Bill O’Reilly says Barack Obama “in his adult life” has never been criticized before, just told “Barack, you’re the greatest.” My own experience as a community organizer makes me skeptical that’s how it went for Obama…
Author Archives: Josh Eidelson
HOUSE OF ROCK
Loyal readers may have noticed my latest way of compensating for my neglect of this blog is to search out hooks to link back to things I wrote in the days of not neglecting this blog. In that vein, check out the part of Obama’s speech today where Obama cites the Sermon on the Mount:
Now, there’s a parable at the end of the Sermon on the Mount that tells the story of two men. The first built his house on a pile of sand, and it was soon destroyed when a storm hit. But the second is known as the wise man, for when “the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house, it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.”
It was founded upon a rock. We cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand. We must build our house upon a rock. We must lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity — a foundation that will move us from an era of borrow and spend to one where we save and invest; where we consume less at home and send more exports abroad.
This strikes me as a good example of an appeal to a religious text on the basis of insight, rather than authority. About a million years ago I blogged about a debate between Sojourners’ Jim Wallis and Americans United’s Barry Lynn where Lynn said the problem with politicians quoting the Bible is that unlike quotes from other literature, quotes from the Bible are appeals to the author’s inherent authority rather than to the author’s particular insight. In other words, biblical quotes are used to support your argument based on who said it (God says don’t oppress strangers) rather than why they said it (because you yourself have experienced slavery). I thought at the time, and I still do, that Lynn was making an insightful distinction, but it cuts against his argument. In a multireligious democracy, we should be concerned when politicians’ arguments rely on appeal to the authority of their particular religious texts (especially if theirs are shared by a religious majority). But contra Lynn, not all Bible quotes are appeals to divine authority. “The Bible says not to steal wages from your employees” is an appeal to biblical authority. “Let’s not copy Moses’ mistake when he hit the rock instead of talking to it” is an appeal to biblical wisdom.
I bring this up because I think it explains why, as a non-Christian (in a democracy with a Christian majority), I’m not bothered on a gut level when a Christian President quotes the New Testament parable about building your house on sand or on a rock to make a point about our economic recovery. The plain meaning of Obama’s speech is not that the Bible commands us to make new rules for wall street, investments in education, etc… His plain meaning is that this metaphor from his tradition, which may be familiar to many listeners, illustrates well why it’s urgent and worthwhile to do so.
This is not always a clear-cut distinction. But I think it’s a useful one. Maybe a useful thought experiment in assessing what kind of appeal to religious text we’re dealing with is to consider: Would using this quote in this way make sense if the speaker’s religion were different from the quotation’s?
TOMORROW’S WINGNUTTERY TODAY
Barack “Messiah” Obama: He’s so vain, he named the family puppy after his own initials! (And he left out the H because he’s still got something to hide). You heard it here first…
BELATED BATTLESTAR THOUGHTS (SPOILERS)
Why did the Battlestar Galactica finale feel like a letdown? A big part of it was the reductionism of the pat ending, in which all the remaining narrative and character threads either lead to the colonization of Earth or are rendered irrelevant by it. Faiths that long conflicted – generating some of the tension and mystery of the show – are squeezed unconvincingly into harmony: Roslin’s faith in her destiny and her gods of sacrifice, Baltar’s faith in himself and his god of narcissism, Starbuck’s sense of dark and unavoidable purpose. Everything, we’re left to infer, was leading them to the same place. That conclusion rounds off the edges that made these beliefs interesting – the uncertainty of whether Roslin was prophetic or delusional, the outrageousness of Baltar’s spirituality of selfishness, the dread that Starbuck is trapped as an agent of collective doom. In the end, all of it was a way to get from A to B. They all meant the same thing, which leaves you with the sense that it didn’t mean that much.
Starbuck may have been dead, but she didn’t doom anybody after all. Baltar’s cult of self-love without consequences turns out not to have had any bad consequences. Not that a good ending would have required Baltar or anyone else to suffer for bad decisions – I just wanted the sense that somebody somewhere down the line is affected. Instead we’re left with an optimistic fatalism. It was an ending that reminded me of the movie Signs – no need to angst anymore about faith or the consequences of your choices, because it was all a plan and it worked out.
The difference is that Battlestar Galactica, unlike Signs, was often terrific, which is what makes the ending frustrating. It echoes a frustration I felt at a lot of points in the show: Battlestar Galactica is rightly praised as a dark show where textured characters face hard choices and make bad decisions with bad consequences. But too often, consequential decisions and revelations register a shock but then turn out not to have much consequence. These are the final four Cylons! But they didn’t know it themselves, so their friends can only hold it against them for so long, and they mostly still get to do what they were doing before. Gaius Baltar is still being manipulated by the Cylon that deceived him so they could conquer Earth! But they’re both angels (literally?) We are all descended from half-Cylon Hera (!) and we are now reenacting the history of our human ancestors (!). But don’t those two revelations sort of cancel each other out? If we’re are doing what the humans did an epoch ago, why did they need to save a hybrid baby to be our progenitor? Some of the relationships on the show, like between the two Adamas, also suffer from a sort of cataclysm fatigue – every half-season another betrayal or near-death experience sends the father-son relationship spinning off in another direction, partially negating the last one, to the point that their relationship, though compelling, feels like less rather than more than the sum of what’s happened to them.
IT’S NEW TO YOU! (MAYBE NOT YOU, DAD)
Our perpetually outraged friends at the Anti-Defamation League (the guys that tally the aggregate number of synagogues fire-bombed and university lectures critical of Israeli policy per year) are now defaming cartoonist Pat Oliphant for making a cartoon they call “hideously Anti-semitic.” Why? His “use of the Star of David in combination with Nazi-like imagery.”
Which bring us to that old chestnut: Is it antisemitic for cartoonists to use the Star of David as a symbol for the State of Israel? We were all over this one back in 2003.
(Short answer: No. Slightly longer answer: Abe Foxman missed the boat about sixty years ago on keeping the Star of David out of cartoons about the State of Israel.)
THE EIDELSONS TAKE THE INTERNETS
Over at Balkinization, they’re discussing my brother’s research on “just how anti-majoritarian modern Senate filibusters are.”
Meanwhile, my Dad’s thoughts on “The Psychology of Progress” have been posted at Truthout and Common Dreams.
TWITTER TEXTUAL ANALYSIS
Of all the annoying tweets from Claire McCaskill, I think this one tops the list:
I’m depressed about my Tigers. And new HHS Sec nominee called to rub it in! Gotta go make dinner.
Get it?
1. She roots for Missouri like a true Missourian.
2. She follows sports like a regular American.
3. She makes dinner like a real mom.
…and yet…
4. She’s so connected, your next HHS Secretary calls her up – just to talk sports!
She’s just like you, except more influential and she has cooler friends!
As McCaskill explains for the “naysayers” out there:
Communication is always a good thing especially in my job.
RUSH’S JUDGEMENT
Of course l’affaire Limbaugh is fun to watch, both for the drama of Republicans inching onto the limb of wanting the economic recovery plan to work and then scurrying off of it when Rush roars, and for the ongoing beating the Republican brand is taking. That said, I think one of the angles getting missed in the discussion of this is that Republicans fear getting on Limbaugh’s bad side because he has a singular ability to shape the opinion of a noteworthy minority of the country.
For better or worse, right-wingers have a leader who can keep right-wing elected officials in line. Does anyone disagree that there’s no equivalent leader or organization on the left with the same level of clout to hold elected progressives – including the President – accountable?
MAJORITY AIN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE
Now that the Senate has voted for cloture on the stimulus, I gotta say it’s striking how the goalposts have moved in terms of what the media consider a majority out of 100 senators. The dominant sense you’d get from following mainstream media coverage of the debate is that 61 Senators is the cut-off for a Senate majority, and if Obama’s initiatives don’t make it past that post he hasn’t garnered that much support (and he isn’t really that bipartisan). That’s not how I remember things being covered during the Bush administration, when the same talking heads did their talking about the filibuster as though it was an extreme measure.
Put differently, with a Republican in the White House the onus was on Democrats to justify why anything would be worth a filibuster; with a Democrat in the White House, the onus is on Democrats to scare up 61 votes.
When John Kerry talked about filibustering Sam Alito’s Supreme Court nomination (which, compared to the stimulus package, is also far-reaching in impact but most would agree was less time-sensitive to get done), that was covered as an antic from the fringe. But amidst the veneration of Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, the starting assumption seems to be that the very most moderate members of the Senate GOP Caucus by default will filibuster the President’s bill unless they get to rewrite it.
Is this an unfair comparison? And if not, then do we blame the media, or blame the Democrats for having lacked the parliamentary-style party discipline to better control the media narrative?
That said, I don’t think there’s much evidence that the public cares terribly much about what Nancy Pelosi rightly called “process arguments” – who’s obstructing who, who’s more bipartisan, etc. And the latest polling suggests that as with the Presidential election, the GOP may be capturing media cycles without capturing voters. Another reason to hope the Conference Committee leaves the Nelson-Snowe crew with a token accomplishment or two but otherwise churns out the bill best designed to actually stimulate the economy – whose success or failure is what voters will actually remember a year from now.
A PRAYER FOR THE CITY
Just finished Buzz Bissinger’s A Prayer for the City, which he wrote after shadowing Ed Rendell (and staff) through his first term as Mayor. It’s a compelling read and gives an interesting sense of the politics of early ’90s Philadelphia and, more than that, of how folks in City Hall go about their jobs and why. The book suffers, though, from the blinders of ideology in a way that maybe only a book by a zealously pragmatic journalist about a zealously pragmatic technocrat can.
In the Philadelphia of Bissinger’s book, there is no public policy argument for raising taxes to maintain public services – only the weakness of previous politicians who indulge in tax hikes like heroin. Disability rights activists get a dismissive sentence about how they unreasonably expect the city to spend “money that isn’t there” on public services. In Bissinger’s Philadelphia, there’s little grounds for the skepticism Ed Rendell and his crew face from people in the “Black establishment” or “Hispanic interest groups” – you wouldn’t think from the way such folks are described that they really represented anybody, except when Rendell worries if they turn on him they could summon thousands to vote him out of office. The most prolonged, serious engagement with the reality of racism (as supposed to the evils of racial politics) is a discussion of the the devastating legacy of explicitly racist New Deal redlining on the city’s neighborhoods, and it segues back into why urban citizens don’t trust the federal government rather than why racial distrust might still persist. Bissinger’s narrative of the life of an African-American great-grandmother struggling to raise her great-grandkids, like the redlining discussion, is compelling, but essentially divorced from the discussion of racial politics and the book’s scorned “Black leaders.”
And while a good chunk of the book is built around Rendell’s successful campaign to force takeaways in negotiations with the public sector unions, we never get a sympathetic – or even much better than contemptuous – portrayal of anyone who works in one. Bissinger repeatedly mourns, in vividly anthropomorphic terms, the death of middle class manufacturing jobs in Philadelphia (and he talks about service jobs as though they’re inherently undignified and inevitably sub-middle class). But he never gives the reader any reason beyond greed that the city’s employees, some middle class and some aspiring towards it, might zealously defend the standard they’ve won. He gives no reason beyond ambition and self-protection that Union leaders would go to the ramparts in that fight. Bissinger is super sympathetic, on the other hand, in describing a fervently anti-government libertarian who comes to work for Rendell on subcontracting out city jobs and ultimately moves first from downtown to gentrified pricey Chestnut Hill and then out to suburbs because of crime and schools. In Philadelphia, Bissinger states flatly, she had “no choice” but to pay for private school education.
LWB IDOL CROSSOVER EPISODE
THE APPLE WAFFLES (LIKE THE TREE)
Watching Meghan McCain’s interview with Mark McKinnon doesn’t reveal anything too newsworthy about Mark McKinnon, you sure come away with your suspicions confirmed that Meghan didn’t get where she did in journalism on merit alone (as a friend put it, “Malia could beat Meghan in a debate right now”). We also learn that Meghan had a grand old time at the dinner Barack Obama hosted honoring her Dad, but she couldn’t bring herself to watch all of Barack’s inauguration the next day. Stay classy, Meghan.
My favorite line, though, is when Meghan explains that she was an independent until she conveniently converted to the GOP when the campaign geared up – based on having “studied the issues.” That makes her principled political evolution about as persuasive as John McCain’s.
Josh Eidelson 