PLEASE let me preface with my hope is that Obama will make it right for the LGBT community. I TOTALLY understand the rage and feeling of betrayal and am not sure how I would react. I was shocked, angry and felt betrayed myself but clearly to a lesser degree as I am not gay and this ridiculous proposition 8 crap is not a direct assault on my marriage.
Please bear with me..
On it's face the pick seems like pandering to the far-right but a closer analysis shows me otherwise...
Obama essentially stole the reigns from the evangelical christian conservative movement and chose their leader for them. HE CHOSE the new face of evangelism; Not Dobson, not Falwell-- but OBAMA chose a self "professed" evangelical moderate...
Obama did us a favor. He chose the (ostensibly)weakest link in the evangelical chain and has nothing to lose. He hedged his bets: Either evangenical moderation will lead them to relevancy or moderation fails and the christian right falls back further into extremism and irrelevancy for a generation.
Were Obama to pick a leader of the evangelical right to speak at his inauguration as an outright pander to the christian right, why wouldn't he pick Dobson or a host of other firmly planted, prominent evangelical conservatives?
The reason is strategy.
Now before I go further, one must accept or agree that Obama did in fact mean "change" upon which he campaigned; Not "return" to Democratic congressional muscle-flexing (admittedly a part of me wants that too). So to change would mean coming to or at least appearing to move to the center.
Now in this way, Warren works perfectly to Obama's advantage. Warren is a mirror reflection across the political divide of Obama. Whether Obama believes Warren IS truly interested in evangelical moderation matters not. What placing Warren on this bully pulpit before tens of billions of people accomplishes is threefold:
1.)Politically it reads as an immensely magnanimous gesture toward the evangelical community (obviously).
2.)Places Warren squarely in the spotlight who has built his reputation on moderation now will be forced to either walk the walk or appear hypocritical as he is now the new "face of evangelism" thanks to Obama.
3.)It is a BRILLIANT power-play on Obama's part. Consider it a kind of "Yeah, Rick. How's it feel being in front of 50 billion people? What's the size of your audience? OH! 100 million? That's...nice. Must be real intimate, huh?"
in one fell swoop, he choses the face of evangelism and establishes dominance.
What a show of force it will be. What a brilliant means of taking the right by the throat. With a smile and a hug, Obama will expose a lesser entity to the (unimaginably) bright glare of being the president that dares you not to blink. The presidency can be an awfully peruasive tool. If the right CANNOT moderate themselves: The right loses, the left wins. If it succeeds: The left wins, and the right is emasculated.
Consider this the bitter pill to achieve the cure of a lasting center-left majority. The first step in the removal of evangelical dominance has been taken.