Four years ago, after Sen. John Kerry effectively clinched the Democratic nomination, I wondered aloud—the most effective way to communicate on television—whether he would reach out to the white evangelical community. Suppose he asked to address a convention, openly acknowledging the likelihood that he'd receive few of the votes of the assembled faithful but talking about finding common ground on issues like poverty, AIDS, and human rights?
This never happened, of course, and that November, evangelicals voted for President Bush by a 78-21 margin. More important, the outpouring of faith-based voters almost surely tipped Ohio, and thus the election, into the Bush column. Would a speech, or a series of conversations between Kerry and white evangelicals, have made a difference? It's not clear: A gay-marriage ban was on the Ohio ballot that year, and that helped turn out these voters in force. Nor is it clear that John Kerry would have been convincing had he talked about his faith.
What is clear is that Barack Obama is pursuing a course radically different from Kerry's—or, for that matter, Al Gore's. (Gore lost the white evangelical vote by a 68-30 margin.) And therein lies a tale about one of the least appreciated but most effective of political techniques: the art not so much of winning over voters as of lessening the intensity of their opposition.
Earlier this month, Sen. Obama met privately with some 30 religious leaders for a no-holds-barred conversation. Participants were Catholic and Protestant, mainline and evangelical, black, white, and Hispanic. Franklin Graham was there. (He's Billy's son and now heads this father's ministry.) So was T.D. Jakes, the African-American pastor at a Dallas megachurch, and Doug Kmiec, a prominent conservative Catholic scholar who has endorsed Obama (and who contributes to Slate's legal blog, "Convictions").
and more:
http://www.slate.com/id/2194325/
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
