Gore for VP…?

Rob Kuttner at TAPPED explores the idea of Gore as Obama’s Vice Presidential nominee. Wouldn’t that be something?

The fact that former Virginia governor Mark Warner is delivering the keynote speech at the Democratic Convention is being taken as a sign that Kaine (also a former governor of Virgina) is out of the running. Apart from the fact that Evan Bayh is about as unexciting a candidate as one can imagine, he’d almost certainly end up being replaced in the Senate by a Republican. On Countdown they seemed to think that this made Joe Biden the front-runner, but others have said that having a white male deliver the keynote suggests that the VP may be a woman (Kansas governor Sebelius being the obvious choice). Of course, this is undercut by the fact that the presidential candidate isn’t a white male.

I like Biden better than Bayh or Kaine, but I’m not a fan, especially after last year’s bankruptcy bill. Sebelius would be a decent choice, but I’m really not sure that adding a woman as VP would do much to reach out to white working class men (who are supposed to be less comfortable with Obama). After all, it would feed the fear that white men have lost control of the country, a popular meme. Including Al Gore wouldn’t solve the “elitist” whine, of course. But Gore does bring a lot of positives. As Kuttner says

• Stature? Definitely.
• National security credibility? Check.
• Believable as president if need be? That, too.
• Boring? That was the old Gore, not the new one. (And compared to whom? Biden? Bayh?)
• Help carry a key state? Gore is in own unique state, and the regional effect has been overrated since LBJ.
• Upstage Obama? Funnily, doesn’t seem so.

Obama-Gore would be my dream ticket.  That’s for certain.

McCain, Clinton, Obama and the gas tax

John McCain proposed a temporary repeal of the 18 cent per gallon federal gas tax over the summer, when gasoline demand peaks.  The idea is that it would give consumers some relief from high gas prices at a time when prices tend to peak.  Hillary Clinton jumped on board, but realising that taxes on gasoline are used to build and repair roads and bridges, proposed that the revenue shortfall be made up through taxes on windfall profits by the oil companies.  Apart from making only a trivial difference to most consumers as envisioned, ($3.60 if you buy 20 gallons of gas), Saurabh explains why consumers are unlikely to see the full 18 cent reduction in prices.

Only Barack Obama has said something sensible on this issue – that these are short-term measures that do more harm than good (road construction, for example, generates a lot of jobs).  But none of them seem to have mentioned one key point – higher prices are good, because they reduce demand.  The higher prices of the “summer driving season” are due to the fact that people do a lot of driving in the summer.  The increase in consumption also increases greenhouse gas production.  Higher prices reduce demand, which, in turn, should moderate the spike in gas prices.  Higher prices also push consumers towards smaller, more fuel efficient vehicles.

It makes me wonder whether anyone has tried to determine what effect a repeal of the gas tax is likely to have on gas prices.  I wouldn’t be surprised if it resulted in higher gas prices.  It definitely will have a bad effect on greenhouse gas emissions.

Huckabee defends Wright

Mick Huckabee has come out in defense of Obama on Wright, and somewhat in defense of Wright himself.

[Obama] made the point, and I think it’s a valid one, that you can’t hold the candidate responsible for everything that people around him may say or do. You just can’t. Whether it’s me, whether it’s Obama…anybody else. But he did distance himself from the very vitriolic statements. Now, the second story. It’s interesting to me that there are some people on the left who are having to be very uncomfortable with what Louis Wright said, when they all were all over a Jerry Falwell, or anyone on the right who said things that they found very awkward and uncomfortable years ago. Many times those were statements lifted out of the context of a larger sermon. Sermons, after all, are rarely written word for word by pastors like Reverend Wright, who are delivering them extemporaneously, and caught up in the emotion of the moment. There are things that sometimes get said, that if you put them on paper and looked at them in print, you’d say “Well, I didn’t mean to say it quite like that.”

Via LizzyPop at dKos.

Obama’s speech

Sally Quinn on MSNBC called Obama’s speech “the most important speech on race since Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech” (although she prefaced it with “this might be hyperbole but…”)

One of the best bits, for me, was this

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

Sadly I missed it. Here’s the video at MSNBC.

Jeremiah Wright and the Prophet Jeremiah

Henry Neufeld has an interesting post comparing Jeremiah Wright with the Prophet Jeremiah.

The role of a prophet is to speak truth to power.   Devilstower at dKos also looks at Wright’s words in the context of the words of Jesus.

Manufactured crises

Pastor Dan writes

The fact is, America has postponed a necessary conversation on race for at least forty years. Jeremiah Wright makes white (and not a few black) people uncomfortable because he reminds them that America is not as morally pure as it would like to imagine itself as being. Nor is it as post-racial. Injustice, however ameliorated, is still daily a part of many lives. Until we are willing to face that truth, we can never truly leave the ghosts of our racial past behind. White Americans don’t like to hear that, and I don’t blame them.

Obama on Wright

Statements by the pastor of Barack Obama’s church, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, have ignited a bit of a firestorm, especially at TPM. It really didn’t strike me as comparable with McCain’s endorsements from Hagee and Parsley – McCain, after all, sought and welcomed the endorsements from that pair. Obama, on the other hand, is a member of the church that Wright pastors. After all – a church is a community, not (generally) a band of followers of one charismatic individual.

Writing at HuffPo today, Obama addressed the Wright issue. He begins with an outright rejection of Wright’s statements

The pastor of my church, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who recently preached his last sermon and is in the process of retiring, has touched off a firestorm over the last few days. He’s drawn attention as the result of some inflammatory and appalling remarks he made about our country, our politics, and my political opponents.

Let me say at the outset that I vehemently disagree and strongly condemn the statements that have been the subject of this controversy. I categorically denounce any statement that disparages our great country or serves to divide us from our allies. I also believe that words that degrade individuals have no place in our public dialogue, whether it’s on the campaign stump or in the pulpit. In sum, I reject outright the statements by Rev. Wright that are at issue.

Some people have said that by remaining members of the church, they are somehow endorsing Wright. Obama writes

The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation. When these statements first came to my attention, it was at the beginning of my presidential campaign. I made it clear at the time that I strongly condemned his comments. But because Rev. Wright was on the verge of retirement, and because of my strong links to the Trinity faith community, where I married my wife and where my daughters were baptized, I did not think it appropriate to leave the church.

The key question here is “what is a church?” While it varies from denomination to denomination and from church to church, by an large a church is a community, not a group of devotees of a charismatic preacher. Of course, this is a continuum – most televangelists are the opposite – the preacher is the focus, and often, the church is treated as if it were private property. But this isn’t the case in most denominations – whether the church is connectional (and all property is owned by the broader denomination) or congregational (where the church owns its own property and chooses to associate with the broader denomination), the church is the functional unit. The church employs the pastor…sometimes the local church actually hires and fires the pastor, sometimes it is the denomination that does so. A good pastor can attract and hold crowds. And sometimes, when a pastor leaves, a portion of the congregation goes with him or her.

The United Church of Christ is congregational, so Trinity UCC actually employed Wright. And Wright was pastor there for a long time – his Wikipedia article says that he was pastor for 36 years. It goes without saying that he was an important part of shaping that congregation. And from what Obama says, Wright probably played a significant role in his decision to join and remain in the church

I knew Rev. Wright as someone who served this nation with honor as a United States Marine, as a respected biblical scholar, and as someone who taught or lectured at seminaries across the country, from Union Theological Seminary to the University of Chicago. He also led a diverse congregation that was and still is a pillar of the South Side and the entire city of Chicago. It’s a congregation that does not merely preach social justice but acts it out each day, through ministries ranging from housing the homeless to reaching out to those with HIV/AIDS.

Most importantly, Rev. Wright preached the gospel of Jesus, a gospel on which I base my life. In other words, he has never been my political advisor; he’s been my pastor. And the sermons I heard him preach always related to our obligation to love God and one another, to work on behalf of the poor, and to seek justice at every turn.

But a church is a community, it’s a family. It’s far more than a single individual. Obama’s decision to remain a member of his church is in no way comparable to McCain’s decision to seek out the endorsement of bigots.

$55 million?!

The Obama campaign reports that it raised $55 million in February.

That’s just a mind-boggling amount of money.

Texas

Truly beautiful, especially the stadium shot.

H/T dKos

Political must-reads

Josh Marshall talks about McCain’s repeated problems with the truth, and some of the issues he may have with getting out of public financing for the Republican primary campaign.  (Paul Kiel has a more detailed analysis).

Barbara O’Brien looks at several articles that analyse the challenges of being a woman/being black in a US presidential campaign, and others that talk about “what went wrong” with Hillary’s campaign.