Letters to the Editor
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Wesley or not, Clinton's remarks were saccharine
It's possible I am missing a subtlety but the quoted text sounded like something you'd have heard from Tammy Faye Bakker in her prime. That's not necessarily bad coming from Tammy Faye, whose personality fits the sentiment, but it does strike an odd tone with the otherwise rational Hillary Clinton. I just don't see a lot of spiritual depth there. As a Christian, you might feel guided by the spirit, but you might equally feel a certain moral burden that is missing in all of these feel-good testimonies. Though I suspect that Obama is a humanist at heart who uses religion as a vehicle of community organization, I see in his earnestness a deeper spiritual commitment than is evident in Bush Jr.'s AA conversion or Hillary's memories of Sunday picnics. I don't know enough about McCain to hazard a guess, except that his brushes with religion look more opportunistic than anything else.
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Back to hiding our heads in the sand, are we?
The Democratic party has been and to the point, still is the party of main stream secular America. That's been the case for decades now and it most likely will continue to be the case in the near term and future.
The tag-line on Walter Shapiro's piece, "is it really more secularism that they need?" completely doesn't make any sense because the Democratic party can't become any more secular than it currently is - unless Shapiro is attempting to intimate that they should become the party of Atheism.
Mainstream secular democrats (like myself) need to get over their natural aversion to religion and by extension religious people and learn that even though we may not share the same beliefs in the supernatural, that doesn't mean that we all cannot contribute to a better future for individual Americans.
Homelessness, Poverty and Hunger have long been important issues to both the religious in this country as well as to the Democratic party and on these issues we should seek to forge a common ground that will allow us to work towards mending the ills of our society while simultaneously forging a new, more powerful, Democratic majority.
This isn't a matter of a candidate being more, or less religious - it's about them being authentic in their dealings with religious people and the language that they use to communicate with them. It's quite possible to go up to a person with faith and have a conversation that admits that you will not see eye to eye with them on their entire agenda, but that you feel passionately about many of the same things that they care about as well and out of this discussion an understanding can be created that forms the groundwork for more votes for the Democratic party.
Barack Obama has been excellent at doing this, by far the best out of all the potential Democratic candidates during this last election cycle and the reason why this has been the case is because he uses authentic language and genuine feelings to talk to potential religious issue voters. Even if he doesn't with the nomination, or God forbid (no pun intended), he does but loses the White House bid, the dialog that he has started with the American religious community needs to continue.
The message needs to be clear that the Democratic party wants these fine folk to vote for them and to make certain that instead of allowing the Republican's to control the dialog between us (read: ABORTION) that we establish our own dialog on issues that we can support but the Republicans continuously fail to deliver on (read: Poverty, Homelessness, Starvation, Medical Care)
In America, with it's high concentration of Christians, most of the work should already be cut out for us since "the man" himself, Jesus Christ, probably would be a Democrat.
We need to show people why.
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Here's Walter Shapiro With Another Unconvincing Piece
Every time I try to browse a Walter Shapiro opinion piece, I have to shake my head in disbelief; so much so that I can never manage to finish reading it all the way through. His muck features mostly wandering "logic", specious speculations, and unsupported allegations. PLEASE bring back Sidney Blumenthal on a regular basis if he can manage it, and coax Joe Conason to write more frequently for salon.com. Lately, they strike me as badly needed on the salon website. And please, while you're at it, send Walter S. back to whatever school he attended and have him review the writing of cogent expository essays.
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Here's Walter Shapiro With Another Unconvincing Piece
Every time I try to browse a Walter Shapiro opinion piece, I have to shake my head in disbelief; so much so that I can never manage to finish reading it all the way through. His muck features mostly wandering "logic", specious speculations, and unsupported allegations. PLEASE bring back Sidney Blumenthal on a regular basis if he can manage it, and coax Joe Conason to write more frequently for salon.com. Lately, they strike me as badly needed on the salon website. And please, while you're at it, send Walter S. back to whatever school he attended and have him review the writing of cogent expository essays.
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Bullshit. They Have No God Problem.
What the Democrats need to do is stop the goddamn self-flagellation.
Whispers puts it perfectly:
most Democratic "consultants" should be fired and sent to work in menial labor. Most of these losers have horrible track records giving bad advice to Democratic candidates. And the worst advice is "pretend to be Republican". Either fight for the ideals of the Democratic party or get out of the way.
Here’s a new flash, folks: the Democrats won the popular vote in 2000, and came damn close in 2004, given the relentless subversion of the electoral process by the most egregiously corrupt cabal of criminal thugs in American history. Accordingly, what the Democrats need to do most urgently is free themselves from the delusion that they must win the support of a single one of the racist, authoritarian religious fanatics that populate the Republican base. What matters isn’t converting the Republican right, but demonizing them among the rest of the country as a cancer that threatens the most fundamental values upon which our democratic institutions were founded.
That means securing, but needing no more than, 50.1% of the vote - not a single one more than 270 electoral college votes - and then governing without the slightest concern for the opinions and values of the 49.9% who lose. The effectiveness of that strategy requires implementing several vitally important steps. Most urgently, they need to pass both the Fairness Doctrine and media consolidation restrictions designed to break the media stranglehold of Rupert Murdoch, Clear Channel, and other key supporters of the Perpetual Republican Nigger Hunt. They need to fund their own media outlets in order to expose the fanaticism and ignorance of Rush Limbo, Michael Savage, and all the other grotesques of Republican talk radio. Lastly – and perhaps most importantly – they need to decisively rid the party of such loathsome crypto-Republicans as Harry Reid and Dianne Feinstein, by giving them the full "Lieberman treatment."