The New York Times reports that Barack Obama is defending his choice of Rick Warren as a keynote speaker at his inauguration : "But Obama told reporters in Chicago that America needs to 'come together,' even when there's disagreement on social issues. 'That dialogue is part of what my campaign is all about,' he said."
Should Obama also invite David Duke to speak so that he can "come together" with white supremacists? Or should have L. B. Johnson felt the need to have noted segregationists speak at an inauguration (hypothetically speaking)?
I find this exceptionally disappointing. I understand the need to bring people together, but there must be limits to the bigotry that you include, and including a man who took an active role in stripping the benign rights away from citizens based on a myopic view of morality clearly crosses this line. Yes, I believe Obama should continue to engage Evangelicals in an open and respectful dialog, but I think it is rather obscene to give Warren the cache and acceptance that an inaugural address grants.
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4 comments:
We should probably just grow up and focus on actual policy instead of getting apoplectic over what amounts to symbolic head-nods to the religious right. How do you expect to do things that matter unless you bring them to the table?
I agree that all sides should be engaged, at lest semantically, in the formation of policy. That is not the issue here. Obama did not eke out an electoral victory; he comes to office with an electoral mandate. I see no excuse for offering this national platform to a man that breeds intolerance, and not for simply pedantic reasons, but rather because by offering Warren a national stage, endorsed and improved of my the president, his purblind views also gain acceptance.
This is a dangerous way of thinking. If the views of an individual who represents a large swath of people constitute such anathema that we can't even invite that person (and group) to participate in a distinctly symbolic nonpolicy event, then I don't see how you talk to them at all. Maybe that's the answer a lot of people are looking for, but the way to get to good dpublic policy decisions is not by cutting people out; it's by winning on the merits. If you don't involve the other side in some sense, your policy is already delegitimized.
Obama is trying to rebuke the selfsame Manichean politics that has so plagued us over the past eight years. I'm deeply invested in seeing through a progressive agenda, but I don't want to do it the same way Bush has done it. This is a break from the norm, and a healthy one. If we fear giving our opponents a pulpit, we've already lost the debate.
I agree that Bush’s Manichean simplification of the world, the dividing into good and evil, was unproductive to consensus building. It was however successful in shifting the marginal opinion incrementally closer to his extreme. With the Warren issue, my fear is that the majority of the people viewing the inaugural events will miss the latitudinarian undertones and will instead view the gesture as policy, regardless of intent; that Obama’s attempt to curry favor with the far right may unintentionally sway the yet malleable opinions in the middle. So much of American politics is posturing and photo-ops that I question the ability of the semi-uninterested citizen to parse out the difference between symbolic pulpit sharing and reified value sharing.
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