Monday, October 22, 2007
Minimum presidential standard
Posted by Harold Henderson on Mon, Oct 22, 2007 at 7:34 AM
Bitch Ph.D. links to a funny Katha Pollitt column in the Nation. The first part is funny because Katha's correspondent rants and raves about the need to rebuild the left, which was why he won't support Clinton and is instead backing...Obama. (This is a joke, or should be. Anyone who can casually talk about bombing Pakistan ain't no lefty.)
Pollitt doesn't see much space between the three media-anointed Democratic front-runners. She does have an idea what could move her off dead center:
"I could be won over by a candidate who just stands up and speaks his or her mind without calculating the effect of every syllable on some indecisive mini-demographic. Someone who will speak frankly about the disaster that is the war on drugs, say, or call for free college education. I would even vote for a candidate who refuses to name a favorite Bible passage on national television. 'Tim,' this candidate might say, 'I'd be happy to talk Scripture with you over a cup of coffee after the show, but in this country religion is private and personal, and if I'm elected I'll keep it that way.' There, would-be Presidents of America, was that so hard?"
Comments (2)
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The "private and personsal" ghettoization of religion is one of the failures of American society. So it is all right to be Religious as long as no one knows it? I slightly agree that candidates making up a religiosity for themselves is a nuisance, but demanding that candidates appear as irreligious to satisfy the Left has to be a worse outcome. JBP
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I agree that it would be, though I am personally someone who is not religious. But I don't think Pollitt is actually proposing that, rather she is yearning for a candidate willing to be proudly and privately religious. If I thought that most lefty voters today really meant what Pollitt does, I might feel a whole lot better than I do about modern progressivism. Alas they mostly don't, rather they want to impose a new puritanism.
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