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player ready...by Frank James
A theme in some of the coverage today of Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign suggests an Obama presidency would be a faith-based one, but not in the meaning of the Bush Adminstration’s use of the phrase.
Instead, if he is elected, it would be based on voters’ faith that he can pull off something there’s little evidence for, that is, the creation of a politics that transcends partisanship.
There’s a New York Times piece by Robin Toner whose headline asks the question: “Obama’s Test: Can a Liberal be a Unifier?” It’s a question the story doesn’t answer, though one can gather from it that Obama would have difficulty pulling off such a feat.
The NYT article cites the National Journal report from earlier this year that determined that Obama had the most liberal voting record in the Senate last year.
The article notes that the most successful Democratic president of recent decades, Bill Clinton, came to power as a centrist or center-right.
In many ways, the Obama campaign is challenging the fundamental political premise that has prevailed in Washington for more than a generation: that any majority coalition must be carefully centrist, if not center-right. Bill Clinton ran in 1992 as a candidate willing to break with liberal orthodoxy on many issues, including crime and welfare, and eager to move the party — which had lost five of the six previous presidential elections — to the middle. Mr. Clinton’s New Democrats assumed a certain level of conservatism among voters.
But Obama has been a fairly orthodox progressive (or liberal for those who prefer that word.) The evidence of bridge-building really isn’t readily apparent in his short U.S. Senate career. So voters are going to have to pretty much trust that he would be able to govern in a way that his career in Washington doesn’t give much support for. They’ll just have to have faith.
Underscoring this view is a piece produced by the McClatchy Washington bureau. The piece by Margaret Talev and former Swamper David Lightman starts thusly:
Barack Obama says that if he were president, he’d take politically courageous stands while forging the consensus needed to enact universal health care, immigration revisions, global warming legislation and a withdrawal from Iraq.
His three-year record in the Senate, however, offers little evidence that he can do what he’s promising. His party was in the minority for his first two years, and in the third he began campaigning for president and missed lots of time on Capitol Hill. He was absent from or only partly involved in some key bipartisan efforts to head off stalemates on judicial nominations, immigration and Iraq war policy.
“He is asking us to believe he can do something he has yet to do,” said Michael Fauntroy, an assistant professor of public policy at George Mason University.
Obama has made the word “hope” his campaign mantra. Perhaps “faith” would be equally apropos.
Why faith? Because as St. Paul wrote in Hebrews 11:1 More Top Picks Google Nest Cam
When Obama asks voters to believe he can create a new politics in Washington, he’s arguably asking them to take on faith “the evidence of things not seen” in his Washington political record.