N
NY.Transfer.News@blythe.org
Guest
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Rich: Latter-Day Republicans vs the Church of Oprah
Via NY Transfer News Collective All the News that Doesn't Fit
The New York Times - Dec 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/opinion/16rich.html
Latter-Day Republicans vs. the Church of Oprah
By FRANK RICH
THIS campaign season has been in desperate need of its own
reincarnation of Howard Beale from Network: a TV talking head who
would get mad as hell and not take it anymore. Last weekend that prayer
was answered when Lawrence ODonnell, an excitable Democratic analyst,
seized a YouTube moment while appearing on one of the Beltways more
repellent Sunday bloviathons, The McLaughlin Group.
Pushed over the edge by his peers polite chatter about Mitt Romneys
sermon on Faith in America, Mr. ODonnell branded the speech the
worst of his lifetime. Then he went on a rampage about Mr. Romneys
Mormon religion, shouting (among other things) that until 1978 it was
an officially racist faith.
That claim just happens to be true. As the jaws of his scandalized
co-stars dropped around him, Mr. ODonnell then raised the rude
question that almost no one in Washington asks aloud: Why didnt Mr.
Romney publicly renounce his churchs discriminatory practices before
they were revoked? As the scion of one of Americas most prominent
Mormon families, he might have made a difference. Its not as if he was
a toddler. By 1978 " the same year his contemporary, Bill Clinton, was
elected governor in Arkansas " Mr. Romney had entered his 30s.
The answer is simple. Mr. Romney didnt fight his churchs
institutionalized apartheid, whatever his private misgivings, because
thats his character. Though he is trying to sell himself as a leader,
he is actually a follower and a panderer, as confirmed by his
flip-flops on nearly every issue.
Concern for minorities isnt a high priority either. The Christian
Science Monitor and others have published reports that Mr. Romney has
said he wouldnt include a Muslim in his cabinet. (He denies it.) In
Faith in America, he exempted Americans who dont practice a religion
from freedom and warned ominously of shadowy, unidentified cabalists
intent on establishing a new religion in America " the religion of
secularism. Perhaps today, in his scheduled turn on Meet the Press,
he will inveigh against a new war on Christmas being plotted by an axis
of evil composed of Muslims, secularists and illegal immigrants.
As Mr. ODonnell said in his tirade, its incredible that Mr. Romneys
prejudices get a free pass from so many commentators. Faith in
America was hyped in advance as one of the years big, emotional
campaign moments by Mark Halperin of Time. In its wake, the dean of
Beltway opinion, David Broder of The Washington Post, praised Mr.
Romney for possessing values exactly those I would hope a leader would
have.
But Washington is nothing if not consistent in misreading this
election. Even as pundits overstated the significance of Faith in
America, so they misunderstood and trivialized the other faith-based
political show unfolding this holiday season, Oprahpalooza. And with
the same faulty logic.
Beltway hands thought they knew how to frame the Romney speech because
they assumed (incorrectly) that it would build on the historical
precedent set by J.F.K. When they analyzed the three-state Oprah-Obama
tour, they again reached for historical precedent and were bamboozled
once more " this time because there really was no precedent.
Most could only see Oprah Winfreys contribution to Barack Obamas
campaign as just another celebrity endorsement, however high-powered.
The Boss, we kept being reminded, couldnt elect John Kerry. Selling
presidents is not the same as pushing Anna Karenina. In a typical
instance of tone-deafness from the Clinton camp, its national
co-chairman, the former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack, said of Oprah, Im
not sure who watches her.
Wanna bet he knows now? Even before Oprah drew throngs in Iowa, the Des
Moines Register poll showed Mr. Obama leading Hillary Clinton among
women for the first time (31 to 26 percent) in late November. Now his
surge is spreading. In New Hampshire, the Rasmussen poll after Oprahs
visit found that the Clinton lead among women had fallen from 14 to 4
percent in just two weeks. In South Carolina, where some once thought
Mr. Obama was not black enough to peel away loyal African-American
voters from the Clintons, hes ahead by double digits among blacks in
four polls. (A month ago they were even among African-Americans in that
state.) Over all, the Obama-Clinton race in all three states has now
become too close to call.
Oprah is indeed a megacelebrity. At a time when evening news anchors no
longer have the reach of Walter Cronkite " and when Letterman, Leno,
Conan, Stewart and Colbert are in strike-mandated reruns " she rules in
the cultural marketplace more powerfully than ever. But the New York
Times/CBS News poll probably was right when it found that only 1
percent of voters say they will vote as Oprah asks them to. Her
audience isnt a pack of Stepford wives, and the message of the events
she shared with Mr. Obama is not that her fame translates directly into
support for her candidate.
What the communal fervor in these three very different states showed
instead was that Oprah doesnt have to ask for these votes. Many were
already in the bag. Mr. Obama was drawing huge crowds before she bumped
them up further. For all their eagerness to see a media star (and star
candidate), many in attendance also came to party. They were
celebrating and ratifying a movement that Mr. Obama has been building
for months.
This movement has its own religious tone. References to faith abound in
Mr. Obamas writings and speeches, as they do in Oprahs language on
her TV show and at his rallies. Five years ago, Christianity Today, the
evangelical journal founded by Billy Graham, approvingly described
Oprah as an icon of church-free spirituality whose convictions
cannot simply be dismissed as superficial civil religion or so much
New Age psychobabble.
Church free is the key. This country has had its fill of often
hypocritical family-values politicians dictating what is and is not
acceptable religious and moral practice. Instead of handing down
tablets of what constitutes faith in America, Romney-style, the
Oprah-Obama movement practices an American form of ecumenicalism. It
preaches a bit of heaven on earth in the form of a unified,
live-and-let-live democracy that is greater than the sum of its
countless disparate denominations. The pitch " or, to those who are not
fans, the shtick " may be corny. The audacity of hope is corny too.
But corn is preferable to holier-than-thou, and not just in Iowa.
Race is certainly a part of the groundswell, but not in a malevolent
way. When I wrote here two weeks ago that racism is the dog that hasnt
barked in this campaign, some readers wrote in to say that only a fool
would believe that white Americans would ever elect an African-American
president, no matter what polls indicate. Well find out soon enough.
If thats the case, Mr. Obama cant win in Iowa, where the population
is roughly 95 percent white, or in New Hampshire, which is 96 percent
white.
Id argue instead that any sizable racist anti-Obama vote will be
concentrated in states that no Democrat would carry in the general
election. Otherwise, race may be either a neutral or positive factor
for the Obama campaign. Check out the composition of Oprahs television
flock, which, like all daytime audiences, is largely female. Her
viewers are overwhelmingly white (some 80 percent), blue collar (nearly
half with incomes under $40,000) and older (50-plus). This is hardly
the chardonnay-sipping, NPR-addicted, bicoastal hipster crowd that many
assume to be Mr. Obamas largest white constituency. They share the
profile of Clinton Democrats " and of some Republicans too.
The inclusiveness preached by Obama-Oprah is practiced by the other
Democrats in the presidential race, Mrs. Clinton most certainly
included. Is Mr. Obama gaining votes over rivals with often
interchangeable views because some white voters feel better about
themselves if they vote for an African-American? Or is it because Mrs.
Clintons shrill campaign continues to cast her as Nixon to Mr. Obamas
Kennedy? Even after she apologized to Mr. Obama for a top advisers
unauthorized invocation of Mr. Obamas long-admitted drug use as a
young man, her chief strategist, Mark Penn, was apparently authorized
to go on Hardball to sleazily insinuate the word cocaine into prime
time again. Somewhere Tricky Dick is laughing.
But it just may be possible that the single biggest boost to the Obama
campaign is not white liberal self-congratulation or the Clinton camps
self-immolation, but the collective nastiness of the Republican field.
Just when you think the tone cant get any uglier, it does. Last week
Mike Huckabee, who only recently stood out for his kind words about
illegal immigrants, accepted an endorsement from a founder of the
Minutemen, whose approach to stopping the illegal alien invasion has
been embraced by white supremacists and who have been condemned as
vigilantes by President Bush.
For those Americans looking for the most unambiguous way to repudiate
politicians who are trying to divide the country by faith, ethnicity,
sexuality and race, Mr. Obama is nothing if not the most direct shot.
After hearing someone like Mitt Romney preach his narrow, exclusionist
idea of Faith in America, some Americans may simply see a vote for
Mr. Obama as a vote for faith in America itself.
=================================================================
NY Transfer News Collective A Service of Blythe Systems
Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us
Our main website: http://www.blythe.org
List Archives: http://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/
Subscribe: http://blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr
=================================================================
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (FreeBSD)
iD8DBQFHZSmyiz2i76ou9wQRAo4+AKCLWSHSqXHibgiYgs1BNFeHJY4evgCeJG+q
8yJqQrXbPp6xDlBPP+bcsPg=
=ynmw
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Hash: SHA1
Rich: Latter-Day Republicans vs the Church of Oprah
Via NY Transfer News Collective All the News that Doesn't Fit
The New York Times - Dec 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/opinion/16rich.html
Latter-Day Republicans vs. the Church of Oprah
By FRANK RICH
THIS campaign season has been in desperate need of its own
reincarnation of Howard Beale from Network: a TV talking head who
would get mad as hell and not take it anymore. Last weekend that prayer
was answered when Lawrence ODonnell, an excitable Democratic analyst,
seized a YouTube moment while appearing on one of the Beltways more
repellent Sunday bloviathons, The McLaughlin Group.
Pushed over the edge by his peers polite chatter about Mitt Romneys
sermon on Faith in America, Mr. ODonnell branded the speech the
worst of his lifetime. Then he went on a rampage about Mr. Romneys
Mormon religion, shouting (among other things) that until 1978 it was
an officially racist faith.
That claim just happens to be true. As the jaws of his scandalized
co-stars dropped around him, Mr. ODonnell then raised the rude
question that almost no one in Washington asks aloud: Why didnt Mr.
Romney publicly renounce his churchs discriminatory practices before
they were revoked? As the scion of one of Americas most prominent
Mormon families, he might have made a difference. Its not as if he was
a toddler. By 1978 " the same year his contemporary, Bill Clinton, was
elected governor in Arkansas " Mr. Romney had entered his 30s.
The answer is simple. Mr. Romney didnt fight his churchs
institutionalized apartheid, whatever his private misgivings, because
thats his character. Though he is trying to sell himself as a leader,
he is actually a follower and a panderer, as confirmed by his
flip-flops on nearly every issue.
Concern for minorities isnt a high priority either. The Christian
Science Monitor and others have published reports that Mr. Romney has
said he wouldnt include a Muslim in his cabinet. (He denies it.) In
Faith in America, he exempted Americans who dont practice a religion
from freedom and warned ominously of shadowy, unidentified cabalists
intent on establishing a new religion in America " the religion of
secularism. Perhaps today, in his scheduled turn on Meet the Press,
he will inveigh against a new war on Christmas being plotted by an axis
of evil composed of Muslims, secularists and illegal immigrants.
As Mr. ODonnell said in his tirade, its incredible that Mr. Romneys
prejudices get a free pass from so many commentators. Faith in
America was hyped in advance as one of the years big, emotional
campaign moments by Mark Halperin of Time. In its wake, the dean of
Beltway opinion, David Broder of The Washington Post, praised Mr.
Romney for possessing values exactly those I would hope a leader would
have.
But Washington is nothing if not consistent in misreading this
election. Even as pundits overstated the significance of Faith in
America, so they misunderstood and trivialized the other faith-based
political show unfolding this holiday season, Oprahpalooza. And with
the same faulty logic.
Beltway hands thought they knew how to frame the Romney speech because
they assumed (incorrectly) that it would build on the historical
precedent set by J.F.K. When they analyzed the three-state Oprah-Obama
tour, they again reached for historical precedent and were bamboozled
once more " this time because there really was no precedent.
Most could only see Oprah Winfreys contribution to Barack Obamas
campaign as just another celebrity endorsement, however high-powered.
The Boss, we kept being reminded, couldnt elect John Kerry. Selling
presidents is not the same as pushing Anna Karenina. In a typical
instance of tone-deafness from the Clinton camp, its national
co-chairman, the former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack, said of Oprah, Im
not sure who watches her.
Wanna bet he knows now? Even before Oprah drew throngs in Iowa, the Des
Moines Register poll showed Mr. Obama leading Hillary Clinton among
women for the first time (31 to 26 percent) in late November. Now his
surge is spreading. In New Hampshire, the Rasmussen poll after Oprahs
visit found that the Clinton lead among women had fallen from 14 to 4
percent in just two weeks. In South Carolina, where some once thought
Mr. Obama was not black enough to peel away loyal African-American
voters from the Clintons, hes ahead by double digits among blacks in
four polls. (A month ago they were even among African-Americans in that
state.) Over all, the Obama-Clinton race in all three states has now
become too close to call.
Oprah is indeed a megacelebrity. At a time when evening news anchors no
longer have the reach of Walter Cronkite " and when Letterman, Leno,
Conan, Stewart and Colbert are in strike-mandated reruns " she rules in
the cultural marketplace more powerfully than ever. But the New York
Times/CBS News poll probably was right when it found that only 1
percent of voters say they will vote as Oprah asks them to. Her
audience isnt a pack of Stepford wives, and the message of the events
she shared with Mr. Obama is not that her fame translates directly into
support for her candidate.
What the communal fervor in these three very different states showed
instead was that Oprah doesnt have to ask for these votes. Many were
already in the bag. Mr. Obama was drawing huge crowds before she bumped
them up further. For all their eagerness to see a media star (and star
candidate), many in attendance also came to party. They were
celebrating and ratifying a movement that Mr. Obama has been building
for months.
This movement has its own religious tone. References to faith abound in
Mr. Obamas writings and speeches, as they do in Oprahs language on
her TV show and at his rallies. Five years ago, Christianity Today, the
evangelical journal founded by Billy Graham, approvingly described
Oprah as an icon of church-free spirituality whose convictions
cannot simply be dismissed as superficial civil religion or so much
New Age psychobabble.
Church free is the key. This country has had its fill of often
hypocritical family-values politicians dictating what is and is not
acceptable religious and moral practice. Instead of handing down
tablets of what constitutes faith in America, Romney-style, the
Oprah-Obama movement practices an American form of ecumenicalism. It
preaches a bit of heaven on earth in the form of a unified,
live-and-let-live democracy that is greater than the sum of its
countless disparate denominations. The pitch " or, to those who are not
fans, the shtick " may be corny. The audacity of hope is corny too.
But corn is preferable to holier-than-thou, and not just in Iowa.
Race is certainly a part of the groundswell, but not in a malevolent
way. When I wrote here two weeks ago that racism is the dog that hasnt
barked in this campaign, some readers wrote in to say that only a fool
would believe that white Americans would ever elect an African-American
president, no matter what polls indicate. Well find out soon enough.
If thats the case, Mr. Obama cant win in Iowa, where the population
is roughly 95 percent white, or in New Hampshire, which is 96 percent
white.
Id argue instead that any sizable racist anti-Obama vote will be
concentrated in states that no Democrat would carry in the general
election. Otherwise, race may be either a neutral or positive factor
for the Obama campaign. Check out the composition of Oprahs television
flock, which, like all daytime audiences, is largely female. Her
viewers are overwhelmingly white (some 80 percent), blue collar (nearly
half with incomes under $40,000) and older (50-plus). This is hardly
the chardonnay-sipping, NPR-addicted, bicoastal hipster crowd that many
assume to be Mr. Obamas largest white constituency. They share the
profile of Clinton Democrats " and of some Republicans too.
The inclusiveness preached by Obama-Oprah is practiced by the other
Democrats in the presidential race, Mrs. Clinton most certainly
included. Is Mr. Obama gaining votes over rivals with often
interchangeable views because some white voters feel better about
themselves if they vote for an African-American? Or is it because Mrs.
Clintons shrill campaign continues to cast her as Nixon to Mr. Obamas
Kennedy? Even after she apologized to Mr. Obama for a top advisers
unauthorized invocation of Mr. Obamas long-admitted drug use as a
young man, her chief strategist, Mark Penn, was apparently authorized
to go on Hardball to sleazily insinuate the word cocaine into prime
time again. Somewhere Tricky Dick is laughing.
But it just may be possible that the single biggest boost to the Obama
campaign is not white liberal self-congratulation or the Clinton camps
self-immolation, but the collective nastiness of the Republican field.
Just when you think the tone cant get any uglier, it does. Last week
Mike Huckabee, who only recently stood out for his kind words about
illegal immigrants, accepted an endorsement from a founder of the
Minutemen, whose approach to stopping the illegal alien invasion has
been embraced by white supremacists and who have been condemned as
vigilantes by President Bush.
For those Americans looking for the most unambiguous way to repudiate
politicians who are trying to divide the country by faith, ethnicity,
sexuality and race, Mr. Obama is nothing if not the most direct shot.
After hearing someone like Mitt Romney preach his narrow, exclusionist
idea of Faith in America, some Americans may simply see a vote for
Mr. Obama as a vote for faith in America itself.
=================================================================
NY Transfer News Collective A Service of Blythe Systems
Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us
Our main website: http://www.blythe.org
List Archives: http://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/
Subscribe: http://blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr
=================================================================
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (FreeBSD)
iD8DBQFHZSmyiz2i76ou9wQRAo4+AKCLWSHSqXHibgiYgs1BNFeHJY4evgCeJG+q
8yJqQrXbPp6xDlBPP+bcsPg=
=ynmw
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----