Legion of Angels News Archive

Lori Lipman Brown has had her fill of God-talk.

“It’s a very frustrating time,” said Brown, director of the Washington-based Secular Coalition for America, the first lobbying organization devoted to secular issues.

“All of us have been very hopeful that at the end of the Bush administration, we would stop seeing theology impose itself on civil law and yet in just the last few months, we’ve heard both major party presidential candidates support faith-based initiatives.”

For obvious reasons, Brown and other nonbelievers dislike President Bush’s emphasis on integrating religious faith with public policy. But what has her more upset — and perhaps disappointed — is the Democrats’
newfound emphasis on religion and courtship of evangelical voters.

With a recent survey showing that increasing numbers of Americans feel “uncomfortable when politicians talk about how religious they are,” is it possible the Democrats’ fervent attempts to court religious voters could backfire on Election Day?

Much media speculation and campaign strategy has been devoted to the political preferences of evangelical Christians, who make up an estimated 26 percent of Americans. But very little attention has been paid to the 16 percent of Americans unaffiliated with any religious tradition — or to those religious voters who prefer not to hear politicians talk about the Iraq war and God’s will in the same sentence.

Perhaps that’s because it is widely assumed that no matter how uncomfortable secular Americans are with Sen. Barack Obama’s overtures to the religious right, they simply won’t abandon the Democratic ticket.

Or, as Brian Parra of the Southern California-based Atheists United says, “They understand that (we) have nowhere else to go.”

The Coalition of Secular Voters’ blog, for instance, refers to Obama as “the Democratic candidate overseeing the greatest expansion of religiosity and religious pandering in his party’s history.” And secular groups were appalled when the organizers of the interfaith gathering at the Democratic National Convention refused to allow a nonreligious speaker to address the convocation.

“That’s a blatant disregard to the secular community, which makes up a huge portion of the Democratic ticket,” said Parra, director of communications and membership for the atheist group.

But Bobbie Kirkhart, a board member of Atheists United, said secularists do have options. In recent elections she has watched as some of her fellow nonbelievers defected to the Green Party or Peace and Freedom Party “for a more secular approach.”

Could the alienation of secular voters spell trouble for the Democrats? According to the Pew Forum, religiously unaffiliated voters favored John Kerry over President Bush in 2004 by a margin of 44 points. In the most recent survey, that same demographic, though still strongly Democratic, preferred Obama to Sen. John McCain by only 32 points.

Greg Smith, a researcher at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, says it’s unclear whether the Democrats’ greater willingness to talk about faith will cause nonreligious voters to decamp, but says the nonreligious comprise an important voting bloc that should not be ignored.

“If you were to count (the unaffiliated) as a religious tradition so to speak, it would be the fourth largest in the country,” he said.

Some fear that both campaigns’ intense focus on religious issues and constituents distracts the candidates and the country from more pressing matters.

For nearly a year, a group of citizens, science organizations and Nobel laureates operating under the name Science Debate 2008 have been trying to get the candidates to debate science issues.

Asked if she thinks science should have an equally prominent, if not more prominent, role as religion in this election, Darlene Cavalier, director of public engagement for Science Debate 2008, said, “I really do because a president is going to have influence on these critical science topics that will … affect us, not just in the next four years, but it will affect our nation.”

Though Republicans probably aren’t losing much sleep over alienating secular voters, some believe their professed devotion to evangelicals may not deliver the payoff they are expecting either.

“The word `evangelical’ doesn’t mean that much anymore because the population it describes is so incredibly diverse,” said Christine Wicker, the author of “The Fall of the Evangelical Nation.” “The groups that they’re catering to are not the majority of Christians, they’re not the majority of religious people in this country.”

Still, August Berkshire, president of Minnesota Atheists, said in this election the candidates “not only have to be Christian, but (they) have to be the right kind of Christian.”

What won’t be known until all the ballots are counted is whether being the right kind of Christian can deliver the White House if such singularity ends up turning off religious and secular voters alike.

Source — The Pew Forums

HARRISBURG, Pa. - In an election where so many voters are hungry for “change,” both candidates are trying to position themselves as the one who can deliver it in Washington. Barack Obama has made famous the tagline “change we can believe in.” The first word in one of John McCain’s oft-used campaign slogans is “reform,” and in recent weeks on the stump he has begun emphasizing his reputation as a “maverick.”

But reading between the lines this week, voters may have gotten a glimpse of who the real reformer is. Although the public back-and-forth between McCain and Obama has focused mostly on energy, residing at the root of the candidates’ political attacks may be a fundamental difference in their style of governance.

This most recent debate started around the time McCain released an ad stating that Obama would support an “energy tax” if elected president. This point came from an interview that the Illinois senator did with the San Antonio Express-News in which he was asked about increasing taxes on wind power to fund education. “What we ought to tax is dirty energy like coal and, to a lesser extent, natural gas,” Obama said, but such a tax is not actually a part of his economic proposals.

Both candidates support a form of cap-and-trade in which polluters are allowed to emit only a certain amount of greenhouse gases but can purchase extra pollution credits from less-polluting companies. Because “dirty energy” producers would likely be forced to purchase additional credits, a cap-and-trade system could in some ways be seen as an “energy tax” — but then both Obama and McCain would be in favor of it. The only difference between them would be how high the cap and how expensive the credit.

Obama responded to McCain’s attack with an ad of his own alleging that the Arizona senator was “in the pocket” of the big oil companies and “wants to give them another four billion in tax breaks.” Although this is technically true, these tax breaks would come from a significant cut in the corporate tax rate across the board, which McCain argues would help spur growth and increase employment levels.

The apparent hypocrisy of Obama’s commercial was certainly not lost on the McCain campaign, which quickly pointed out that Obama had supported the last round of tax breaks for big oil companies contained in the so-called Bush-Cheney energy bill. According to an article in the Washington Post written at the time of bill’s passage, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 included “an estimated $85 billion worth of subsidies and tax breaks for most forms of energy — including oil and gas,” renewable energies and nuclear power.

McCain refused to support the president’s bill, and at the time said his opposition was due to the large number of funding packages targeted at special interests — specifically Big Oil. He even mused to his colleagues in Congress at the time: “I wonder what it’s going take to make the case for fiscal sanity here?”

Although Obama voted for the bill, he too remarked that he felt the bill was misguided, saying in his speech on the Senate floor that he voted for the bill “reluctantly,” calling it “a step forward,” but “not a very big step.”

So while both senators saw major problems with the 2005 energy bill, Obama decided that the good aspects of the bill outweighed the bad, whereas McCain determined that voting against the good parts of the bill was necessary to send a message about pork barrel projects, which he has consistently criticized.

While visiting a nuclear power facility in Michigan last Tuesday, McCain responded to his opponent’s commercial and the allegation that he was in the pocket of Big Oil by criticizing Obama’s support for the energy bill: “I think he might be a little bit confused because when the energy bill came to the floor of the Senate, full of goodies and breaks for the oil companies, I voted against it. Senator Obama voted for it. People care not only what you say but how you vote.”

By Thursday he had found a much pithier message, telling a crowd in Ohio, “I know he hasn’t been in the Senate that long, but even in the real world, voting for something — voting for something means you support it, and voting against something means you oppose it.”

But the U.S. Senate isn’t quite the “real world,” and voting against something there doesn’t always mean you oppose all of it — especially when a bill is already certain to pass. In a place where compromise and concession are part and parcel of productivity, senators often feel forced to vote for bills they feel are less than perfect in order to achieve their ultimate goal. McCain is opposed to that practice.

“The system is so badly broken that they try to present us with a choice of voting for stuff that has pork barrel projects in it and some good things in it to force us to vote for them,” McCain told reporters on his plane last week when asked about his opposition to the energy bill. “I have consistently voted against those kind of entrapments because then pork barrel projects and the good deals and the benefits never stop.”

Obviously, McCain hasn’t said “no” to every bill that contained earmarks. In fact, he’s voted for specific earmarks that he regularly lambastes on the stump, including $3 million to study the DNA of bears in Montana (McCain often tells audiences that he isn’t sure if that was “a paternity issue or a criminal issue”). Still, McCain prides himself on his record of voting against bills that he sees as the products of a “corrupt” system, often bragging about his earmark-free tenure in Congress and promising crowds that he will put an end to the practice if elected president.

“Public money should serve the public good,” McCain told a crowd at the Disabled American Veterans conference in Las Vegas last weekend. “And if it’s me sitting in the Oval Office, at the Resolute desk, those wasteful spending bills are going the way of all earmarks, straight back to the Congress with a veto. And you will know their names and I’ll make them famous.”

Back on his campaign plane, McCain said that this is the fundamental difference between himself and Obama.

“There’s a clear difference between someone who nearly a million dollars a day proposes pork barrel projects and therefore would support a bill that has lots of pork in it,” McCain said, referring to the total value of Obama’s requested earmarks. “Between those of us who are reformers, who are trying to fix the system and saying, no, no, we’re not going to take the pork. We’re not going to take the special-interest deals that ends up with people in federal prison, with people indicted, and there will be more indictments…. So it’s a difference between the reformers and the ‘go along to get along’ system.”

It’s probably not fair to simply label Obama as a part of the “go along to get along” system, but his support of the 2005 energy bill suggest a willingness to play Washington’s game for what he sees as a greater good — or at least a “step” in the right direction. Although McCain has supported many compromises during his time in the Senate, and he has said that many of those bills did not turn out exactly as he would have written them, he has also been much more willing to vote against something because, in his view, the bad outweighed the good.

So despite the Obama campaign’s reliance on buzzwords such as “hope” and “change,” when it comes to reforming the system in Washington, Obama may actually be more of a pragmatist, while McCain may be the real idealist in the race.

Source — MSNBC

WASHINGTON - Former Republican Sen. Phil Gramm isn’t the first friend to give a presidential candidate heartburn. And based on recent history, another one will be along before John McCain or Barack Obama know it.

“You’ve heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession,” Gramm, a leading supporter of McCain, said recently, a less-than- sympathetic description of an election-year economy that features rising joblessness, a spike in mortgage foreclosures and a declining stock market.

“We have sort of become a nation of whiners,” he added — not all that helpfully in the opinion of the man he is trying to help win the White House.

“I strongly disagree,” McCain told reporters in Michigan, a state with an unemployment rate of 8.5 percent in May. “Phil Gramm does not speak for me. I speak for me.”

McCain’s the one discomforted this time.

But Obama’s known the same feeling. An unpaid adviser quickly became an unpaid former adviser this spring after calling Hillary Rodham Clinton a monster.

Not that Clinton escaped this type of embarrassment, either, in her bid for the White House. One of her national co-chairman once opined that Republicans would be looking for information on Obama’s admitted youthful drug use, a comment that caused a candidate-to-candidate apology.

The circumstances in these episodes vary, but often follow a predictable arc.

For starters, the surrogate or supporter usually serves a political purpose, which explains their presence within the campaign. Gramm, for example, is well-known for his conservative economic beliefs, and can presumably help McCain strengthen his ties to advocates of tax cuts who might otherwise view the presidential contender with suspicion.

In many cases, the person who instigates the controversy follows up with a claim of being quoted out of context. Or misunderstood. Or speaking off the record. None of these constitutes a denial, though, which would be an invitation to further difficulty in an Internet era.

An apology may be forthcoming, although Gramm has yet to make one. Sometimes there is a parting of the ways.

With or without an apology, the candidate makes clear his disagreement, as McCain did, and hopes the controversy fades.

Yet often, and understandably, a rival campaign seizes on the incident in hopes of gaining a political advantage.

Obama did in the current case. “Let’s be clear,” he told an audience in Virginia as McCain struggled to escape the fallout of Gramm’s remarks. “This economic downturn is not in your head.”

McCain’s had some practice at this sort of thing.

Not long ago, he rejected an endorsement from Texas pastor John Hagee after an audio recording made in the late 1990s surfaced in which the preacher suggested God sent Adolf Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land. “Crazy and unacceptable,” McCain said of his erstwhile endorser. Hagee quickly said the parting was “best for both of us and the country.”

Or at least for McCain’s campaign.

Clinton went down the same path in the case of Billy Shaheen, a prominent New Hampshire Democrat and national co-chairman who said last winter that if Obama won the nomination, Republicans would work hard to uncover unsavory aspects of his youth.

“It’ll be, ‘When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?’” said Shaheen, whose wife, Jeanne, is a former New Hampshire governor and is running for the U.S. Senate this year.

A round of apologies ensued, one from Shaheen and another from Clinton to Obama.

“As soon as I found out that one of my supporters and co-chairs in New Hampshire made a statement, asked a series of questions, I made it clear it was not authorized, it was in no way condoned, I didn’t know about it and he stepped down,” she said.

Obama’s moment came when Samantha Power offered an unvarnished opinion of Clinton in a newspaper interview. “She’s a monster — that is off the record — she is stooping to anything,” was the quote.

An apology soon followed in a statement in which Power called her own remarks inexcusable and contradictory to her admiration for Clinton.

By then, Obama had already called to bid his adviser good riddance.

And Clinton’s campaign followed up with an e-mail to supporters informing then of what had happened and seeking campaign donations “to show that there is a price to this kind of attack politics.”

Of course, there are variations on the theme.

In the last few days, the Rev. Jesse Jackson mused in front of an open microphone about wanting to emasculate Obama, whom he said sometimes appears to be talking down to black audiences.

A novel idea, perhaps, of expressing support for a presidential candidate.

This time, it appeared the damage was done to the supporter, rather than the candidate.

Obama accepted an apology from Jackson.

And what did Jackson really mean?

“My support for Senator Obama’s campaign is wide, deep and unequivocal.”

Source — Yahoo!