Reaching across lines Obama goal: Choice of ministers fits with his policy
parispi.net
Published: Friday, December 19, 2008 12:04 PM CST
President-elect Barack Obama is deliberately playing both sides of the street, and getting away with it because he’s doing it right.
He’s not being two-faced, saying one thing to one group and something else to another. Instead, he’s deliberately casting a wide net in his choice of top administrative appointees, bringing into his team people with widely varying views. He’s calculating that listening to these diverging opinions from within his own team will better enable him to make sound choices.
An example is his choice of preachers to offer prayers at his inauguration. That has nothing to do with national policy, but a lot to do with perception of what tone his administration will set.
Obama would have had to have reached to the far fringes of the nation’s religious spectrum to select two preachers with more different viewpoints than Rick Warren and Joseph Lowery.
Warren is the nation’s most prominent evangelical minister and arguably the most influential pastor in the country. Author of the highly popular book, The Purpose Driven Life, he is a Southern Baptist with traditional conservative beliefs. His Saddleback Community Church in California has 22,000 worshipers a week.
Lowery, a liberal, is the dean of the civil rights movement. A half-century ago, he helped lead the Montgomery bus boycotts and the Selma-Montgomery march that confronted Alabama’s Gov. George Wallace. He said he had hoped that one day the nation might have an African-American president, but never dreamed he’d live to see it.
The choice of Warren in particular drew sparks from Obama’s left-wing backers. They’re horrified because Warren publicly opposes same-sex marriages. Obama told them, in nicer words, to back off.
He said he wants the inaugural to reflect his goal of building relationships with people on opposite sides of the fence.
“That dialogue, I think, is part of what my campaign’s been all about,” Obama said. “That we’re not going to agree on every single issue, but what we have to do is to be able to create an atmosphere … where we can disagree without being disagreeable and then focus on those things that we hold in common as Americans.” |
