-16-inch sign for $8. For those Obamites into conspicuous consumption, the site advertises a variety of 22-by-15-inch designer signs for $19.99. If this were an oil company, the Democrats would be accusing it of price gouging. As Kurt Vonnegut put it, “So it goes.”

I called the Obama ’08 Minnesota office for clarification. Media spokesperson Nick Kimball told me it is “generally a policy of the campaign nationally to charge a nominal fee for lawn signs.” “An occasional exception might be made for an outstanding volunteer,” he added. Kimball later called back to report that “if someone balks at paying for a lawn sign and really wants one, we’ll work something out.”

Gee, I guess I didn’t protest enough.

I contacted Obama’s national headquarters and was told that charging for lawn signs compensates for the income lost when Obama rejected contributions from PACs and lobbyists. Here’s what they failed to mention—any revenue lost from those special interests is more than offset by the cash windfall the campaign is accruing from having opted out of public financing.

What’s wrong with this picture? For a campaign that purports to be a movement, this mercenary marketing strategy is not only hypocritical but also counterproductive. Lawn signs should be an investment, not a revenue stream.

Lawn signs are a biennial ritual for partisans and party activists. Even so, the faithful have minimal influence on their immediate neighbors. However, when a nominal party member or, better yet, an independent puts up a candidate’s sign, the neighborhood takes notice.

Here’s how it works. A couple of households unexpectedly put up an Obama lawn sign. Emboldened by their neighbors, others follow suit. Obama ’08 should be seeking this bandwagon effect: Folks are more likely to put up a sign when they see an increasing proliferation of signs. This effect carries over on Election Day.

So I have learned that even heartfelt allegiances are conditional.

I will write no check nor will I knock on any door until the person answering that door can get a free lawn sign. I urge Obama supporters of conscience to do the same.

I recently spent countless hours writing an op-ed article favorable to Barack Obama. It was a labor of love and a proud contribution to his candidacy. I now realize I was a fool not to have billed my hours to Obama ’08.

This post first appeared on July 14 as an op-ed article on the opinion page of the St. Paul Pioneer Press.                                                                                                                                                                                          

Race and gender may have been the most visible currents in the 2008 presidential primaries, but what really unsettled the political waters was a riptide of religion. Beginning in March, a maelstrom encircled Barack Obama’s relationship with his pastor at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.

It started when ABC News discovered some of Wright’s old sermons. Cable news channels were soon repeatedly running video clips of the pastor’s most racially inflammatory and anti-American remarks. Given this negative coverage and a subsequent dip in the polls, Obama had little choice but to condemn Wright’s “incendiary language” but he refused to disown the man.

Just as this political firestorm was about to burn out, the recently retired pastor embarked on a five-day publicity tour, concluding on April 28 with an appearance before the National Press Club. In a performance described by a Newsweek columnist as a “public murder-suicide attempt,” Wright seemed as intent on damaging Obama as he was in defending himself.

Obama reacted with uncharacteristic anger. Within a month, Barack and Michelle Obama had resigned from Trinity. In their resignation letter they wrote, “Our faith remains strong and we will find another church home for our family.” On Father’s Day, Obama gave the sermon at Chicago’s Apostolic Church of God.

Wright may have been Barack’s pastor for nearly two decades, but it is now obvious that he’s never been Obama’s theologian.

David Brooks of The New York Times interviewed Obama last year. The columnist asked the candidate if he had ever read Reinhold Niebuhr. “I love him. He’s one of my favorite philosophers,” he said. Brooks asked what Obama took away from Niebuhr:

I take away the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away . . . the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from from naïve ideaism to bitter realism.

“My first impression was . . . that’s a pretty good off-the-cuff summary of Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History,” wrote Brooks. “My second impression is that his campaign is an attempt to thread the Niebuhrian needle.”

Who was Reinhold Niebuhr? From the 1930s through the 1960s, he was arguably the nation’s most influential theologian and political theorist. For three decades after his death in 1971, Niebuhr’s influence steadily declined in both ecclesiastical and civic circles. Nearly all of his books had gone out of print.

This was quite a tumble in status for a public intellectual who in 1948 graced the cover of Time magazine’s 25th anniversary edition as America’s “No. 1 Theologian.” His crossover popularity was so great that a Harvard critic once joked about “atheists for Niebuhr” clubs.

It’s ironic that it took the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent debate over terrorism to resurrect Niebuhr—Paul Elie argues that he has become “a man for all reasons.” New acolytes include a Noah’s Ark of ideological warriors: neoconservatives, liberal hawks, military revisionists, anti-war leftists, theoconservatives and religious liberals.

Each of these factions claims him as their own. Regrettably, most of these latter-day disciples are seeking sound bites rather than subtlety. “Niebuhr was always finding troubling questions,” wrote one scholar, “where even his friends found easy answers.”

No single work of Niebuhr’s does justice to the range and depth of his unique fusion of religious faith and power politics. Nevertheless, if you are among those many readers of the past two generations who have never made the acquaintance of Pastor Niebuhr, The Irony of American History is the place to start.

As an interpretation of our national heritage, Irony stands alongside the masterpieces of Beard, Du Bois, Miller, Hofstadter and Williams. Even so, portions of a book written early in the Cold War are unavoidably seasonal.

What is perennial about Niebuhr is a style of thought—and his ironic mind is most evident in the first and last chapters. In the alpha and the omega, he sketches an existential drama that is born of the human condition. Niebuhr appropriates the ideas of tragedy, pathos and irony to portray three enduring theories of human nature and destiny. With Abraham Lincoln as his exemplar, the preacher casts his lot with irony:

The evil in human history is regarded as the consequence of man’s wrong use of his unique capacities. The wrong use is always due to some failure to recognize the limits of his capacities of power, wisdom and virtue. Man is an ironic creature because he forgets that he is not simply a creator but also a creature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “The two omnipresent parties of History, the party of the Past and the party of the Future, divide society today as of old.”

The literary critic R.W.B. Lewis has argued that these polarized perspectives don’t account for those thinkers who “seemed skeptically sympathetic toward both parties and managed to be confined by neither.”

To accommodate those intellectual innovators who periodically challenge our taken-for-granted beliefs, Lewis suggested creating a third party. Like Lincoln, Niebuhr and Martin Luther King before him, Barack Obama is today’s standard-bearer for Lewis’s “party of Irony.”

Facts and opinions, though they must be kept apart, are not antagonistic to each other; they belong to the same realm. Facts inform opinions, and opinions, inspired by different interests and passions, can differ widely and still be legitimate as long as they respect factual truth. Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute. In other words, factual truth informs political thought just as rational truth informs philosophical speculation. Hannah Arendt

A colleague, Professor Doug Rossinow, recently published an op-ed in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. An American historian who specializes in the 1960s, Doug has written extensively on the New Left. In his column, “Flash: ’60s radicalism predated Obama,” Rossinow unmasks an unscrupulous campaign tactic of guilt by association: the linking of Barack Obama to a former member of the notorious Weather Underground.

The day his column appeared, I sent an e-mail to our university community with the subject heading “Prof. Doug Rossinow exposes campaign ‘Swiftboating’ in today’s Star Tribune.” I also pasted the op-ed into the e-mail with the following preface: “Doug Rossinow provides Minnesotans an invaluable civic service in today’s Star Tribune. In the best tradition of a citizen-scholar, Doug exposes a presidential campaign fiction that the news media has failed to adequately fact check. He has done Metro State proud.”

As the old saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished. I received several irate e-mail responses. The following message was the most cogent.

“Opinions are opinions. Facts are facts.”

Hi Mr. Bute,

While I’m not sure that a broadcast political message to faculty colleagues is an appropriate use of MnSCU/Metro State resources, I’ll let that rest for now. Remember that Professor Rossinow’s article is an opinion piece, not news and if you wanted to alert your colleagues to the article, you might have done so without repeating the content.

There is room for disagreement in the article, and I quite readily admit that I do disagree with several of Rossinow’s (and by extension, your own) conclusions. Allow me to be clear, up front. I have been a committed Democrat since my first campaign in the Fifties–1950s not 1850s. I have been very active in every election since 1992, holding office in the local DFL organization and being campaign treasurer for four legislative campaigns.

I am not a committed Obama supporter, nor am I a committed Hilary supporter. My choice didn’t make it past Super Tuesday. I am fully prepared to support whoever emerges from the Convention as the nominee, flawed though he or she may be. While Rossinow may be a scholar of the Sixties and I am not, I lived through them. That should allow me to view the times through my perspective.

Professor Rossinow talks about the Weathermen as if they were “the gang who couldn’t shoot straight.” I admit they were no Al Qaeda. A group who knowingly planted bombs and set them off, perhaps killing anyone who happened to be in the vicinity, is, to me at least, a violent and threatening group.

Rossinow writes “[Bill] Ayers and other Weatherveterans may have become wholesome, productive citizens since returning to polite society.” Sara Jane Olsen became a productive citizen but is sitting in a jail cell today. There is evidence that she was a “brainwashed” pawn. Ayers was a militant leader in a terrorist group.

Rossinow soft-pedals their actions but does not the term “terrorist” fit? They were not teens hopped up on testosterone doing stupid things they were dangerous terrorists trying to overthrow our government by violence, or at least trying to get newspaper space and their message out. With Al Qaeda’s money and today’s technology, how dangerous could they be now?

Rossinow continues, “Hillary Clinton–at long last, having no shame–suggests that Ayers’ comment that ‘we didn’t do enough,’ in an interview published on 9/11, was an endorsement of Al-Qaeda’s attack on America. She certainly knows that Ayers’ interview was done before 9/11. Whatever he meant, the timing of the interview’s publication was simply unfortunate.”

Wait a minute. Two conjectures, both wrong (in my opinion). Rossinow cannot deny that Obama’s relationship with Ayers was a continuing one. More than just being a neighbor, they served together on a Board of Directors. They appeared together on at least one public panel. Rossinow’s implication that Ayer’s comment “We didn’t do enough” was innocuous because it was uttered before 9/11 is flat out stupid.

What did Ayers mean? Did he mean “We didn’t plant enough bombs?” “We didn’t kill anyone. Maybe we should have?” However he meant it, a former terrorist who says that, even before 9/11, doesn’t regret what he did do, he regrets what he didn’t do. Those aren’t the words of a “wholesome, productive citizen.” Anyone who knows history or lived through the Sixties should be shaken by that comment.

The fact that Obama sees nothing wrong with their association shows poor judgment on his part at best. Personally, I’d stay as far away from Ayers as I could. Hillary’s comments on the association are fair game. Can she claim Obama was sympathetic to terrorists in the Sixties? Of course not. Can she imply that Obama’s continuing and voluntary association with a Sixties terrorist who apparently has no regrets for his past actions show poor judgment on Mr. Obama’s part? Hell, yes!

Did Hillary know Ayers’ interview was before 9/11? I don’t know that. Maybe Rossinow does. If she knew it and still tied Ayers’ reference to 9/11 that was wrong. Shameful? I don’t know that.

The point of this all? Opinions are opinions. Facts are facts. Professor Rossinow doesn’t let the facts get in the way of his opinions. The article should be read that way.

Mike

“Factual truth informs political thought.”

Mike,

First off, I sent out that e-mail with pride; a Metropolitan State University faculty member had a column in the state’s premier newspaper. One distinguishing characteristic of Metro State is that our faculty tries to communicate not only with specialists in our fields but with the well-informed public as well. As a faculty member at a university that gets little or no respect, I admit I am quick to point out our achievements.

Second, it’s interesting that you insist on identifying Professor Rossinow’s op-ed as a “political message,” which you deem as inappropriate for ‘broadcast” on a workplace e-mail system. Internal communication about faculty achievements is quite common. Harvard, Princeton, and Yale are only too glad to have their faculty’s op-eds in the New York Times, Washington Post, or Wall Street Journal identified with their respective universities. They don’t make such a sharp distinction between “fact” and “opinion” because this line of demarcation is far murkier than you allow.

You seem to have an ideological criterion for distinguishing “fact” from “opinion.”  I read Rossinow’s column as an example of solid investigative reporting: he busted journalists for passing off “opinion” as “news.” He exposed the new media’s failure to vet a planted story.

As for William Ayers, no matter how odious his behavior in the 1960s, he is, and has been for years, a professor at Illinois State in Chicago. Until this story broke, I doubt that most of his colleagues were aware of what he had done 40 years ago. It is also unlikely that Barack Obama knew of his background as a leader of the Weather Underground.

Over the past 40 years, I have served on numerous boards and spoke on many panels. No doubt some of my fellow board members or panelists have committed past transgressions that I have no knowledge of–just as some of them would be startled by some of my activities in the Sixties. The point being, one is not guilty by association with someone whose previous behavior we have no knowledge of.

Yes, the Weather Underground would be, by today’s standards, a “terrorist” organization. Yes, they were a physical danger to innocent victims who might have been  injured by their bombings. Your next assertion, however, is a perplexing equivocation: “They were dangerous terrorists trying to overthrow our government by violence, or at least trying to get newspaper space and their message out.”

You got half that sentence correct: yes, they were self-promoting caricatures of media-inspired fantasies; no, they were not real revolutionaries who were trying to violently seize power. A pathetic lot, they had almost no support, even among radicals of the day. Further, they did not have the foggiest notion of how to make revolutionary change. And even if we were to allow that they were “dangerous terrorists,” what does that have to do with Obama, particularly if he had no knowledge of Ayers’ ancient history?

By failing to ”fact check” these spurious claims made by Hillary Clinton and Republican operatives, the mainstream media has been engaging in “opinion.” If the Obama-William Ayers’s story is not a case of media complicity with “Swiftboating,” I would love to see evidence for your explanation of these events.

In conclusion, I remember reading the September 11, 2001, issue of the New York Times. When I finished the Ayers’ interview that morning I thought, “what an unreconstructed moron that guy is.” Only later in the day, after the terrorist attacks, did I recall the Times interview. I saved that issue and, to this day, it sits on display in my office. If Hillary’s brain trust did not realize that the interview had occurred days before publication, they are too stupid to be in the White House; if they did realize it, they are too treacherous to be in the White House.

Monte

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crises. The great point is to bring them the real facts.  Abraham Lincoln

Does Lincoln’s 19th century faith in the people’s ability to discern truth and to confront national crises extend to the American polity of the 21st century? The answer to that question may depend upon whether we can “bring them the real facts” before November 4, 2008.