Those who were listening to Barack Obama's speech in St. Paul tonight, upon the occasion of him becoming the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, heard him make a campaign promise that may have got lost in the general (and by now entirely unsurprising) rhetorical brilliance of the speech as a whole. Or heard as a mere oratorical flourish. But that promise:
What you won’t hear from this campaign or this party is the kind of politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon – that sees our opponents not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to demonize.
...summarizes, as well as anything else ever has, why I support Barack Obama for President of the United States of America, and why any lucid American should do the same.
One of the worst things to have resulted from the historical accident of the Bush administration occupying the White House when the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon occurred is the damage that's been done to our popular political vocabulary. That vocabulary has gotten smaller and stupider in the years since 2001, and this curtailment in the realm of permissible political discourse has directly enabled other, more showy disasters like, say, the war in Iraq. Or the fact that the US government tortures people and doesn't feel badly enough about it to do more than a half-assed job keeping that information under wraps.
The neoconservative movement, with its political champions in the Executive branch, and its rhetorical champions on talk radio and in Evangelical Millenialist churches nationwide, is masterfully accomplished in the use of "religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon", considerably more accomplished than it is at actual governance.
None of this is news to regular readers here, of course. No doubt every one of us could site some particularly egregious example. I'm thinking here of things like Jerry Falwell blaming gays and pagans for the attacks of 9-11, or the "Swiftboat Veterans for Truth" tarring war hero John Kerry as a coward and potentially a traitor.
We all know that the neocons say these kinds of things constantly. What typically gets lost in the shuffle is that they have sound tactical reasons to say them from a political point of view, even if doing it does is morally and ethically bankrupt (and it is).
When Jerry Falwell, or anybody like him, assures his congregation that the supreme ruler of the universe hates gays and pagans, he's simultaneously manipulating their sexual insecurities to instill greater loyalty to the church, and influencing them to support the neocon political agenda...because it's only the Democratic Party that offers a political home for gays or pagans. (Not that the home on offer is perfect, but Christ on a crutch, it's better than being Republican!) In return for this service as a propagandist, Falwell receives support for his political agenda in the GOP-controlled administration.
Similarly, when the SBVT tarred John Kerry as an America-hating coward, they were not merely asserting that his military record was weak. They were also creating a frame in which military ideology became the sole measure of fitness for the Presidency. Kerry took a lot of heat for not defending himself, but even if he had, the defense would have amounted to a validation of the neoconservative frame, a frame in which the Democratic Party was doomed to fail.
This is all incredibly cynical, not least because the low-information voters that these sorts of tactics typically work best on are generally not going to benefit from the neocon agenda, which amounts to little more than a thinly-disguised consolidation of our national wealth into the top 1/2 of one percent of the population.
With an agenda like that, it's no wonder that the GOP needs to dress it up in either choir robes or olive drab fatigues, but even if their agenda was perfectly benign their tactics would render it evil. Again...nothing that people here don't already know, I assume. But with this promise:
What you won’t hear from this campaign or this party is the kind of politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon – that sees our opponents not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to demonize.
...Barack Obama has signaled that he knows it too, and that it's a centerpiece of his upcoming GE campaign not to use such tactics himself.
I cannot for the life of me imagine any of the other candidates that we started this primary season with being both (a) willing to say this out loud during their speech upon securing the nomination, and (b) able to actually get elected come November.
So, clearly, we have made the right choice this year. And now it's time to get the real party started. Bring everything you've got, because we're going to need it in the fight ahead.