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E.J. Dionne channeled some of the I'm-fine-with-Rick-Warren arguments on this blog in his Post column today, which suggests that the brilliance of the Rick Warren choice is that it challenges everybody, not just lefties:
By inviting Pastor Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation, President-elect Barack Obama has alienated some of his friends on the left. By accepting, Warren has enraged some of his allies on the right.
There's this notion out there—call it the equivalence of outrage—that right-wingers are just as upset with Warren for agreeing to bless Obama as left-wingers are upset with Obama for asking Warren for his blessing. But where are these explosions of rage on the right happening? I can't find them. I went to National Review's lively "Corner" blog and couldn't detect any irritation. ("I haven't gotten a single angry email from a reader about this, and usually when conservatives are enraged by something, somebody emails me about it," NR's Jonah Goldberg noted.) No rage immediately evident in quick skims of Michelle Malkin, Confederate Yankee, Ace of Spades, or RedState, either. Christian Broadcasting News even rhapsodized that Obama "said he was tired of the same old 'us vs. them' mentality in DC and beyond. Well, picking Warren does the trick."
To try to get to the bottom of this—maybe it's the conservative rank-and-file that's upset?—I did a highly scientific study of three right-wing friends of mine, none of them pundits, asking them the question, "What do you think of Obama's decision to have Rick Warren deliver his inaugural convocation?" Here were the responses:
I'm not too sure yet ... On the one hand, he is trying to keep some of the dissatisfied Republicans he obviously picked up in this past election. On the other hand, the reaction from the LGBT community shows that Obama will find himself all too often ticking off either his political base OR America at large as he tries to do this.
I am mildly amused by the idea that some liberals are disappointed in Obama already.
I imagine he [Warren] would have a lot of good things to say and I will take him over Obama's pastors any day!
If that's anger, then Mister Rogers had an anger problem. I'm just not sure E.J.'s on target that "so many" on the right are upset with Warren. And unfortunately, his celebration of Warren kind of hangs on the equivalence of outrage—on the idea that Obama and Warren have both shown courage in bucking their supporters' wishes, and that Obama, in choosing Warren, is approving not of the politics of evangelical Christianity as they traditionally have been, but as they could be:
Warren appears to be genuinely interested in broadening evangelical Christianity's public agenda. In a recent interview with Steve Waldman of Beliefnet.com, Warren compared gay marriage to "an older guy marrying a child," and to "one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage." But he also called upon evangelicals to be "the social change leaders in our society" engaged with "poverty and disease and charity and social justice and racial justice."
Obama wants to encourage this move, which would be good for him and good for progressive politics. Fear that Obama's analysis is exactly right is why so many conservatives are so angry with Warren for blessing the new president's inaugural. Although I support gay marriage, I think that liberals should welcome Obama's success in causing so much consternation on the right.
Let's see Warren make a few moves that do provoke a little consternation on the right, and then we can be impressed. (E.J. actually offers some good ideas in his column.)
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So Rick Warren is going to give the inaugural prayer? Rick Warren, Jerry Falwell in sheep’s clothing, the leader of the Saddleback Church (megachurch, actually, with satellite campuses and broadcast sermons and services), who, as Michelle Goldberg puts it so pleasantly in The Guardian:
He is a man who compares legal abortion to the Holocaust and gay marriage to incest and paedophilia. He believes that Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and other non-Christians are going to spend eternity burning in hell. He doesn't believe in evolution. He recently the social gospel—the late 19th- and early 20th-century Protestant movement that led a religious crusade against poverty and inequality—as "Marxism in Christian clothing.
Or as Linda Hirshman noted on the WAM listserv (I’m posting this with her permission):
Rick Warren’s site for educating preachers, Pastor.com, has a long essay on why women should submit to their husbands. Here’s the money line: "The Greek word for 'submit' is hupotasso. Hupo means "under" and tasso means "to place in order." The compound word hupotasso means "to place under or in an orderly fashion." Paul didn't dislike women, he liked order! He advocated order in the church, order in government, order in business, and, yes, order in the home.
There have been a lot of heartbroken comments about this on change.gov.
Barack, please, say you respect women—and nonevangelicals—more than this. Please?
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Like Dahlia amd E.J., I'm not thrilled with Obama's selection of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the inauguration, given Warren's opposition to gay marriage and many of his other views. At a time of high divorce rates and increased infidelity—and I'm talking about hetereosexuals, who are the real threat to the institution of marriage—I find it almost comically perverse that conservatives are against a group of people who so earnestly want to form committed, long-term, stable relationships sanctioned by God.
Indeed, when I recently moved temporarily to Dallas, my way of finding an Episcopal church for me and my daughter was to Google "gay," "bishop," "New Hampshire," and "Dallas." And sure enough, I quickly found the one congregation where every priest on the staff had supported Gene Robinson, and I feel right at home. But it did gnaw at me at the time that I just wanted to be preached to by the converted. After all, were I more committed to gay and lesbian rights, wouldn't I have joined precisely those Episcopal congregations where the issue is still an open wound—and believe you me, there are plenty to choose from in North Texas—and tried to persuade my less-enlightened congregants to see the light? I took the easy way out.
In this one sense, I do have grudging respect for Obama’s choice of Warren. Yes, it’s clearly a political calculation—but political in a good sense. I do believe Obama is genuinely trying to create dialogue with those who disagree with him in hopes of bringing a few more wayward souls along. If he can get even a few evangelicals to drop their active opposition to gay rights—to become more agnostic, so to speak, on this one issue—then that might, in fact, further the cause more than I'm doing on Sundays by kneeling, smug and self-satisfied, next to my fellow liberal parishioners.
Obama did, after all, actively campaign on bringing people together, and I remember at least thinking I supported that idea during the election. While I am sinfully spiteful enough after the damage of the Bush years to wish this unity would now take place under dark of night (or maybe involve issues I care less about), so long as Obama continues to push hard for equal rights for all Americans as a matter of policy, I have less of a problem with his otherwise entirely symbolic olive branch to Warren. However, if the result of such good-faith efforts is to provide an opportunity for right-leaners like Rachael to tar Obama again with Jeremiah Wright, then never mind: Bring back those good ole partisan politics.
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Obama hasn't banished anyone, Dahlia, and that's what's giving us such agita. (Well, not all of us; Sara has casually lumped pro-lifers like me in with the "anti-gay bigots'' that those who are on the side of tolerance and inclusion must guard against and try to get disinvited.) When Obama ran on bringing together all Americans, did you who are horrified that he's chosen Rick Warren to offer the inaugural benediction think he meant only the right-thinking, left-leaning people you would be perfectly comfortable around—and no figgy pudding for dissidents?
Obama nation is not going to work that way, and his inauguration won't be that kind of party. Warren is not my brand of (Godly) vodka, either, but so what? Noreen, Jim Wallis is my favorite evangelical, too. But when you wish that someone who cared more about poor people than Warren does had been picked instead, whom are you thinking of who "reverse tithes" as he does, keeping 10 percent of what he makes and giving 90 percent to those in need? Did you assume that because he's a conservative evangelical minister, he doesn't care about poor people?
Among those who see Warren as a hater is, of course, Christopher Hitchens, whose umpteenth diatribe hating on believers is thought perfectly fair and funny, just Hitchens being Hitchens hahaha. But directed at any other group of people, Slate wouldn't dream of running even one such screed. And if Obama makes all of us confront our biases, then that's just one more reason I thank God he got elected.
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A post from Hanna Rosin, en route to parts tropical:
I have to take a break from my vacation to object to this liberal groupthink. We elected Obama partly because he is able to talk to people with different views. Our standards for hearing out a religious leader should not be: Does he believe everything we believe? It should be: Is he willing to talk to the other side? Many months ago, Rick Warren gave the stage over to Obama—showing a form of open-mindedness from an evangelical leader we haven't seen since Billy Graham. Now it's Obama's turn to reciprocate. Your strategy—E.J. and others—would involve pretending evangelicals don't exist. And what good would that do?
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Hello to all the XX women—major fan here. I'll be guest-blogging with you for a week, and I'm thrilled to join such an august set of old friends and admired colleagues. So thrilled, actually, I'm buying everybody a round of the "spam, egg, rice and seaweed Hawaiian specialty" that we now know our new president loves. Look for it in the mail, and please warn your letter carriers.
Before we move on to, say, the hot "Baby Alive" doll trend (" 'Be careful,' reads the doll's promotional literature, 'just like real life, sometimes she can hold it until she gets to the 'potty' and sometimes she can't'"), I do want to say I think Hanna's on to something when she calls Obama's Rick Warren move "tokenism." It is a token gesture, and that's exactly what makes it irritating. For what seems like ages, liberals have dutifully swallowed the lesson that America is a center-right country, way more in line with Warren than with Wallis; that the bulk of Americans regard liberal values with suspicion; and that any Democrat who aspires to national leadership has to mince around either shading his liberalism (think of Bill Clinton and Don't Ask Don't Tell) or mounting grand conciliatory gestures toward the other side's values (think of John Kerry's attempts to look militant). This is a pretty broad phenomenon: In my day job at the New Republic magazine, I often write about Congress, and while hoofing around the country to cover congressional races this fall I was struck—as I was in 2006, too—by how far the infinitely adaptable red-district Democratic candidates go to demonstrate their sympathies with conservative mores, while the Republican candidates tend to feel far less pressed to make those kinds of adaptations or token gestures. (George W. Bush sure didn't see the need to tap Gene Robinson or Katharine Jefferts Schori to deliver his inaugural invocation.)
Of course, it's nice that many Democrats try to rise above dogma and pitch themselves to a broader coalition. That's the Obama Doctrine, as much as anything is. But at a certain point, the frantic efforts to smooth conservative America's ruffled feathers get damned tedious. I think Rick Warren was that point for many.
And why the hotshot obsession? What with signing up first Hillary Clinton and now Warren, whom the Independent aptly called "the most popular religious figure in the US bar the Pope," Obama seems to be on a mission to get every American with ~20 million followers to stand next to him on a podium and authenticate the breathtaking range of his appeal. But I can't help wishing he had chosen somebody a little less garishly megawatt, for God's sake. Some slightly more obscure person of good works; somebody less political and less token; somebody more along the lines of Kirbyjon Caldwell during the W. years. That kind of choice, not Warren, would have been the real surprise.
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Melinda, you are precisely right that extreme right/left black/white thinking got us into this polarized, judgmental 2008 mess, and that Obama’s willingness to get beyond such thinking is exactly why so many of us were attracted to him. But isn’t the argument that Rick Warren must be a great man because he reverse tithes just as absolutist? Nobody (except maybe Hitchens) is suggesting that Warren hasn’t done extraordinary work toward relieving AIDS and poverty and global warming. But that doesn’t change the fact that not only does he not speak for all Americans, he also expressly rejects some of their very basic rights. We can debate about whether the right to marry someone you love constitutes a basic right. But—and here is where Hanna and I probably differ—I don’t think Warren is really interested in having that kind of argument.
I also think it’s not quite fair to claim that any criticism of Warren represents some kind of generalized anti-religious bias. Too many people of very deep faith don’t make Warren’s cut. That doesn’t make us religion-haters. It just means that you can’t call it “bringing people together” if you are honoring one group’s message while denigrating another’s.
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E.J., I gotta say, thank you for going through all the stages of grief re: Rick Warren so I didn't have to. Here's the thing: Really, who cares. It "sends a message"—nah, don't care. As Peggy Noonan said of Jeremiah Wright, I'm finding it hard to be truly upset about this one. Maybe just distracted by my upsetness over the questionable future regulators who will be "sending a policy" in the form of "trillions of dollars."
So the guy is a huge homophobe: Meh, sorry Barney, still don't care. As you yourself have so often observed—and I'm "addressing" Barney Frank here, for the record—"the average American is less homophobic than he thinks he's supposed to be and more racist than he's willing to admit." Why is this? Well, statistically, the average American knows at least a handful of gay people. The average American knows a handful of women who've had abortions. The average American does not think people in either camp are evil for what they have "done." The average American probably even empathizes with the pain involved in belonging to said camp in an America whose moral culture is dominated by guys like Rick Warren. But wait, let's talk about that for a sec: Rick Warren's book is called The Purpose-Driven Life. It is not called The Perverts and Babykillers Bringing the Country to Ruin. I am sure he has said a lot of ridiculous things, but has he ever likened Gay Pride parades to Murderer's Pride Parades a la Ted Haggard?
I'd like to hear the Rev. Michael Pfleger on this one. One of my favorite things about being raised in such an old and big and totally screwed-up religion is all the deviant and/or dissident clerics the Catholic Church has produced over the years, exposing on a grand and tragic and awesome scale the fallibility of humanity and the consciousness that instills in us the sense that there must be something bigger and more beyond just our own petty civilization, and we can glean what that bigger thing wants from us. My favorite at the moment is the late Father Bob Drinan, the anti-war Jesuit priest Frank replaced in Congress upon the request of a new Pope uneasy at the thought of a representative in the world's most important legislature who said of abortion "I think abortion is a terrible thing … except for women."
At some point I expect science will allow mothers to test prenatally for homosexuality, and some sort of epic crisis of conscience will force Christendom to see humanity in a more nuanced light, in part because we'll all have much more pressing matters to confront by that point, like the economic apocalypse and so on.
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Dahlia, you ask if there's a difference between Obama's choice of a "personal spiritual adviser" and the public and political act of picking Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation. I agree there's a difference, but probably not in a way that you will like.
If Obama had attended a quiet, out-of-the-way church that focused on helping its congregants achieve spiritual growth, one where the kindly old minister made house calls to the elderly and infirm, sure, it would be unkind to compare that person to Rick Warren. But if Obama had attended that kind of church, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Instead, he attended a church whose preacher sought out the spotlight and sold DVDs of sermons in which he preached anti-American views. And Obama had a 20-year relationship with that church. Isn't that lengthy commitment, however personal, more telling than a brief and symbolic political act?
Let's frame this another way: If the Republicans had nominated a candidate who attended Rick Warren's church for 20 years, would it have been fair to question that person's choice of spiritual adviser? (Heck, I'd have questioned it.)
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E.J.,
I agree. Obama’s decision to ask Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration shows exactly what happens when bipartisanship becomes an end in itself. The president-elect continues to confuse reaching across the aisle with being principled. Sometimes the principle is just too important to compromise. Both Obama and Warren are to be credited for reaching out across the chasm that separates liberals and evangelicals in America. Each has signaled a willingness to talk and—to their huge credit—to listen to ideas different from their own. But as you explain, Warren’s views on women, stem-cell research, and homosexuality are not moderate. He doesn’t even dress them up as moderate!
If Obama wanted to signal his continued respect for Warren and for religious Americans, he could have done so in a thousand ways that would have welcomed them into the tent, without banishing and insulting those already inside.
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Hey, wanna come over for some fruitcake and a long talk about Rick Warren? Me neither. But Dahlia, unless I've been blogging my blackouts, I never said he was a great man. I don't know what kind of man he is, other than one I mostly disagree with and will forever associate with my worst babysitter ever, who constantly lugged around his purpose-driven book, along with her other favorite volume, which was on how to make a fortune in 30 days. (Needless to say, her plan for raking in the big bucks did not involve providing excellent child care. And I saw her working at a Kinkos not too long ago.)
So where we differ is not so much on Warren himself, or over gay marriage, for that matter. It's not over censorship, as I'm sure we agree that the KKK can march around Skokie to their shriveled little hearts content and yay, odious speech. Though you think Obama's pick of Warren as official prayer-sayer is bad optics and I think it's great politics, even that isn't our real difference. Which is that I don't think opposing gay marriage automatically makes someone a bigot or a homophobe, and if I read you correctly, you do. But can you really write off the millions of people who read their Bible that way? (Don't they write off gay people?) Doubtless some do, but their traditional definition of marriage does not necessarily make them haters, does it? How could I view the Bible as (among other things) a cultural document and not see Bible readers as products of our various cultures, too?
The conservative Illinois town where I grew up (and where Obama not only lost to McCain in '08, but to ALAN KEYES for U.S. Senate in ‘04) was so lacking in diversity that we didn't have that much to work with, bias-wise, and the only conflict was the Christians versus the other Christians. Some of the neighbor kids who went to different churches were always letting us know that because we were Catholic (had not been baptized the right way, and had parents who drank and danced, though not as often as they would have liked) we were totally going to hell. So we'd run into the house - Oh no, so-and-so says we haven't been saved! -- and my Republican dad, whose greatest heartbreak in life is that he somehow wound up with the world's most liberal daughter - yes, everything really is relative -- never got the least bit worked up about our likely damnation, or ever, ever hit back: "That's what they believe,'' he'd say, and that would be that. Which was kind of frustrating at the time. But when I think now about what tolerance looks like, I do think of him shrugging and going, "That's what they believe,'' and I wish I were more like that.
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Well, Hanna, I don't think anyone is advocating censoring Warren. He has the same freedom to speak as does every other American, and certainly far more access to public forums. Nor do I think that failing to ask him to give the inaugural prayer would have been equivalent to pretending that evangelicals don't exist, any more than Reagan's failing to invite the late Rebbe Schneerson to give an inaugural prayer was equivalent to pretending that the Lubavitcher Chassidim didn't exist. Or more to Melinda's point, that Obama's failing to ask Christopher Hitchens to give the inaugural antiprayer is equivalent to pretending that atheists exist. Of course they exist. Of course they are free to preach, evangelize (which Hitchens does with particular enthusiasm), organize, and speak in the public square. Go forth. Multiply. Knock yourselves out in the marketplace of theological ideas.
The objection has been to giving an extremist-someone who thinks women who've had abortions were running concentration camps in their wombs, as Katha Pollitt put it so brilliantly in the L.A. Times-the honorary job of saying the nation's prayer over the presidency.
That said, over the course of this discussion, I have somehow talked myself into the other point of view. (Or maybe spending a weekend-long blizzard locked in the house with an energetic 5-year-old has just worn me down, and I'm willing to give in on anything that doesn't involve screechy toys. Is there a special circle of hell for screechy toy manufacturers and for "friends" who give said toys? This is my prayer: Please, God, let it be so!) Giving Rick Warren the temporary job of preacher-in-chief is an entirely symbolic scrap thrown to the right-wing evangelicals. In more important news, Obama appears to be ready to launch a reality-based science policy, to authorize stem-cell research, to lift the global gag rule on family planning services, to roll back Don't Ask Don't Tell, and to take similar actions on truly urgent issues. Warren's prayer won't actually have much particular public effect-except to give Obama his reverse "Sister Souljah" moment and the cover of appearing inclusive. Fine. Fine. Prez-elect, go play with whatever preacher you want to play with. I don't care, so long as I don't have to listen to the screechy toys.
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E.J.,
Let me start by saying that there is probably very little outside of abortion that the Rev. Rick Warren and I agree on. My righty-ness has more to do with political and economic conservatism than social issues. I am a staunch supporter of gay rights and gay marriage, and I think the best marriages are equal partnerships, not employer-employee relationships. I don't know what the afterlife will bring, but I doubt it's a Christians-only country club.
So I respect and share your concerns about the message President-elect Obama is sending by inviting Warren to do the inaugural invocation. But isn't there an interesting parallel here? Obama attended Trinity United and listened to its pastor, the infamous Rev. Jeremiah Wright, for 20 years. Jeremiah Wright, who is on tape saying, "God Damn America," who has claimed that the government created AIDS for the purpose of "genocide against people of color," and who just a few weeks ago marked the occasion of Pearl Harbor Day by calling it the anniversary of the United States dropping the bomb on Hiroshima.
Yet complaining about Obama's association with Wright was verboten during the election. Conservatives who raised the issue were viewed as intolerant, racist, or muckraking. It was a silly issue blown out of proportion and gave no indication of what kind of president Obama would be, we were told.
Personally, I'm no fan of extremism of any stripe. So I hope that everyone who is so up in arms about Warren right now can at least take a second and reconsider whether we righties were so wrong to complain about Wright.
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I honestly never thought I'd see the day when James Dobson stepped down. To me, he so perfectly encapsulated this moment in evangelical history, when conservative Christians feel simultaneously persecuted and entitled. To much of America, Dobson was revered as a kind of friendly living God, dispensing advice on all things family from his headquarters in Colorado Springs, through his books and radio shows. Then every once in a while, Dobson would step a big foot into secular politics, often with disastrous results.
Rick Warren is the closest Dobson has to a successor. Until he was embraced by Obama, Warren too operated as an outsider, keeping a low profile as he glad-handed around Washington. Dobson operated much more clumsily. He would declare someone—Gingrich, Bush—the next savior and then be bitterly disappointed when things didn't work out. He remained to the end baffled and angry about the outside world, despite his considerable influence in it.
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Today, the Smithsonian announced it has acquired "street artist" Shepard Fairey's now iconic HOPE portrait of Obama. A similar image of Obama by Fairey appeared on TIME's Person of the Year cover, as well. Unsurprisingly, Fairey isn't a big fan of Obama's selection of Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural invocation. "I understand that Obama is trying to appeal to conservatives and evangelicals," Fairey wrote on his Obey Giant Web site, "but this move is symbolically a slap in the face to many people." He continues, "I still think Obama is the best choice for president, but I can’t condone Warren’s involvement in Obama’s inauguration, no matter how insignificant it is." Therefore, Fairey is donating a "chunk of the proceeds from an inauguration poster of Obama I was asked to create to the movement to overturn Prop 8." Of course, Fairey isn't the only Obama-obsessed artist. In Chicago, graphic artist Ray Noland is painting up a storm of Obamas, including a piece featuring Obama attack dogs chasing down the disgraced Rod Blagojevich.
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Two things: First. A reader writes to chide me for using the word religious interchangeably with “right-wing evangelical” in my last post. Point well-taken. I didn’t mean to suggest that all religious Americans are represented by Rick Warren. Second, Rachael, surely there is a difference between Obama’s personal spiritual leader and the man he picks to bless the inauguration and his presidency? The choice of Warren in this case was a public and political act.
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I’m a bit disappointed by President Obama’s rude expurgation of contraceptive planning from the “economic recovery package”—as we’re being asked to call the stimulus bill that’s working its way through Congress. Perhaps I’m just not down with all the euphemism on tap this week: Why not just call “Republican skepticism” here on the Hill what it is—an attempt to derail the future expansion of health coverage, couched in a puritanical queasiness with contraception. Lisa Lerer reports Minority leader John Boehner asking: “How can you spend millions of dollars on contraceptives? How does that stimulate the economy?” Well, John—hot button-ness aside—birth control is a commodity bought and sold like any other.
I agree with EJ that in many cases (I felt this way about Rick Warren) progressives should attempt to see the forest, not the offending tree. But here, it’s not just a bunch of women begging for their crazy pills! The Democratic White House’s concession of rhetorical and political ground—about whether contraception (a better than average return on public investment) and other Medicaid assistance counts as “stimulus” or not—could have outsized effects on the future of the universal health coverage debate. Over at the Washington Independent, Lindsay Beyerstein makes roughly this point. Harold Pollack and Nicholas Beaudrot at TAP make it explicit: We’re now, the latter writes, subject to “rule by Republican hissy fit.”
Who knows whether it’s the public climate that requires lifting of the odious global gag rule to be done under cover of media darkness, or the lightweight status afforded to “women’s health” in general—but birth control represents an arm of the pharmaceutical industry that nets drugmakers over $5 billion annually—perhaps even in a recession. I imagine the investors of $5 billion in any other American industry could, presumably, expect some back-scratching, be it through money kicked into the search for a better product, or strenuous lobbying to ensure access to said product is available to American women—especially those planning families, and seeking “economic recovery” from the new Congress.
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Rachael, it's lovely to agree with you ... at least partly. I too am vastly in favor of contraception being available to all, and yet agree that it shouldn't be in the stimulus package.
I've long found it amusing that Viagra, but not contraception, is regularly covered by health insurance: Why should men's sexual pleasure be underwritten but not women's? I don't know whether Medicaid covers Viagra without a waiver (according to MSNBC, 27 states' Medicaid programs do cover contraception, but they had to seek a waiver to do it.) If yes, obviously contraception should be, too. And I agree that underwriting contraception for poor folks seems like a no-brainer-except for the radicals (and yes, they do exist) who believe that all sexual activity should lead to babies.
And yet like you, Rach, I humbly disagree with my admired friend Ruth Rosen's position ... although for different reasons. I don't have any economic philosophical objections to its inclusion: After all, this stimulus package includes money for food stamps, the GAO, the census, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, unnamed projects for the Department of Homeland Security, information technology projects for the Department of State... and what's most relevant, Medicaid. If the Obamites deem a project good for the country, it's in this bill.
So why do I disagree with Ruth? Because the White House is already showing incredible savvy in making controversial changes about women's health. I was wowed by the fact that the controversial global gag was repealed on Friday at about 4:45 p.m. ... perfect timing for missing the American news cycles. Thursday's and Friday's news cycles were dominated by Gitmo closing; Monday, the news media were all over the plan to back higher fuel-emissions standards, a big symbolic move on environmental policy. Obama slipped through his move to improve women's lives by allowing women's health providers to talk freely about all options without losing U.S. funding with no controversy. (If Rick Warren's ghastly inaugural prayer was a fig leaf for this repeal of the gag rule, well, it was worth it.)
That's why I don't mind seeing this particular, um, withdrawal from the stimulus package: because I'm guessing that the Obamamites are being savvy—taking this fight out of the public eye so that they can handle it in a better way.
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Susannah,
Thank you for sharing the news about Shepard Fairey and his famous Obama artwork. One thing that struck me right away was how he handled his displeasure that Obama selected Rick Warren to give the invocation. Instead of throwing a tantrum, he's going to take some of the earnings he's getting for an inaugural poster and donate them to the movement to overturn Prop 8 in California. It's a targeted response, and very smart and level-headed.
Which strikes me as a great contrast to the way some other artists—pop and rock musicians—behaved during the election. Heart, John Mellancamp, and others, upon learning that the McCain campaign had licensed their music to use at campaign rallies, stomped their feet and whined and sent cease-and-desist letters. Wouldn't it have been more appropriate, especially from these wealthy celebrities, had they said to themselves, "Wow. I'm not comfortable having made money from a politician whose views I don't share. Let me take that money and give it to a cause I believe in." It would have been more appropriate, but a cease-and-desist letter is free AND attracts attention.
Fairey's gesture, on the other hand, seems far more meaningful.