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The First Real Obama Vote

History may be about to be put back on the track that it was knocked off by Robert Kennedy's death; it may not. Sometimes, such formulations are silly even though the hope is not. Still, it's interesting to read that the tiny hamlet of Dixville Notch, which votes at midnight and declares soon after, has gone overwhelmingly to a Democrat for the first time in a presidential election since 1968. Things do seem set fair, the far right seems hysterical, and Obama seems at the start of today to be heading for a very hard-won expensive victory. I've seen too many last-minute reverses and too many candidates coming up just short, but it does seem as though something is actually happening after all these months. Roll on tomorrow. The republic is about to take a step, through millions of voters, to rescue itself. It's enough to bring a tear to the eye....

Comments

Anonymous said…
http://spuc-director.blogspot.com/2008/11/please-say-extra-prayer-today-that-us.html

http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/viewarticle.php?selectedarticle=2008.10.14_George_Robert_Obama%27s%20Abortion%20Extremism_.xml
9:49 am
Martin Meenagh said…
Hi Berenike
Not one single thing about abortion in the United States would change if Palin and McCain were elected. The US Supreme Court already has a catholic majority, but one which believes in ceding controversial ground to Congress; not one congressional proposal to significantly restrict or expand abortion will pass. On the other hand, Obama and Biden will not do anything to expand abortion either. They could not.

However, McCain has shown himself to be reckless and to be deeply wedded to an immoral concept of positive war; Sarah Palin, for all her qualities, is blatantly unqualified for the post of President. Both of these two have more of a chance of starting a terrible war than Obama and Biden; both would expand an unjust income inequality, which is against catholic doctrine and has been since before rerum novarum; and McCain and Palin could substantially increase, by their economic and social outlook, the poverty and criminal environments in which abortion thrives.

Unless one nails one's self-defined principle as a layperson to a door and then has nothing to do with anyone--neither of which are catholic behaviours--it is not wrong to acknowledge a flawed process in a fallen world. It is not wrong to take the least worst option in this context, though I can imagine Pontius Pilate saying the same thing. All politicians are forced to be liars occasionally if they are not habitually, hypocrisy is sometimes a civilised virtue linked closely to restraint, and machine politicians tend to deliver jobs and food and shelter and social discipline.

So for all these reasons, I would suggest that it is perfectly possible for a catholic to pray that the world does not blow up and that the voters of the american republic take the least bad option.

I would also counsel you that the culture wars are enormously destructive and we start them at our peril as a society, however much I agree with you about abortion, which I do.

We are more likely to eliminate abortion with jobs and strategic growth than we are with fury and injunction and division. Leave that to the 'atheists'.
3:03 pm
Anonymous said…
[thumps head off wall]
7:39 am
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