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Mixing Church and State,
Obama’s Greatest Mistake
By William Finucane
This is a shocker.
Shortly after edging a victory over New York Senator
Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama
started to spell out his campaign platform planks.
What was the number-one item in Obama’s platform?
He wants to expand the plan that George W. Bush began
to use churches to fight domestic ills like hunger, homelessness, health issues
and the like.
It is apparently Obama’s “moral center” of his
administration, he named it the Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood
Partnerships.
But this flies in the face of a republican democracy.
How?
Simple: It takes the responsibility for formulating
public programs away from the government and shifts it to the churches.
Surely the government will make noises about its own
part in pushing some $500 million per year, at the very start, into clergymen’s
hands, all the while assuring Americans that this is not a melding of church and
state. The way Mr. Obama paints this picture is that marrying public government
and private churches is the only way to tackle the moral monsters of hunger,
sickness, homelessness and lack of jobs.
That is a remarkably short-sighted view from a man who
purports to have mastered the long range concepts of American democracy.
A more proper way of viewing these long-standing
American problems is to propose programs such as President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt floated in the 1930s. These were not carefully shaped to begin
addressing problems at hand; they were direct stabs at creating solutions. If
they failed, Roosevelt would openly admit it and try something else.
What Roosevelt did was to call on all Americans to
share a great leap toward national solutions.’
And, yes, he told the rich they would have to pay more.
Then, as now, two Americas existed: the opulent moneyed
and the dirt poor.
What really needs to be balanced is national income.
Tax law has to be reformed before that happens. All
else is show. If Obama really wants to attack America’s huge imbalance in
wealth, he will have to aim right at those with the big pockets and take them
on.
He has to take some of that money from the bloated and
give it to those who truly need it. To succeed, he will need the needy and
middle classes to stand with him. That is not a religious stand, it is plain
good government. And since the bloated moneyed class has satiated its greed
through every type of market manipulation and high stakes gambling with housing
and other financial underpinnings of the nation during the Bush ‘Open House for
Business’ years, this is not income redistribution; it is long overdue penalty’s
upon those who have happily looted the nation at the expense of the majority of
Americans.
Fact is, Obama hammered himself into the national
psyche with a thunderous speech at the last Democratic presidential convention,
speaking of many of these very issues, which average people know well but have
been powerless to halt during the GOP domination of public life.
Just about everybody loves the cadenced, eloquent
rhetoric of Mr. Obama, but now it’s time to see some actual, Democratic policies
that will roll back the effects of the grasping Bush years.
Ringing church doorbells and giving them money so that
they can manage programs for the most desperately needy raises all manner of new
problems: America therefore gains a lot of new troubles without solving the old
ones.
Well, maybe Obama has other reasons for this call to
the churches. Perhaps he wanted to show himself a bit more right wing than he
has seemed in the past; walking beside the churches might somehow make him look
more like Bush and company. But why? Aside from the fact that such an effort is
transparent to everyone, it reveals an unexpected shallowness. Everyone knows
that Bush played off religion as a diversion while his minions were undermining
the Constitution and looting the country. In eight years they have driven the
nation into the ground while hiding behind religion.
Maybe Obama was hoping this call to churches would help
counterbalance his troubled past with rabble rouser Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.,
who made Obama sound like some sort of fringe candidate; of course most people
don’t believe Obama is that brand of contender, but trying to deflect right wing
criticism and exaggerations by reaching out to all religions with an extension
of Bush policies only makes him look like a fool.
Trying to be something of a ‘regular guy’ to
churchgoing Americans isn’t even self-serving; it won’t win over the skeptical
and it will turn away the hopeful.
This has nothing to do with America’s gargantuan
national woes; this has everything with getting elected. Obama is leaning right
to capture wavering Republicans and Independents. But he has raised doubts among
the Democrats, all the long-time Democrats and those that will be Democrats this
year, after watching the GOP ruin the nation.
America wants a Democrat in the White House, not a
veiled Republican. Its leader has to show bold moves.
Republicans have practically dismantled Roosevelt’s
programs and a hard hitting Democrat needs to fight for them again. It is vital
that Mr. Obama remember that it was the Republicans who were in office during
the decade – the 1920’s – that led to the Great Depression!
July, 2008
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