Join Me & Support Barack Obama
We are now three weeks away from Election Day 2008.
The campaign tone and rhetoric in the next 20 days can be expected to intensify. There will be last-minute "revelations". There may well be a surprise, good or bad, from the hills of Waziristan, from some American city, or from the global financial system. Mysterious, dark-suited, dark-glassed, shifty-looking Men-in-Black types may come to your neighborhood, as one did to mine yesterday, to slip through your door smear pieces by axe-grinding ideologues purporting to tie your preferred candidate to one imagined nefarious activity or another.
As all this unfolds, I urge you to keep in mind the fact that all evidence available to us suggests that a politician's (and a party's) conduct of the election campaign tends to be a strong indicator of conduct and leadership style in office.
And so with us all. As my favorite Christian ethicist has written, "I become what I do ... (and) we, as communities, become what we do."* I am struck by the degree to which this dictum has played out on our national stage: our current candidates for the presidency and vice-presidency have become products of their actions over the course of the campaign, and their supporters have responded to their leadership and collectively become something different from what they were before.
1. One candidate has become increasingly erratic and incoherent as the campaign has progressed, avoiding discussion of core themes and focusing instead on character attacks and fear mongering. The other has held a steady course and continued to focus on the core themes that matter to Americans: the faltering economy, the war in Iraq, and health care concerns.
2. One candidate has chosen country over personality by choosing from among former opponents a running mate with decades of experience who can step into the presidency from a position of integrity and wisdom should tragic circumstances demand. The other candidate has chosen gimmickry over substance by choosing a poorly-vetted running mate whose principal trend in public life is a penchant for abusing the power of office to pursue personal vendettas.
3. One candidate has surrounded himself with a diverse group of technically competent advisers, and started three months ago planning the complicated transition that will have to take place in a new administration. The other candidate has surrounded himself with lobbyists and graduates of the Bush/Rove school of political campaigning, and has developed no transition plan to speak of. Little help that his head of transition planning is now known to have close ties to felonious lobbyists for Saddam Hussein.
4. One candidate's party has since 2004 been engaged in vigorous outreach throughout the country to bring more eligible voters into the electoral process in all 50 states. The other candidate's party is gearing up its own vigorous quadrennial efforts to reduce the number of people who show up at the polls by lying about potential voter fraud.
So much for the candidates and their parties. But what about us? Many of us view this campaign as the most important and engaging one we have ever witnessed. Many of us are emotionally caught up in our support of one candidate, or opposition to another. But how far do we let those emotions take us? Clearly, when people call for blood, they take it too far.
For me, at this point, the important thing to remember is that those most vocal and hateful of supporters at McCain and Palin rallies are hurting inside. They are (based on the demographics) actually among those who have been hurt most by the economic and foreign policies of the Bush administration, and who would be hurt even more by the economic and foreign policies of a McCain administration. They have been fooled, time and time again, into tying their party and candidate allegiance to a dream of moral uprightness that has never materialized, and is not likely to from any of their party's candidates. They have trusted in the words of people who misled them, and have been disappointed, and are now faced with the cognitive dissonance challenge of either digging in deeper, or realizing that everything they have built their political allegiance on to date has been a huge lie.
What does this mean for Obama supporters in these next three weeks? It means that they must approach McCain and Palin supporters not with hubris or with anger or with that oh-so-tempting knowing, lecturing tone, but rather with compassion and love. The McCailinites have suffered the same decline in their retirement savings as we have. They have lost friends and family to misguided Bushian foreign adventures, as we have. And now they see on the horizon the fading prospects of what they mistakenly believed to be the most mavericky of mavericks, and they are angry and sad. Deep inside, they are in part angry at themselves for believing the lies.
What they need from us is understanding. So do something nice for them. Do something fun with them that will take their mind off the loss they are feeling. And maybe, just maybe, you will do something that shows them we are all in this together.
Oh, and give a few bucks to Obama so he can finish strong.
- Bob
* Christians in the Public Square: Faith that Transforms Politics by Ellen Ott Marshall. Abingdon Press, 2008. (Full disclosure: the author is godmother to my daughter).
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