The Spectacle Blog
Andrew Sullivan cites excerpts from an article about Obama speaking about faith in public, and argues:
What Obama might represent is a twist on Bush's
"compassionate conservatism." That label was always a way to
disguise well-meaning big government liberalism. Obama, unlike
Bush, need not pretend otherwise. He can raise taxes on the
successful as a Biblical injunction. He can increase even further
the reach of the welfare state because Jesus is calling him to. It
may be that history records the Bush presidency as the breakthrough
for a revival of domestic liberalism - because Bush conceded that
"when someone's hurt, government has got to move." I'm not
surprised many Democrats are now exploiting that concession.
I agree with Sullivan, and just expanding on this, one point I make
in an upcoming magazine piece on Obama for our July/August issue is
that he shrewdly realizes that appealing to faith is actually an
effective way to advance progressive ideas. In his book
The Audcacity of Hope, Obama writes, "Scrub
language of all religious content, and we forfeit the imagery and
terminology through which millions of Americans understand both
their personal morality and social justice."
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More Blog Posts by Philip Klein
http://spectator.org/blog/2007/06/19/obama-and-religion
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