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E.J., I gotta say, thank you for going through all the stages of grief re: Rick Warren so I didn't have to. Here's the thing: Really, who cares. It "sends a message"—nah, don't care. As Peggy Noonan said of Jeremiah Wright, I'm finding it hard to be truly upset about this one. Maybe just distracted by my upsetness over the questionable future regulators who will be "sending a policy" in the form of "trillions of dollars."
So the guy is a huge homophobe: Meh, sorry Barney, still don't care. As you yourself have so often observed—and I'm "addressing" Barney Frank here, for the record—"the average American is less homophobic than he thinks he's supposed to be and more racist than he's willing to admit." Why is this? Well, statistically, the average American knows at least a handful of gay people. The average American knows a handful of women who've had abortions. The average American does not think people in either camp are evil for what they have "done." The average American probably even empathizes with the pain involved in belonging to said camp in an America whose moral culture is dominated by guys like Rick Warren. But wait, let's talk about that for a sec: Rick Warren's book is called The Purpose-Driven Life. It is not called The Perverts and Babykillers Bringing the Country to Ruin. I am sure he has said a lot of ridiculous things, but has he ever likened Gay Pride parades to Murderer's Pride Parades a la Ted Haggard?
I'd like to hear the Rev. Michael Pfleger on this one. One of my favorite things about being raised in such an old and big and totally screwed-up religion is all the deviant and/or dissident clerics the Catholic Church has produced over the years, exposing on a grand and tragic and awesome scale the fallibility of humanity and the consciousness that instills in us the sense that there must be something bigger and more beyond just our own petty civilization, and we can glean what that bigger thing wants from us. My favorite at the moment is the late Father Bob Drinan, the anti-war Jesuit priest Frank replaced in Congress upon the request of a new Pope uneasy at the thought of a representative in the world's most important legislature who said of abortion "I think abortion is a terrible thing … except for women."
At some point I expect science will allow mothers to test prenatally for homosexuality, and some sort of epic crisis of conscience will force Christendom to see humanity in a more nuanced light, in part because we'll all have much more pressing matters to confront by that point, like the economic apocalypse and so on.
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Emily Y., I quite agree that we haven't seen the last of the rev.; he'll be with us through November and beyond. But in trying to prove that Obama couldn't stand up to the Attack Machine, Hillary put him through a pretty good simulation and wound up proving that he can so—because he just did. I didn't read Bill Clinton's body language quite the way you did; no question his wife's dramatic interpretation of gun-totin', hawg-sloppin', beer-drinkin' Amuricans was sub-par—but to me, 42 just seemed checked out. In fact, the red face, nobody's-home expression and mouth gaping open were kind of worrying.
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David Brooks raises an excellent question in his column today about demographics and the Democrats: I understand why affluent, college educated voters are drawn to Barack Obama, but how did Hillary Clinton become the candidate of the working class voter? She went to Wellesley and Yale Law School. People in Arkansas found her snooty and bizarre. She didn't shop at Wal-Mart, she served on the board. There was the "cookie baking" flap. In the years since the White House she and her husband have taken in more than $100 million and their best friends are billionaires. Brooks offers only, "Clinton's talk of fighting and resilience plays well down market", but is that it? Whatever it is, Hillary has wrought an absolutely extraordinary political transformation.
And what is everyone thinking about Obama's tepid response to Jeremiah Wright's "throw Obama under the bus" tour? Is Obama right to simply say, "He does not speak for me He does not speak for the campaign. He may make statements in the future that don't reflect my values or concerns. I think certainly what the last three days indicate is that we're not coordinating with him, right?" and just hope Wright burns himself out. Or does he have to make a stronger, more specific statement saying that while he still has love for the Rev. Wright and appreciation for the role he has played in his life, he is filled with sorrow over the ugly, damning, just plain wrong things he has been saying, etc.—which runs the risk of looking like he is getting into an under-the-bus throwing contest with his pastor and which might offend some black voters?
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Emily, your exegesis of Obama as Joshua to MLK's Moses, leading the people to the promised land, was inspiring, but it would have been laughed off the table at a Seder I attended this past weekend—also in the Philadelphia area—where three separate attendees announced their decision to change their vote in tomorrow's primary from Obama to either Hillary or (in the case of one intractable Hillary-hater) not to vote at all. Their decision was based entirely on the Jeremiah Wright dustup. In their eyes, voting for Obama would now constitute an irredeemably anti-Semitic act, presumably because of Wright's ties to Farrakhan (all the recent combing of his sermons for offensive material didn't turn up any anti-Semitic rants, did it?). Mind you, these were not hardcore Zionists whose only voting issue is Israel's security—they were middle-class, center-left Jews who agreed with Obama on the war and most social issues and who would have placed themselves firmly, if not passionately, in his camp six weeks ago. Of course, this is just one anecdotal example, but it made me wonder how many Jewish votes Obama lost in that whole Wright flap, and whether, if he does become the candidate in the general, those lost votes will wander across the desert to McCain.
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Speaking of Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary, at our family seder in Philadelphia over the weekend, my mother pointed out that just as 40 years elapsed before the Israelites made it to the Promised Land, so 40 years have passed since the assassination of MLK in April 1968 and this contest, with Barack Obama's candidacy. He may be down in the polls statewide, but in my parents' corner of northwest Philadelphia, Obama signs bloomed in many a yard (even on streets near the home of Gov. Ed Rendell, a Clinton diehard). If MLK plays the role of Moses in this analogy, then Obama is Joshua—of a generation one step removed from the past (civil rights-era leaders like Jeremiah Wright come to mind). It's the Joshua-vintage leader who gets to lead his people into the new land. All very biblical and sweeping and moving—even if you're right, Hanna, and tomorrow Obama doesn't yet pull it off.
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I thought I was onboard with Emily about all the benefits of openly airing this buried anger and rage about race and gender. I’d been arguing for months that it was past time to lance this boil and just have it out in the streets about how mad everyone in the Democratic Party feels.
Perhaps I’ve read one too many livid blogs today or listened in on a few too many enraged racially charged debates this weekend, but I am starting to go a little wobbly at the ankles. Can someone remind me what’s truly served by a “conversation” about race and gender for its own sake? Are we progressing toward something better here? Is all this dialoguing fostering some new paradigm for talking about personal identity and politics? Or is this just the sort of conversation that always goes badly in the end? The kind that starts when some guy in a bar says, “Wanna hear what your real problem is?”
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Rosa, I'm glad to know that Rev. Wright made it to the Clinton White House, but no, I don't think it's time to stop talking about him. Obama and the country are better off for his amazing and moving race speech, which Wright popping up on YouTube forced him into giving. All of this needs to be aired, and now, during the primaries. If Obama becomes the Democratic nominee, the Republicans are going to come back at him with another round or three of Wright. And if the party isn't ready to nominate Obama because he's got roots in the angry black community, alongside his message of hope, well, I think that's the wrong rationale, but let's get it all out there. No surprises. Or at least as few as possible.
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Noooo... it wasn't Monica.
It was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, of course, joining Bill and Hillary for a breakfast with "religious leaders" on Sept. 11, 1998. There is a lovely photo, too.
Q. Does this mean Bill & Hillary are closet Wright parishioners who share Wright's every opinion?!
A. Nope. But I think now we can all stop talking about Jeremiah Wright. If Wright was good enough to be considered a major national religious leader by the Clinton White House, then maybe Barack Obama wasn't uniquely obtuse in his decision to stay on at the church where Wright presided. And maybe Hillary Clinton's campaign should stop trying to use Wright to discredit Obama.
Just a thought.
And in case you were wondering what Bill, Hillary, the Rev. Wright, and the other religious leaders chatted about over their coffee and muffins: Bill took the occasion to repent. Even the absent Monica got an apology from Bill, at least in passing: "It is important to me that everybody who has been hurt know that the sorrow I feel is genuine. First and most important, my family, my friends, my staff, my Cabinet, Monica Lewinsky and her family, and the American people."
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In "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf talks about how the struggle to be heard and taken seriously by a dismissive and mocking world leaves ugly traces in a writer's work-- how it distorts reasoning, undermines arguments, sharpens the tone. Woolf is talking about novels written by female writers of the past, but it seems to me that she could be talking about books by Germaine Greer or sermons by Jeremiah Wright or, I can't help thinking, the shifting self-presentations of Hillary Clinton:
One has only to skim those old forgotten novels and listen to the tone of voice in which they are written to divine that the writer was meeting criticism; she was saying this by way of aggression, or that by way of conciliation. She was admitting that she was 'only a woman,' or protesting that she was 'as good as a man.' She met that criticism as her temperament dictated, with docility and diffidence, or with anger and emphasis. It does not matter which it was; she was thinking of something other than the thing itself. Down comes her book upon our heads. There was a flaw in the center of it. And I thought of all the women's novels that lie scattered, like small pock-marked appes in an orchard, about the second-hand bookshops of London. It was the flaw at the center that had rotted them. She had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others.
[Then Woolf says of the two writers she feels have managed to wriggle free of these conditions, Jane Austen and Emily Bronte:]
What genius, what integrity it must have required in the face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking. ... They alone were deaf to that persistent voice, now grumbling, now patronising, now domineering, now grieved, now shocked, now angry, now avuncular, that voice which cannot let women alone, but must be at them, like some too conscientious governess...
If we were to contrast Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama we'd have to say that Clinton is one of those forgotten novelists, with an edge of rage warring in her with a penchant for excessive deference to the "divisive" politics of the past, and Obama is Jane Austen, speaking as Woolf said she did, with "freedom and fullness of expression." But I'd also have to say that what Clinton has weathered is far more horrifying than anything Obama has weathered—think of all the mean articles about her hair, about her glasses, about her name, about her every utterance and deviation from the well-scripted role of first lady. Given all this, I think it's a miracle that she has emerged as unscarred, as clear-thinking, as politically effective as she has.
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Good for Huckabee. Here's what he had to say yesterday on MSNBC:
On Obama's speech:
... I think that, you know, Obama has handled this about as well as anybody could. And I agree, it’s a very historic speech. ... And I thought he handled it very, very well.
And on the Rev. Wright:
... One other thing I think we've got to remember: As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say, "That's a terrible statement," I grew up in a very segregated South, and I think that you have to cut some slack. And I'm going to be probably the only conservative in America who's going to say something like this, but I'm just telling you: We've got to cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told, "You have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can't sit out there with everyone else. There's a separate waiting room in the doctor's office. Here's where you sit on the bus." And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would, too. I probably would, too. In fact, I may have had a more, more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.
Funny how you don't see Mark Penn or Howard Wolfson or Hillary Clinton saying things like that.
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In a newsroom, you see right away that a high percentage of people who would like you to write about them—people with serious grievances of all kinds, against the cops or the city or the hospital or whatever—are at least a little bit crazy. Unfortunately, this makes it harder for them to get any action, because they're written off: "Guy's a nut.'' Which is especially unfortunate, because in a lot of cases, if the story is even half-true, of course he's a nut; that's what injustice in the long term tends to do to people. Maybe we shouldn't be so surprised if the generation that ran into more brick walls of sexism and racism than is currently necessary has some post-concussive issues as a result; they are entitled to their tirades—and to our respect, though I don't think we honor their sacrifice by refusing to see that they actually did accomplish something.
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Judith your In Treatment post calls to mind another dim cultural memory—of Clarence Thomas’ stunning autobiography (I reviewed it here) and the ways in which Justice Thomas both worships the grandfather who raised him and is scarred by him. Thomas painstakingly catalogues the man’s endless cruelties, from throwing him out when Thomas dropped out of the seminary to skipping his weddings and graduations. But despite all this, and despite his grandfather’s paradoxical message—work harder than whites and you will succeed/success on “white” terms is not true success—Thomas reveres the man as the "one hero in my life.” The book is titled My Grandfather’s Son, after all. He believes his grandfather’s cruelty shaped and tempered him.
Thomas’ grandfather, like Wright, and like your Glynn Turman character, Judith, suffered horribly and survived. But what they passed on to the next generation was this double-edged wish: I want you to have it better than me, but I know you never will.
I often feel that’s what Gloria Steinem and Co. feel about us: We’re kidding ourselves if we think life is any better now, and we're insulting them or in denial if we disagree.
One other insight from My Grandfather’s Son? Thomas writes that when he met his second wife, Virginia, he was astonished to encounter anybody who still "thought it was possible to make the world a better place.” Thomas’ sense that repairing the world is impossible echoes Obama’s criticism yesterday of Jeremiah Wright. If Thomas teaches us anything, it’s that if you glorify your father's cynicism and hopelessness along with his heroism, you will never get "past" race.
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Does anyone at XX Factor watch "In Treatment"? I watched last night's episode immediately after watching Obama's magnificent speech on YouTube, and was struck an echo of the speech in the show. It had me thinking about something like the point you made, Dahlia, about having to apologize for one's crazy elders.
Here's the echo: As you all know, every day of the week, Dr. Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne) sees a different patient, and we see the session. Well, over the weekend, his Tuesday patient, a black Navy pilot (Blair Underwood), died. He had been struggling to unpack a suitcase full of anguish--guilt over having bombed a madrassa full of teenage boys, gay impulses, the legacy of his father, a harsh sometime civil-rights activist. Then his plane crashed during training exercises. He was considered one of the Navy's best pilots, and it is unclear whether his death was accidental or suicidal. And the father (Glynn Turman), who had emerged during the sessions as not just as a harsh man but as a soul-destroying monster, arrives on Dr. Weston's doorstep. He wants to understand what has happened to his son.
Turman gives a menacing, heart-breaking performance,well worth watching [http://www.hbo.com/intreatment/tuesday/], but his accomplishment per se is not what made me think of Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. That came at the moment when he makes us see the father's side of things. He draws himself up, this thin, erect, bitter man, aware that the doctor partly blames him for the son's death though is too professional to say so, and he narrows his eyes and says (I'll have to paraphrase and make it sound more banal than it was): "I saw terrible things as a child. I understood that only the strong could survive this world. I wanted my son to be strong." And the doctor gently chides him, saying, "Couldn't you see that the world your son was born into was not the world you were born into?" And the father looks around at Dr. Weston's gorgeous office, with its deep sofas and mahogany furniture and picture windows full of leafy views, and says, in effect, "How can you, who know nothing of where I come from, of my culture, dare to judge me?"
The scene volleys our sympathies back and forth many more times before it ends, but I found myself thinking about some of the same people Dahlia did, Robin Morgan and Jesse Jackson and yes, Hillary Clinton, and all those other public figures who saw terrible things and fought bitter battles and said things we couldn't possibly agree with today and may not have agreed with even then--with the result that, as Obama said, and as Dahlia repeated, we can now afford to see things differently. What felt so new about the speech was not that he apologized but the degree to which he refused to, as well as the extent to which--and this was REALLY new--he eschewed derision and ridicule and the very American sin of presentism, of seeing the past through the lens of the present. Like Glynn Turman, he changed the way we see these people. They're not drooling on the sofa. They're battle-scarred, and so will we be one day. Hillary has a deep historical understanding of such matters, I have no doubt, but I am afraid she may lack the political courage required to articulate such complicated thoughts in the heat of a campaign, as well as the eloquence to make us understand them.
PS I have been told that the show reenacts with shocking fidelity its Israeli model, and I can't help wondering whether in the original, the pilot was in the Israeli army and his father survived the Holocaust. It's the only thing that would make sense. Anyone who has seen the original, please let me know.
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I'm with Maureen Dowd today: The Obama who talks of grays and of complicated legacies and long evolutions, not just of high hopes and change, is my kind of guy. See, there's a reason the campaign isn't over yet—we need to see this man dealing with more than adoring crowds. And he's clearly thinking not just narrowly and strategically about the superdelegate count, but broadly about what the pattern of his primary successes and failures so far tells us about the country. This speech was a response to more than a flap over Rev. Wright, I would say. It was Obama's admirable effort to speak to an electoral puzzle that Matt Bai pointed out in a fascinating piece in the New York Times Magazine this past Sunday. "To put this simply," Bai wrote, "Obama wins in major urban areas but can't seem to win in urbanized states, while Clinton wins in rural communities but consistently loses in rural states. Why?" Bai proposed a counterintuitive answer that says something important about race in America: Obama does well in areas with the least racial diversity—where there are either lots of African-American voters or very few (Wisconsin and Vermont). The actual experience of racial diversity—of living side by side, feeling hard-pressed, struggling, and competing for "a piece of the American Dream," especially during an economic downturn—may not build enlightened racial unity, but instead fuel skepticism about facile promises of harmony. It was exactly that sobering reality that Obama addressed head on in his speech. I call that audacity.
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Do three saps make a trend? What I like best about Obama is that he does not play dumb and keep moving, or shout, Hey, look over there! So that instead of either rushing by this outcry over his preacher's remarks, or attempting to minimize what's happened, he's taken the far harder tack of doing just the opposite, of slowing down and broadening the focus of what Wright's frustration and the public's reaction to it are all about. It would have been so easy for him to get out there and tell us the 34 ways in which Wright is contemptible—but instead, he's actually tried to put the man in context. (Wright's been compared to Hitler on Fox and you think this is without risk?) And I'm asking seriously: When was the last time a politician, any politician, paid us the compliment of asking us to take a deep breath and get beyond our first reaction? Which is why I think he's not only been able to address the immediate campaign concern, but has managed to turn this into a chance for us to learn something. Don't we need someone in public life who can look at a problem and say, No, I reject that premise; let's go at this a different way. He has that capability, and the whole notion that his only real gift is a way with pretty words drives me mad: Lovely words are the product of clear thought. Always.
I heard Obama's speech today as an announcement that we should call off the purity tests, all of them, because we are all flawed, sure, but are also more than the sum of our three worst YouTube moments. We don't have the luxury of continuing to play this gotcha game, because we can every one of us be got—and why would we spend our time that way, when there is so much work to be done?
"As imperfect as he may be,'' Obama said today, Wright "has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years. I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother—a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.''
Isn't there a little Jeremiah Wright—and a little Toot, as he calls his Kansas-born grandma—in all of us? But what I heard him say today is that that's just the starting point.
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Meghan, I am also a sap, but I don't think you needed to be one to be moved by this speech. Obama has often tried to transcend race. Wright's remarks reminded us all that sometimes you just can't. And so Obama got out there and owned the specific injustices black Americans experience while also marrying them to incarnations of disadvantage that can be just as burdensome. The worst moments in this endless primary season, for me, have been the ones in which we have to listen to a chorus about who has it worse, women or black people, or whose -ism is more worthy, feminism or anti-racism. Obama takes us away from that false choice, and that's where I want to be.
And then, for good measure, he singled out reading to your children as one of the most important things parents can do. Which made me think of him as a dad—and a good dad. A welcome image.
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I've been more and more impressed with Obama's speeches—especially since I saw him at a rally in San Antonio. But I still wasn't entirely prepared for today's speech—inspired by the criticism of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. In it, Obama tackled racism head on, and did so—amazingly—in a rather forgiving if rigorous way. He talked first about the anger certain African-Americans feel at finding themselves shut out of the American dream. Then he went on to acknowledge how easy it might be to feel a similar anger if you're a working-class white American who doesn't feel particularly enfranchised either—an immigrant, or someone who lost his or job as the economy globalized. He showed a kind of empathy (at least at first) for those folks in this position who might resent African-Americans for the opportunities afforded them by affirmative action. And he talked about this "unacknowledged resentment" like it was something less dirty that "racism," something not just to be bundled up and hid under the bed where no one could see it, but a fact of national life that deserved voicing. Of course, the last thrust of his speech was about why that resentment is ultimately divisive and needs to be overcome. But he didn't act censorious or threatened by this race resentment. On the contrary, he acted almost like a pastor—someone gently prodding and guiding a flock to acknowledge latent sins that seem too shameful to voice. I usually feel that Obama kinda stumbles when he gets anecdotal and folksy—it's a bad John Edwards or Bill Clinton imitation, I think—but the story about Ashley, a white girl who volunteers for his campaign, was incredibly moving. Maybe I'm just a sap.
I don't think so, though: The other thing that was powerful about the speech, because it's still unexpected, is how directly and uncagily he acknowledges his own role in these scandals. Sure, he said, he knew about Wright's inflammatory remarks. He doesn't try to shield himself from them; instead, he invites Americans into his thought process. This is a kind of political performance too. But it's one that's closer to what I've always thought our politicians should strive to do: appear as if they're speaking naturally to us, their constituents.
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I am so ready to read the long magazine take-out story (Hanna?) about Obama and his church and its pastor: What Trinity United Church of Christ and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright mean to Chicago, what it means that Obama and his family joined this church and stayed there, etc. I feel like I'm missing the context that helps me make sense of the Kristol line Judith points to, and I don't really know how to fit Wright into my ever-developing picture of Obama. Agreed, everyone has their baggage. Also agreed that it's fair enough if Obama's membership in this church is in part a political calculation. I want to know the specifics behind this choice, though. I wonder, for example, if this church reflects the social world and family background of Michelle Obama as much or more than Barack's? Also, it seems to me that your relationship with the pastor who conducts your wedding ceremony and baptize your children says something different about you than your cozying-up political-pal relationships with whatever man of the cloth. Though, to be fair, I don't think Wright was making the statements Obama is calling "appalling and inflammatory" at the time of those Obama family milestones.
Melinda, you asked me last week if I felt more sympathetic to Spitzer because he's Jewish and so am I (and because I stated the obvious: He ain't gonna be the first Jewish president). Nope, I didn't feel more sympathetic, but I did cringe harder over his misdeeds. On that one, I felt like I did understand the context. I may well have been fooling myself, but the Spitzers feel to me recognizable—which made the whole thing all the more unsettlling.
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Melinda H. posts for me, except I'd take her argument a step further. It is actually a politician's job to have nutty acquaintances, because a politician needs to foster alliances with a wide range of different groups. That's how he or she acquires enough backing to get elected and, if elected, to get legislation passed. Any group passionate enough to have political significance is bound to have many nut jobs, or at least immoderate and fiery advocates, in its midst. That's why Bill Kristol's scornful observation in the New York Times this morning—"Obama seems to have seen, early in his career, the utility of joining a prominent church that would help him establish political roots in the community in which he lives"—warmed the cockles of my little Hillary-loving heart. Obama is a politician! He sees the necessity of seducing, pandering, backpedaling, compromising! He has done the work of establishing political roots in a community that he needs to win his campaign! Hurray! Now let's hope he does the same in many, many other communities as well. That way if I wind up voting for him, I won't worry I'm voting for a politics-transcending naif.