Less than the Least

A lot of ink has been spilled on Michelle Obama’s comment that “for the first time in my life, I am really proud of my country.” I’m a McCain man myself, but the criticism seems dumb to me. She isn’t running for office, and she’s entitled to feel what she feels and express it as she chooses, as long as she doesn’t insult anyone else along the way – as she manifestly didn’t. Her comments are part of (and an exceptionally mild instance of) a long tradition of moral self-criticism that may be Americans’ greatest attribute. In the mid-1850s, at the height of Know-Nothingism, Abraham Lincoln wrote more caustically about his country’s history and character than any candidate or candidate’s spouse would dream of writing or speaking today:

"Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it, ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read, ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."

The standard storyline about religion and the nomination process has been the failure of evangelicals to agree on a single preferred Republican candidate. But the choice of Democratic nominee has more momentous implications. If Clinton is the nominee, evangelicals will swarm to McCain (who, contrary to popular belief, has significant support among evangelicals– much more than among staunch, nonevangelical conservatives). Obama, by contrast, could win a sizeable slice of the evangelical vote.

In the furor this week over the anti-American comments of Jeremiah Wright, the pastor of Barack Obama’s church in Chicago, the one question that’s gotten surprisingly little attention is the most obvious one: Should Obama leave his church?

Judging by Jeremiah Wright’s sermons, Barack Obama’s church seems to be an angry place—angry at white America for the many ways it has held back and held down the black community represented in its congregation. I want to write about one source of that anger—crime and criminal punishment—in another post. For now, I’d just note that one can see something similar in a lot of mostly white evangelical churches. There, the target of white believers’ anger is the secular culture that tolerates and even promotes all manner of evil.

 There’s a clear pattern to Obama’s three biggest recent slip-ups– the controversy over his former pastor’s anti-American remarks, his economic advisor’s alleged assurance to Canadian officials that he doesn’t really mean the critical things he says about Nafta, and now his suggestion at a San Francisco fund-raiser that dire economic straits have caused small town Pennsylvania voters to “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them ...”  In each case, the original remarks seem to have been acceptable to their intended audience, but deeply disturbing to a different audience.

Speaking effectively to multiple audiences is one of the trickiest challenges of any political campaign.   Roughly speaking, there seem to be three strategies for pulling this off.

I’m not an economist and don’t even play one on TV, so I didn’t get quite as worked up as my economist friends on Sunday when Hillary Clinton said, in defense of the gas tax holiday first dreamed up by John McCain, that there’s no need to listen to all of the economists who think it’s a wretched idea. But the fact that two of the three remaining candidates have endorsed the idea is depressing, to say the least. As the economists point out (see the succinct explanation on Brad DeLong’s blog here), because the short term supply of oil is essentially fixed, and the suspension of the tax would increase demand, gas prices might well stay right where they are. And even if they dropped a little, encouraging people to buy gas is just about the last thing we need to be doing right now.

In my view, Barack Obama deserves the kudos he’s received for declining to pander on this issue, but his proposal (also endorsed by Clinton) to tax the oil companies’ on their “excess” profits isn’t the answer either.