Zack Exley

Bob Carlton’s Obama book 15 November, 2008

My friend Bob Carlton and Ariele Gentiles just published an Obama book called “An American Story” geared toward youth. I’ve seen parts of the book from when Bob was working on it, and I think this is a great read. Give this book to your Christian friends who are apprehensive about the new president.

The book does not advocate for Obama’s policies, but simply tries to introduce his story as a human being and to explore the relationship he has to his faith.

From the promotional materials:

No life story is universal, but the journey of this young American born in the 49th state resonates with the life experience of millions of other young women and men. Someone who wants to find his place in a family where he is visibly different: chubby where others are thin, dark-skinned where others are light. A young person living in a distant land searches and finds new friends, a new language and a heartbreaking lesson about his identity in the pages of an American magazine. A fatherless son struggling to gain a sense of identity and an understanding of how vital parenting is to the families and communities we live in. A young black man struggling for acceptance at an institution of privilege, where he finds himself growing so angry and disillusioned at the world around him that he turns to alcohol and drugs. A searching adult who turns to Jesus for deeper meaning, finding an example that sets him on a course of a lifetime dedicated to feeding the hungry and healing the sick, always prioritizing what his Savior called “the least of these” over the powerful.

Barack Obama is the person who has traveled that journey, from Hawaii to the cusp of the highest political office in the United States of America. Obama’s story is one of historic “firsts,” from the schools he attended, to the jobs he has taken, to the legislation he has championed. His story is also one of reconciliation, as a son growing up without a father, as an African American in a country that still struggles with racism, as someone who struggles to work beyond the stiffling boundaries of partisian politics. For this man who loves building bridges and playing basketball, there is no greater calling than that of serving the common good, working to change hearts and change structures.

The Defining Moment 12 November, 2008

Reading about FDR in The Defining Moment by Jonathan Alter. It’s an account of the sweeping first hundred days of his presidency. The first half of the book is biographical and a look at his road to the White House.

A few things that struck me:

• Bush gets a lot of criticism for believing God put him on Earth to become president. FDR believed the same thing.
• Bush gets a lot if criticism for allowing advisors to argue and then mixing and matching their advice resulting in often incoherent policy. FDR did the same thing.
• Bush had a strong handler who was arguably more responsible for his career than Bush was himself. So did FDR.
• Bush was seen as a lightweight intellectually, was chronically misunderestimated and was never fully accepted or respected inside his own social caste. Same with FDR.
• Bush played fast and loose with the constitution. FDR played faster and looser.

All those similarities didn’t even strike me until I just started writing them.

Other interesting things:

• FDR’s New Deal and economic policies were mainly created on the fly once he was in office.
• He had essentially all the same positions as Hoover on economics until he got into office.
• He scorned conventional wisdom and created a highly non-traditional “brain trust” who helped formulate his economic policies.
• Part of the reason New Deal investment all went to infrastructure and not industry was because of certain ideas about how the economy worked. They largely left “productive” industry alone. (Until the war, of course, which is what really got the US out of the depression).

And that’s just after the first half of the book. I haven’t even gotten into the 100 days yet. It’s a great read — I highly recommend it.

Couldn’t hurt to check 10 November, 2008

I don’t check my blog traffic stats very often. But I looked last night and saw a big bump on November 5. I thought it must have been just post-election excitement that probably hit all blogs, because there was no single source of referring traffic. But this morning I thought to look more closely at the search terms. There was a whole lot of Obama action going on.

I guess a lot of people had heard the rumor and thought it couldn’t hurt to check and see what Google had to say about similarities between Obama and…The Antichrist! (Or, oddly, Slovoj Zizek.)

Actually, if you read through all of them, you’ll see that maybe half are people looking for arguments (perhaps to convince worried friends?) that Obama is NOT the anti-Christ.

Here are all the search terms including “Obama” that brought people to the blog on Nov. 5:

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Maybe Dawkins just has a serious case of OCD 1 November, 2008

Richard Dawkins just quit his chair for Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University to explore whether fairy tales ruin children.

What’s so funny here is that he is turning even more into the mirror image of angry fundamentalist Christians who want to stamp out any delusion that’s not their own. For them too, unorthodox thinking is forbidden even for children. Dawkins says that scary fantasies are even more harmful than physical abuse for children. Maybe he could make a united front with Christian fundamentalists who would like to ban Harry Potter and cancel Halloween.

John brought up this quote from Dawkins’ Climbing Mount Improbable that shows the extremes to which he goes with this line of thinking. Seriously, doesn’t it seem like this just might be a case of someone who has lost all perspective and become obsessed with stamping his own sense of order on every mind in the world, even six year old minds?

I was driving through the English countryside with my daughter Juliet, then aged six, and she pointed out some flowers by the wayside. I asked her what she thought wildflowers were for. She gave a rather thoughtful answer. “Two things,” she said. “To make the world pretty, and to help the bees make honey for us.” I was touched by this and sorry I had to tell her it wasn’t true. (Pg. 256)

How Running a Campaign Is Like Building a Megachurch 30 October, 2008

Bill Bishop in Slate on megachurches and campaigns:

The model for the modern political campaign is the evangelical megachurch.

This isn’t a partisan observation. Both George Bush in 2004 and Barack Obama adopted the basic organizing techniques that many ministers have been using since the 1970s to grow their churches to stupendous size. And why not? They work.

The megachurch was built on an idea born in India by an American missionary. Donald McGavran spent half a century overseas, and he used much of that time to discover the way churches could convert large numbers of people to Christianity. McGavran observed that converts didn’t come to the church one by one. They came in groups. And those groups were socially coherent—castes, villages, or families. The key to church growth wasn’t in bringing individuals to Christianity but in converting groups, peoples. And these groups would come if they were appealed to as a “homogenous unit.”

“The individual does not think of himself as a self-sufficient unit, but as a part of the group,” McGavran wrote in this 1955 book, The Bridges of God. People don’t want to come to a church where they hear a different language or eat strange foods. “Men like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic, or class barriers,” McGavran wrote. McGavran said ministers needed to understand the culture of their constituents and recommended that they use the insights of anthropology to tailor their appeals to homogenous groups.

Read the whole article.

HT: My Dad!

Statistical Dead-heat among born again voters 23 October, 2008

New poll from The Barna Group:

Among born again voters there is a statistical dead-heat: 45% plan to vote for Sen. McCain, while 43% expect to cast a ballot for Sen. Obama.

See the whole story here.

Socialist Showdown! 21 October, 2008

In an airport. I can see the screen, but can’t hear the sound. Lou Dobbs’ head and neck are floating and jiggling over the words, “Socialist Showdown! McCain attacks Obama.”

Oh wait, Palin is on now and her voice cuts through the din of the airport crowd. I can hear her saying, “That’s SOCIALISM!”

Do people even know what that is anymore?

When I worked as a union organizer, workers used used to stop in the middle of describing the abuse they were receiving in their (capitalist) jobs and say, “You know, it’s like Communism in there!”

Now Obama is getting his rebuttal in the CNN ticker. It says, “Obama: McCain controlled by defunct ideology.”

So it’s Socialism vs. a defunct ideology, I guess.

Jesus for president attack ad 20 October, 2008

If Jesus ran for president…the attack ad! This is pretty funny:

Some updates & ideas 5 October, 2008

Everyone’s got their laptop out in Dublin.
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I never thought I would defend America’s two-party system over the European multi-party system, or the U.S. personal-leader politics over the European party-accountability politics…but…here’s what I realized talking to a group of Irish politics bloggers at a forum graciously hosted by the European Commission yesterday:

In the absence of any parties that stand boldly for real change, the European multi-party+disciplined-party system is totally powerless to produce even the appearance of revolt against the status quo. I’m pretty sure that every Western European nation is stuck in exactly that miserable situation right now (correct me if I don’t know about something exciting that’s happening in Andorra or Lichtenstein). The small left parties are just too rudderless ideologically (and often too timid as well) to lead. The big parties are all decisively tied to the “Washington Consensus” just like the Democrats and Republicans (i.e. the economy as it exists today is the best we can do, just regulate a little big smarter!). And so they’ve been getting nothing, year after year.

And because the party leadership contests are for a very small group of dues-paying members (in even the most democratic of the European parties), there’s no way for the people to call forth a maverick against a party’s establishment.

The difference in America is that the American people — and their desire for “hope” “change” or “power” (as in, ‘you have the…’) — can conjure up exciting individual candidates who represent those things. Dean, Obama, and yes Ron Paul too. Our bizarre system makes it possible. The Irish bloggers kept charging (good naturedly, of course!) that our politics are all about personality. But again, I found myself oddly defending our system. Dean, Obama — and certainly Ron Paul — are/were not primarily about personality. Definitely not. Their campaigns were/are truly about change. Our poor European brothers and sisters are stuck with a system that won’t grant that to them right now.
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I think the Financial Times is using the word “bailout” in their U.S. editions and “nationalize” in their UK & Irish editions — same as they do with “Fries” and “Chips,” “Custom” and “Bespoke.”
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After flooding the world as economic immigrants for two centuries, and then living off the cheap labor of East European immigrants for two decades one decade, Ireland seems to be bubbling up a little bit with an American-style anti-immigrant frenzy thanks to the scent of economic downturn.
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AND HERE ARE A COUPLE IDEAS:

Shane Claiborne & Ben Cohen (of Ben & Jerry’s…watch the Oreo cartoon!) should go on tour together pitching a movement to disband the military as a way of making up for this new trillion we just gave away to careless wealthy investors. I was reading about how Obama is saying he won’t be able to implement his whole energy revolution because of how broke were are now. (But we already infinitely broke — so what difference does it make??)

After I read that, it occurred to me that we may actually have a moment when the American people would favor radical disarmament. First of all, we’re broke — but I already said that. Second, we are going broke paying for the military, and we can’t even win little wars decisively. Third, if we got into a big war with Russia or China, then the whole planet goes up in nuclear smoke. And we’ve known that for a while. Something about Iraq, the rise of China & Russia, etc… just seems to be making all this settle into the American consciousness. We’d be a lot better off if we made friends with everyone from the position of relative strength that we’re in now — rather than continue to piss people off while we are slowing becoming the but of their jokes for our worthless dollar and really frumpy suits. FOURTH: The Christians! Tons of ‘em, even in really conservative churches, turning into total pacifists by the thousands.
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Poor Iceland! Like 250,000 people live there. 1/1000th of America! They just did this really crazy thing with their currency. They thought it was so smart at the time. But they just realized it was really dumb. So all these folks stranded out there in Iceland feeling really rich living off tourism and the U.S. military for quite a while are suddenly starting to feel poor because they’re currency is crashing like the Thai Bhat in 1998.

So here’s what they should do — just a crazy internet idea. Icelanders should offer to put up any world citizen in their home for a weeklong vacation next summer if they will just buy $100 Iceland Kroners. It’s such a small country, and a trip to Iceland would be so cool, that maybe it would actually work!
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William Woodruff! Why didn’t I know about this guy??

Why won’t McCain meet with evangelical leaders 27 September, 2008

This is a really weird thing. I’ve heard this too on the grape vine that McCain won’t meet with *any* evangelical leaders. Back when he was really struggling, right after he won the primary, he wouldn’t even call back a group of evangelical conservatives who stuck their necks out a little bit to endorse him. Did the Hagee thing burn him so bad that he’s afraid to ever run into that again? Meanwhile, even many conservative evangelical leaders are getting chances to talk to Obama and have the campaign on speed dial in the spirit of “Advise everyone, endorse no one.”

I think that if the McCain campaign had been more open, then people like Richard Cizik would have restrained themselves more from criticizing McCain’s policies.

This from an interview on BeliefNet with Cizik:

The McCain campaign has beefed up its religious outreach efforts recently. How is their evangelical outreach going?

We put in a request with the McCain campaign and it was never responded to. Many figures in the Republican Party have reached out to the campaign stating their concern that the candidate has not reached out to evangelical leaders, but it went nowhere. And since we’re so deep into the campaign, we can only assume that we’re not going to get an answer. We had some people, including a governor and a major party official, who said to the campaign, “I think you should meet with some of these evangelicals.” I have subsequently interpreted that they didn’t think they needed to because they had an idea of their own and that maybe that was Sarah Palin.