Faith Based Initiatives and the Sister Souljahing around
I have been seeing that the writers for The National Review have been, relatively respectfully really, claiming Barack Obama as someone who is “not pulling a Sister Souljah” — the focal point being his reluctance to cut ties with Jeremiah Wright, which was to suggest that Obama is, fretfully for them, an actual straight-ahead Liberal poised to win the White House.
Actually he’s a man who has surrounded himself with a number of corporate hacks, plucking up an economic advisor who loves Wal-Mart here and on from there. But leaving that aside, the Liberals are now fretting over some political manueverings. The most “Sister Souljah”est moment in terms of actual parallel with racial politics actually came with Obama speaking about the problems of delinquet black fathers spending all their time playing Play-Station, comments which I close my eye and imagine various white suburban exiles wanting to walk up to Obama and deliver a “Terrorist Fist Bump” for letting them maintain their stereotypes. His announcements over two of the Supreme Court decisions don’t much bother me, basically because I politically find them tenuable and agreeable. His weasle with FISA just depresses me.
But we now also see the odd spectacle of Obama coming out in favor of expanding Bush’s “Faith Based Initiative”s, a small program under Clinton, a large program of electioneering with political patronage under Bush. There are a few ways of looking at this — in this nation you have to burnish your Christian credentials and there’s a segment of the population that thinks Obama is Muslim. And I suppose it dovetails with Obama’s “Community Organizing” past and thus his vision of America. Heck — if he doesn’t simply use it as Bush has and just wield it as a Holy Tammany Hall unit, it may have its virtues. But it also strikes me that you can look at this with polls that show that Obama is poised to win 30 to 40 percent of the Evangelical vote, and news of his electioneering around Christian Rock Concerts. It is a poll number that makes one fretful, even if it is good news that the Evangelical Youth are looking beyond matters of the Gays and the Abortions to a larager scope, because it leads to a whole new group to pander to. (Kind of how I was weary when I saw that Obama was close in Indiana — increases the possibilities that Obama would tap Evan Bayh as his vice president, and we don’t want that.)