Obama Picks Two Vice Presidential Candidates
Posted on | August 31, 2008 | Comments Off
Republican and Democratic.
We are in the age of the corporation and locked into the world of the marketers. Decisions are not based on principle, but on persuasiveness.
Before the Republican Revolution of the 1990s, there was a minimum level of civility in political campaigns. It was not something someone decided, but the indecency had yet to be imagined. Imagined as a possibility or as something acceptable.
A clear indication of that changing was the Swiftboat ads in the 2004 campaign. The big lie. Goebbels-inspired. Two candidates. One a decorated war hero. The other reasonably suspected as an absent-without-leave National Guardsman. Yet veterans. Veterans. Veterans campaigned that the war hero was less than the Guardsman. The absentee Guardsman. And John McCain was a player in this drama. At first, he railed against the ads, demanding that President Bush disavow them and demand their withdrawal. And then silence. The next interplay between Bush-McCain was a hug. That was the turning point. McCain sold his soul. The Faustian moment. He turned his back on truth and principle. He wanted to be the president of the United States. And in that turn both lost the reason he could have made a great president and gained the likelihood that he would become the president. Most good drama involves a heavy dose of irony.
Before this year, the parties mostly let their opponents have their week of attention during their respective national conventions. Not this time. The Republicans have no sense of decency. Of fair play. There is no greatness in their souls. And how did Obama pick the Republican vice-presidential nominee? He chose a man as his nominee. If he had chosen the senator from New York, or the governor of Kansas, who knows what McCain would have done. But Obama chose a man, and in order to pick up the political leavings, McCain chose a woman. It’s marketing, not principle.
In most tales of heroes, if there is a substantial change of character, the move is from weak to strong. In tragedies, the reverse is true. John McCain survived the horror of imprisonment in Vietnam, and surrendered to political ambitions.
[EDIT: added 08/31/08]
I forgot my signature lines. I don’t have those automatically added by the blog programming. I want to write them myself. For authenticity. And my forgetting them leads me to think that this entry was less than joyful and less than loving. I think both those things are true. There it is.
Walk well. God is love. And I am perplexed to no end that God might love George W. Bush as much as he loves me. But he does. Humility is so confusing.
