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What Happened to Obama? |
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Sunday, 07 August 2011 20:58 |
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Excerpt: "Like most Americans, at this point, I have no idea what Barack Obama - and by extension the party he leads - believes on virtually any issue."
Litter, after an Obama-Biden train stop in Baltimore days before the 2009 inauguration. (photo: Todd Heisler/NYT)
What Happened to Obama?
By Drew Westen, The New York Times
07 August 11
 t was a blustery day in Washington on Jan. 20, 2009, as it often seems to be on the day of a presidential inauguration. As I stood with my 8-year-old daughter, watching the president deliver his inaugural address, I had a feeling of unease. It wasn't just that the man who could be so eloquent had seemingly chosen not to be on this auspicious occasion, although that turned out to be a troubling harbinger of things to come. It was that there was a story the American people were waiting to hear - and needed to hear - but he didn't tell it. And in the ensuing months he continued not to tell it, no matter how outrageous the slings and arrows his opponents threw at him.
The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred. Our brains evolved to "expect" stories with a particular structure, with protagonists and villains, a hill to be climbed or a battle to be fought. Our species existed for more than 100,000 years before the earliest signs of literacy, and another 5,000 years would pass before the majority of humans would know how to read and write.
Stories were the primary way our ancestors transmitted knowledge and values. Today we seek movies, novels and "news stories" that put the events of the day in a form that our brains evolved to find compelling and memorable. Children crave bedtime stories; the holy books of the three great monotheistic religions are written in parables; and as research in cognitive science has shown, lawyers whose closing arguments tell a story win jury trials against their legal adversaries who just lay out "the facts of the case."
When Barack Obama rose to the lectern on Inauguration Day, the nation was in tatters. Americans were scared and angry. The economy was spinning in reverse. Three-quarters of a million people lost their jobs that month. Many had lost their homes, and with them the only nest eggs they had. Even the usually impervious upper middle class had seen a decade of stagnant or declining investment, with the stock market dropping in value with no end in sight. Hope was as scarce as credit.
In that context, Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end. They needed to hear that he understood what they were feeling, that he would track down those responsible for their pain and suffering, and that he would restore order and safety. What they were waiting for, in broad strokes, was a story something like this:
"I know you're scared and angry. Many of you have lost your jobs, your homes, your hope. This was a disaster, but it was not a natural disaster. It was made by Wall Street gamblers who speculated with your lives and futures. It was made by conservative extremists who told us that if we just eliminated regulations and rewarded greed and recklessness, it would all work out. But it didn't work out. And it didn't work out 80 years ago, when the same people sold our grandparents the same bill of goods, with the same results. But we learned something from our grandparents about how to fix it, and we will draw on their wisdom. We will restore business confidence the old-fashioned way: by putting money back in the pockets of working Americans by putting them back to work, and by restoring integrity to our financial markets and demanding it of those who want to run them. I can't promise that we won't make mistakes along the way. But I can promise you that they will be honest mistakes, and that your government has your back again." A story isn't a policy. But that simple narrative - and the policies that would naturally have flowed from it - would have inoculated against much of what was to come in the intervening two and a half years of failed government, idled factories and idled hands. That story would have made clear that the president understood that the American people had given Democrats the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress to fix the mess the Republicans and Wall Street had made of the country, and that this would not be a power-sharing arrangement. It would have made clear that the problem wasn't tax-and-spend liberalism or the deficit - a deficit that didn't exist until George W. Bush gave nearly $2 trillion in tax breaks largely to the wealthiest Americans and squandered $1 trillion in two wars.
And perhaps most important, it would have offered a clear, compelling alternative to the dominant narrative of the right, that our problem is not due to spending on things like the pensions of firefighters, but to the fact that those who can afford to buy influence are rewriting the rules so they can cut themselves progressively larger slices of the American pie while paying less of their fair share for it.
But there was no story - and there has been none since.
In similar circumstances, Franklin D. Roosevelt offered Americans a promise to use the power of his office to make their lives better and to keep trying until he got it right. Beginning in his first inaugural address, and in the fireside chats that followed, he explained how the crash had happened, and he minced no words about those who had caused it. He promised to do something no president had done before: to use the resources of the United States to put Americans directly to work, building the infrastructure we still rely on today. He swore to keep the people who had caused the crisis out of the halls of power, and he made good on that promise. In a 1936 speech at Madison Square Garden, he thundered, "Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me - and I welcome their hatred."
When Barack Obama stepped into the Oval Office, he stepped into a cycle of American history, best exemplified by F.D.R. and his distant cousin, Teddy. After a great technological revolution or a major economic transition, as when America changed from a nation of farmers to an urban industrial one, there is often a period of great concentration of wealth, and with it, a concentration of power in the wealthy. That's what we saw in 1928, and that's what we see today. At some point that power is exercised so injudiciously, and the lives of so many become so unbearable, that a period of reform ensues - and a charismatic reformer emerges to lead that renewal. In that sense, Teddy Roosevelt started the cycle of reform his cousin picked up 30 years later, as he began efforts to bust the trusts and regulate the railroads, exercise federal power over the banks and the nation's food supply, and protect America's land and wildlife, creating the modern environmental movement.
Those were the shoes - that was the historic role - that Americans elected Barack Obama to fill. The president is fond of referring to "the arc of history," paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous statement that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics - in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness and just punch harder the next time - he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for at least a generation.
When Dr. King spoke of the great arc bending toward justice, he did not mean that we should wait for it to bend. He exhorted others to put their full weight behind it, and he gave his life speaking with a voice that cut through the blistering force of water cannons and the gnashing teeth of police dogs. He preached the gospel of nonviolence, but he knew that whether a bully hid behind a club or a poll tax, the only effective response was to face the bully down, and to make the bully show his true and repugnant face in public.
n contrast, when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. Instead of indicting the people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of it. He never explained that decision to the public - a failure in storytelling as extraordinary as the failure in judgment behind it. Had the president chosen to bend the arc of history, he would have told the public the story of the destruction wrought by the dismantling of the New Deal regulations that had protected them for more than half a century. He would have offered them a counternarrative of how to fix the problem other than the politics of appeasement, one that emphasized creating economic demand and consumer confidence by putting consumers back to work. He would have had to stare down those who had wrecked the economy, and he would have had to tolerate their hatred if not welcome it. But the arc of his temperament just didn't bend that far.
The truly decisive move that broke the arc of history was his handling of the stimulus. The public was desperate for a leader who would speak with confidence, and they were ready to follow wherever the president led. Yet instead of indicting the economic policies and principles that had just eliminated eight million jobs, in the most damaging of the tic-like gestures of compromise that have become the hallmark of his presidency - and against the advice of multiple Nobel-Prize-winning economists - he backed away from his advisers who proposed a big stimulus, and then diluted it with tax cuts that had already been shown to be inert. The result, as predicted in advance, was a half-stimulus that half-stimulated the economy. That, in turn, led the White House to feel rightly unappreciated for having saved the country from another Great Depression but in the unenviable position of having to argue a counterfactual - that something terrible might have happened had it not half-acted.
To the average American, who was still staring into the abyss, the half-stimulus did nothing but prove that Ronald Reagan was right, that government is the problem. In fact, the average American had no idea what Democrats were trying to accomplish by deficit spending because no one bothered to explain it to them with the repetition and evocative imagery that our brains require to make an idea, particularly a paradoxical one, "stick." Nor did anyone explain what health care reform was supposed to accomplish (other than the unbelievable and even more uninspiring claim that it would "bend the cost curve"), or why "credit card reform" had led to an increase in the interest rates they were already struggling to pay. Nor did anyone explain why saving the banks was such a priority, when saving the homes the banks were foreclosing didn't seem to be. All Americans knew, and all they know today, is that they're still unemployed, they're still worried about how they're going to pay their bills at the end of the month and their kids still can't get a job. And now the Republicans are chipping away at unemployment insurance, and the president is making his usual impotent verbal exhortations after bargaining it away.
What makes the "deficit debate" we just experienced seem so surreal is how divorced the conversation in Washington has been from conversations around the kitchen table everywhere else in America. Although I am a scientist by training, over the last several years, as a messaging consultant to nonprofit groups and Democratic leaders, I have studied the way voters think and feel, talking to them in plain language. At this point, I have interacted in person or virtually with more than 50,000 Americans on a range of issues, from taxes and deficits to abortion and immigration.
The average voter is far more worried about jobs than about the deficit, which few were talking about while Bush and the Republican Congress were running it up. The conventional wisdom is that Americans hate government, and if you ask the question in the abstract, people will certainly give you an earful about what government does wrong. But if you give them the choice between cutting the deficit and putting Americans back to work, it isn't even close. But it's not just jobs. Americans don't share the priorities of either party on taxes, budgets or any of the things Congress and the president have just agreed to slash - or failed to slash, like subsidies to oil companies. When it comes to tax cuts for the wealthy, Americans are united across the political spectrum, supporting a message that says, "In times like these, millionaires ought to be giving to charity, not getting it."
When pitted against a tough budget-cutting message straight from the mouth of its strongest advocates, swing voters vastly preferred a message that began, "The best way to reduce the deficit is to put Americans back to work." This statement is far more consistent with what many economists are saying publicly - and what investors apparently believe, as evident in the nosedive the stock market took after the president and Congress "saved" the economy.
So where does that leave us?
Like most Americans, at this point, I have no idea what Barack Obama - and by extension the party he leads - believes on virtually any issue. The president tells us he prefers a "balanced" approach to deficit reduction, one that weds "revenue enhancements" (a weak way of describing popular taxes on the rich and big corporations that are evading them) with "entitlement cuts" (an equally poor choice of words that implies that people who've worked their whole lives are looking for handouts). But the law he just signed includes only the cuts. This pattern of presenting inconsistent positions with no apparent recognition of their incoherence is another hallmark of this president's storytelling. He announces in a speech on energy and climate change that we need to expand offshore oil drilling and coal production - two methods of obtaining fuels that contribute to the extreme weather Americans are now seeing. He supports a health care law that will use Medicaid to insure about 15 million more Americans and then endorses a budget plan that, through cuts to state budgets, will most likely decimate Medicaid and other essential programs for children, senior citizens and people who are vulnerable by virtue of disabilities or an economy that is getting weaker by the day. He gives a major speech on immigration reform after deporting a million immigrants in two years, breaking up families at a pace George W. Bush could never rival in all his years as president.
 he real conundrum is why the president seems so compelled to take both sides of every issue, encouraging voters to project whatever they want on him, and hoping they won't realize which hand is holding the rabbit. That a large section of the country views him as a socialist while many in his own party are concluding that he does not share their values speaks volumes - but not the volumes his advisers are selling: that if you make both the right and left mad, you must be doing something right.
As a practicing psychologist with more than 25 years of experience, I will resist the temptation to diagnose at a distance, but as a scientist and strategic consultant I will venture some hypotheses.
The most charitable explanation is that he and his advisers have succumbed to a view of electoral success to which many Democrats succumb - that "centrist" voters like "centrist" politicians. Unfortunately, reality is more complicated. Centrist voters prefer honest politicians who help them solve their problems. A second possibility is that he is simply not up to the task by virtue of his lack of experience and a character defect that might not have been so debilitating at some other time in history. Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted "present" (instead of "yea" or "nay") 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.
A somewhat less charitable explanation is that we are a nation that is being held hostage not just by an extremist Republican Party but also by a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election. Perhaps those of us who were so enthralled with the magnificent story he told in "Dreams From My Father" appended a chapter at the end that wasn't there - the chapter in which he resolves his identity and comes to know who he is and what he believes in.
Or perhaps, like so many politicians who come to Washington, he has already been consciously or unconsciously corrupted by a system that tests the souls even of people of tremendous integrity, by forcing them to dial for dollars - in the case of the modern presidency, for hundreds of millions of dollars. When he wants to be, the president is a brilliant and moving speaker, but his stories virtually always lack one element: the villain who caused the problem, who is always left out, described in impersonal terms, or described in passive voice, as if the cause of others' misery has no agency and hence no culpability. Whether that reflects his aversion to conflict, an aversion to conflict with potential campaign donors that today cripples both parties' ability to govern and threatens our democracy, or both, is unclear.
A final explanation is that he ran for president on two contradictory platforms: as a reformer who would clean up the system, and as a unity candidate who would transcend the lines of red and blue. He has pursued the one with which he is most comfortable given the constraints of his character, consistently choosing the message of bipartisanship over the message of confrontation.
But the arc of history does not bend toward justice through capitulation cast as compromise. It does not bend when 400 people control more of the wealth than 150 million of their fellow Americans. It does not bend when the average middle-class family has seen its income stagnate over the last 30 years while the richest 1 percent has seen its income rise astronomically. It does not bend when we cut the fixed incomes of our parents and grandparents so hedge fund managers can keep their 15 percent tax rates. It does not bend when only one side in negotiations between workers and their bosses is allowed representation. And it does not bend when, as political scientists have shown, it is not public opinion but the opinions of the wealthy that predict the votes of the Senate. The arc of history can bend only so far before it breaks.
Drew Westen is a professor of psychology at Emory University and the author of "The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation."
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FOCUS: The Dysfunction at the Very Heart of American Politics |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=7613"><span class="small">Michael A Cohen, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Sunday, 07 August 2011 17:08 |
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Excerpt: "How has America been reduced to one party holding a gun to the US economy and the other trading away its political principles to stop the trigger from being pulled?"
President Barack Obama departs the White House via Air Force One, 08/03/11. (photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
The Dysfunction at the Very Heart of American Politics
By Michael A Cohen, Guardian UK
07 August 11
As the system grinds into catastrophic gridlock, disillusioned voters feel it has less and less to do with their lives.
 early three years ago, on a night of great history, a slender 47-year-old black man who had just been elected to the nation's highest political office offered the American people an optimistic vision for the country's future. Quoting Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama spoke of national unity: "We are not enemies, but friends. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection."
That night, Obama offered the American people a clear sense of his overriding priority as president - it wasn't just to fix the ailing US economy, provide healthcare for all or end the war in Iraq. But rather, after eight years of political turmoil and disunity, through the force of his personality and political temperament, Obama would, as Lincoln said, "bind up the nation's wounds."
Things have not quite worked out as Obama planned. Even with poll results suggesting that Americans prize compromise and are tired of overt partisanship, the level of division and acrimony in Washington has grown exponentially since Obama took office. The recent debt limit debate is the apogee of Washington's dysfunction: and indicative of a political system that is seemingly incapable of dealing with national challenges. Indeed, whatever one may think of Standard & Poor's recent downgrade of US debt, the ratings agency view that "the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policy-making and political institutions have weakened" seems almost self-evident.
How has America been reduced to one party holding a gun to the US economy and the other trading away its political principles to stop the trigger from being pulled? The problem is that the US today has one party intent on utilising government resources as a force for social good and another that rejects any significant role for the public sector. Compounding this collision of ideologies is a populace so indifferent to the workings of their own government that they are unable to choose which model they prefer.
This clash over the proper role for government in the US is one that has defined our national politics for more than a century. But in the last several years this conflict has become an existential one, with Republicans basically abdicating their responsibility to govern. When in power they made little effort to deal with the nation's many challenges. In opposition, and particularly in the two and a half years since Obama took office, they have used the tool of the Senate filibuster and various other procedural impediments to try to stop nearly all Democratic initiatives in their tracks. Whatever legislation passed in the past few years is almost solely a product of Democratic cohesion (an attribute that is generally in short supply) - and a brief window in which Democrats enjoyed a filibuster-proof majority in the US Senate.
From this perspective, threatening economic cataclysm in order to further reduce the size of government, by refusing to raise the debt limit, now seems like an inevitable step in Washington's scorched earth politics. That it forced Democrats to agree to trillions in painful spending cuts without any commensurate revenue hikes shows how successful this strategy of policy extortion can be.
So why do Democrats put up with it? They have little choice. The American political system discourages radicalism and relies on compromise. Yet the violation of even the most customary rules of governance has made such deal-making now nearly impossible. It was once considered a given that, with the rarest of exceptions, a president would be able to appoint his own charges to key policy-making positions; and the debt ceiling was considered an occasionally politicised but generally pro forma exercise. No longer. In a system designed around collegiality, Democrats have few tools in their arsenal to combat the GOP's political obstinacy.
As a result, America is increasingly moving toward a parliamentary system in which politicians, rather than voting along regional lines or in pursuit of parochial interests, cast their ballot solely based on whether there is a D or R next to their name. Such a system might work well in the UK, but in the US, with its institutional focus on checks and balances and the many tools available for stopping legislation, a parliamentary-style system is a recipe for inaction.
What compounds the Democrats' challenge is that they are the party of activist government. When in opposition, they find it hard to use the Republicans' jamming techniques; when in power they feel the almost quaint need to act responsibly. Any scent of scandal or illegitimate behaviour that undermines the electorate's confidence in government in turn undermines the Democrat's brand.
Case in point on the debt: liberals far and wide urged Obama to consider invoking the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, which suggests that the country's public debt must continue to be paid. As the left argued, this would have resolved the crisis. In a worst-case scenario, Republicans might impeach the president in the House of Representatives, but, as the argument went, wouldn't this be a good way to rally the country around Obama? But such tactical recommendations miss a crucial element; if low-information voters (the vast majority of Americans) look to Washington and see the nation's political leaders arguing about impeachment and constitutional crises that have little connection to their own lives it exacerbates their lack of confidence in government. For many conservatives it would only confirm their irrational belief that President Obama is a power-hungry tyrant.
Thus for Democrats, gridlock is their most pernicious enemy; a point Republicans understand all too well. The more they stop government from operating effectively the more it emphasises their key political narrative that there is no reason to have any confidence in public institutions. Tom Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, said to me that Republicans understand that if you have a vat of sewage and you pour in a glass of wine you still have a vat of sewage. But if you pour a glass of sewage into a vat of wine, guess what, you now have a vat of sewage. In short, a little political poison can go a long way. So while liberal complaints that President Obama is far too solicitous of Republicans and far too wedded to his post-partisan agenda (all probably true), a reversion to bare-knuckled politics is not necessarily going to make things any easier or better for progressives.
As the Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg noted in the New York Times, "voters feel ever more estranged from government" and "they associate Democrats with government." More crises in Washington are not going to help that process.
Why do voters put up with such a situation? Polling suggests that the electorate wants their leaders to focus on jobs, rather than the deficit; and work toward compromise, rather than gridlock. So why then do they reward political parties, such as the Republicans, that act decidedly against not only their preferences but also their interests?
The answer lies in the apathy of the American people toward their own government. The ultimate check on Republican nihilism would be voter revolt. But in the last congressional election, voters rewarded unprecedented Republican obstructionism with control of the House of Representatives.
What's worse, voter preferences are often contradictory. Polls suggest that the electorate wants political leaders to cut spending, but then also demand no cuts in any government programme that isn't foreign aid. They want Congress to focus more on creating jobs, but recoil at policies, such as the bailout of the US auto industry or the stimulus package, that did just that. One problem is that Americans have been so inundated with anti-government rhetoric over the past 40 years they seem to have trouble identifying any link between government engagement and a robust economy.
Worst of all, Americans may prefer Democratic policies, but they have little confidence in government's ability to fulfil those promises and then blame both parties for inaction. They are so mistrustful of government and shockingly uninformed about its working that, perversely, via the ballot boxes, they directly contribute to the political stalemate they so regularly decry.
The result is a political system that is perhaps more incapacitated than at any point in modern history. Across the US, states have to cut social services and benefits because they are receiving no support from the federal government. Infrastructure is crumbling, millions of American students are trapped in under-performing schools, the existential threat of climate change is off the political radar screen and job growth is barely on the agenda. Even the most recent agreement to cut the bloated federal deficit does virtually nothing to deal with the greatest driver of national indebtedness - healthcare spending. What all of this suggests is that the episode played out over the past few weeks of one party threatening to plunge the nation into economic catastrophe is not some rare event - it's the new norm in American politics. And perhaps the most glaring indication that Barack Obama's vision of new post-partisan America will be a dream perhaps permanently deferred.
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Rick Perry's Prayer-Rally Politics |
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Saturday, 06 August 2011 19:24 |
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Intro: "Perry's endorsers are not just a random group of radical evangelists but part of a large and little-understood international religious movement."
Participants singing and praying inside 'The Response,' a national day of prayer called for by Texas Gov. Rick Perry at Reliant Stadium in Houston. (photo: Michael Stravato/NYT)
Rick Perry's Prayer-Rally Politics
By Paul Rosenberg, AlterNet
06 August 11
The Biggest Religious Movement You Never Heard of: Nine things you need to know about Rick Perry's prayer event. Perry's endorsers are not just a random group of radical evangelists but part of a large and little-understood international religious movement.
 hen Texas Gov. Rick Perry decided to stage a Texas-size prayer event - dubbed "The Response" - on Aug. 6, it no doubt seemed like the right thing to do at the time. It received little critical scrutiny when he announced it back in early June, except on websites that track these sorts of things. But after Rachel Maddow, drawing on these sites, did a segment highlighting some of the more bizarre statements made by Perry's high-profile religious endorsers, things cooled considerably - even though the real story is still not remotely well-understood.
"Perry's endorsers are not just a random group of radical evangelists making outrageous statements," researcher Rachel Tabachnick subsequently wrote at Alternet.org. "These are the apostles and prophets of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), the biggest international religious movement you never heard of." Almost simultaneously, investigative rePeter Forrest Wilder of the Texas Observer published an extensive article on Perry's prayer event and his endorsers, "Rick Perry's Army of God."
The NAR's intellectual godfather, C. Peter Wagner, one of Perry's early endorsers, brags that it's the most significant change in how Christianity is practiced since the Protestant Reformation. Like him or not, in a sense he's right: With tens, even hundreds of millions of followers worldwide, the NAR's stress on Godlike prophetic and apostolic powers, its revisions of end-time prophecies, its methodology of "spiritual warfare" and its agenda of theocratic dominion over all aspects of society are not just threatening to modern secular democracy and the religious pluralism it protects, they have been sharply criticized by other conservative Christians as unbiblical, deviant teachings, even a form of the very demonic practices they obsessively declare war against. Indeed, the Assemblies of God - the largest Pentecostal denomination in America - condemned some of the NAR's teachings and practices as "deviant" in 2000, though Tabachnick told me that many within the denomination have since embraced the movement.
Wilder told me they were going to "tone it down a little bit to make it less overt in terms of the particular set of beliefs and practices that most of the people behind the event hold." So, probably no talk about taking over government, sex with demons or Oprah Winfrey as a harbinger of the Antichrist - the sort of more alarming tidbits Maddow highlighted.
But if America's mainstream media rePeters think this turns Perry's prayer meeting into a nonevent, they couldn't be more mistaken. There might not be any "gotcha!" moments to be had - although anything is possible - but with 15 long months of campaigning ahead and multiple other candidates courting the same, poorly understood religious constituency, there is a wealth of potential insights to be gathered that could prove invaluable down the road. What's more, the failure to explore and understand the multiple intersections of religion and politics has repeatedly exacted a terrible toll over the past 30 years of media consolidation, which has seen more and more talking heads, as frontline reporting has withered on the vine. Failure to understand the politico-religious dynamics of far-off Afghanistan in the 1980s resulted in all sorts of mayhem there - and eventually in the 9/11 attacks.
So what are some of the stories the media ought to be looking at, coming out of The Response, regardless of whether there are any instant YouTube classics or not? Without trying to dictate what others should write, one can glean some helpful tips from those who've ventured in early. Here are nine underreported stories worth considering:
1. "The Response" Is Not a Broadly Representative Christian Event.
There's a heavy concentration of NAR figures among the endorsers, with several other of the most prominent figures joining Wagner, including Mike Bickle, founder of the Kansas City–based International House of Prayer (IHOP), Dr. John Benefiel, head of the Heartland Apostolic Prayer Network of Oklahoma City, and Cindy Jacobs of Generals International. Tabachnick ticked off a list of NAR endorsers, starting with five from IHOP: Luis and Jill Cataldo, IHOP staff members in Kansas City; Randy and Kelsey Bohlender of IHOP and The Call; Apostle Doug Stringer; and Dave Silker of IHOP.
"This is not a random cross-section of conservative Christians," Wilder told me. "There is such an emphasis and disproportionate number of people that are very closely tied together, affiliated with this strain of neo-pentecostalism or charismatic movement, that it cannot be an accident."
They aren't the only ones involved, of course. The Texas GOP has been avidly recruiting conservative Christians of all stripes for deep political involvement since the mid-1990s. Former state party vice-chair David Barton, a self-taught revisionist historian, has played a key role in this process. (He, too, is an endorser.) However, with the NAR's keen interest in establishing Christian dominion over politics as part of their "Seven Mountains" strategy (more on this below), it's no coincidence that they are significantly overrepresented.
2. Perry Is Not the Only Potential GOP Nominee Specifically Courting the NAR.
According to Tabachnick, writing about Perry's announcement in June, GOP candidates competing for NAR support "include Sarah Palin, who has an over 20-year relationship with Alaskan Apostle Mary Glazier; Newt Gingrich, who was anointed by Lou Engle on an internationally televised broadcast in 2009; Michelle Bachman; Rick Santorum; and now, apparently, Rick Perry."
"It's not just the NAR infiltrating government," Wilder told me. "I think - my observation - they are sought out, often by the politicians themselves."
"Politicians of any type, want to go where the energy is, they want to go where the votes are." Wilder continued. "They want to go where there are people who put together a network. These folks put together a tremendous network. For example, you look at the Heartland Apostolic Network - they have a presence in 50 states."
In addition to cultivating NAR leadership, candidates can publicly identify themselves with the NAR without anyone else being the wiser. Like many other movements, the NAR has its own lingo, which allows politicians to speak directly to NAR members in coded language, directly soliciting their support, telling them "I'm one of you" without anyone else realizing what's being said. This happened repeatedly in 2008, when Palin openly talked about "prayer warriors."
Another NAR phrase Tabachnick wrote about in September 2010 is "the head and not the tail," although she points out that others use the phrase quite differently. For the NAR, however, Tabachnick identified the phrase as the "battle cry for the Seven Mountains Campaign." That's how the NAR conceives of its dominionist agenda: taking control of the "Seven Mountains," or culture-shaping spheres that dominate human society: business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, family, and religion.
By becoming "the head and not the tail" of these seven spheres, the NAR aims to establish complete dominance of human society around the world. Speaking like this sends a powerful message about much more than just opposing abortion or gay marriage, yet the words can pass by unnoticed by rePeters unfamiliar with the NAR.
3. Perry Is Not the Only State-Level Figure Connected to the NAR.
A key aspect of the NAR is its emphasis on "spiritual warfare," which grew out of Wagner's decades of earlier work on church growth. Over time, Wagner came to believe that church growth was limited in some places because of demonic power. At first, attention was focused on the process of "spiritual mapping," a geographical approach to demon-fighting. More recently, this has been presented in terms of "Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare," described as part of a three-tiered approach, as Talk2action.org explains in its glossary of NAR terms:
Ground-level spiritual warfare is casting out demons from individuals. Occult-level spiritual warfare is confrontations with demons operating through witchcraft and esoteric philosophies (examples are Freemasonry and Tibetan Buddhism). Strategic-level spiritual warfare is the highest level, dealing with confrontation of territorial principalities that control entire communities, ethnic groups, religions and nations.
Given this deep-seated orientation, it's not surprising that geographical organization has been key to the NAR. Establishing geographic dominion over cities and states makes perfect sense on the way to controlling whole nations and eventually the world. And so it's not surprising to note several examples where NAR-related individuals have gained state-level power.
Most famously, of course, Sarah Palin, was governor of Alaska. While her deep involvement with the NAR was glossed over at the time, it's now clear that she first joined a statewide "prayer warrior" network under Apostle Mary Glazier when she was 24 years old. When she first ran for Wasilla City Council in the 1990s on an explicitly religious platform, it was unprecedented for the town but perfectly normal by NAR standards. Banning books from the public library when she became mayor was similarly unsurprising once you understand the dominionist ideology she embraced.
Gov. Sam Brownback of Kansas doesn't have anything close to Palin's longtime involvement as a prayer-warrior footsoldier, but he has played a highly visible role as a general while serving in the Senate before becoming governor. While in the Senate, Brownback spent years supporting the NAR's "reconciliation" strategy with Native Americans, both sponsoring legislation and appearing at NAR events. Brownback is the only sitting governor to accept Perry's invitation to attend The Response.
In Hawaii in 2010, before now-governor Ambecrombie joined the race, both the leading Republican and Democratic candidates for governor were deeply involved with NAR. They had almost achieved their goal of making the election irrelevant for their purposes. In April 2010, Tabachnick's colleague at Talk2action, Bruce Wilson, wrote a blog post, Christian Right Claims Both 2010 Hawaii Gubernatorial Candidates. It began with a quote from Ed Silvoso, a global NAR leader who is intimately involved with promoting the Ugandan "Kill the gays" law. The quote reads, "It doesn't matter if the Republican or the Democratic candidate wins the governorship [of Hawaii]. Either one is already in the kingdom".
The Democrat, Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann, is a Mormon, despite the fact that the NAR regards the Mormon church as being under demonic control - the same as the Catholic Church. NAR groups even go so far as to burn the Book of Mormon. They're a pretty tolerant lot - at least the Mormons among them like Hannemann are. The Republican. Lt. Gov. James "Duke" Aiona, is positively Palin-like in his NAR enthusiasms. Fortunately, longtime Democratic Congressman Neil Abercrombie entered the race and won. But there's no doubt the NAR will try again in Hawaii.
4. State-Level Prayer Warrior Networks Are Important.
As Wilder pointed out above, John Benefiel's Heartland Apostolic Prayer Network has a presence in all 50 states. Some states have other organizations as well. Collectively, these organizations, based on "spiritual mapping," create a strong foundation for campaign organizing. "Prayer warriors" have already been mobilized in significant elections, such as the 2008 initiative banning gay marriage in California, and given their geographic foundations, their potential is considerable.
Wilder went on to say, "In Texas, for example, they've got one guy who's in charge of the whole state. He oversees 15 regions. Each has its own director. Below that, there's counties and even churches and precincts. So it's this beautifully put-together network that's both broad and deep, and these are committed, disciplined people."
"These are not people living in caves," Wilder added. "They function just fine in the secular world."
Needless to say, their ideology of taking dominion over the government provides a strong motivational framework for keeping them dedicated, whereas most of the population's political interest fluctuates considerably over time. Particularly in light of widespread state-level GOP attacks on public worker unions, which normally provide a great deal of grass-roots organizational support for Democrats, these GOP-supporting networks could provide a crucial boost for GOP candidates, as well as helping to select who those general election candidates might be.
5. A "Rainbow Right" Could Play a Decisive Role in 2012.
Running against America's first black president, the GOP is going to need any edge it can find to gain minority inroads. The NAR is especially aggressive in recruiting minority leaders, and this could be disproportionately important in 2012.
"If Perry runs for president, success may depend on minority voters. The inclusion of minorities is an area where the NAR is strikingly different from old-school fundamentalists and Jerry Falwell's Religious Right," Tabachnick said. "The NAR is trying to form what Bruce Wilson refers to as a 'Rainbow Coalition' in the Religious Right. Success could dramatically change voter patterns in this country."
"It's surprisingly multiracial, that is, surprising if you you don't understand why," Wilder said. Consequently, people should not expect The Response to be "this white bread crowd that people would expect Rick Perry, this white conservative male would be putting on. In fact, it's a pretty racially diverse movement of people, in part reflecting its deep involvement in overseas evangelizing."
"There's this interesting kind of veneer of racial reconciliation," Wilder continued. "I wrote about in the article. There's this kind of instrumentality to it, not that it's not sincere, but there's a goal that's attached, trying to overcome racial problems within this community or Christianity or even conservatism, if you want to keep going with it. And that's that, at a base level, you look at what Lou Engel said. He wants a new breed of black prophets to rise up and use their social justice civil rights kind of bona fides to lend authenticity and credibility to the anti-abortion movement."
"Thus far, they've had trouble getting everybody on the same page and the right wing continues to shoot itself in the foot with racism and radical immigration policies," Tabachnick added. "But if you look at David Barton and many of the apostles, they are doing everything possible to rewrite history in a way that rebrands conservatives as the champions of Blacks, Latinos, Jews, etc., and liberals as the enemy."
6. But Don't Take Talk of "Reconciliation" at Face Value.
As both Wilder and Tabachnick indicate, many of those drawn in by the NAR's talk of reconciliation are quite sincere. But what this actually means in practice is another matter altogether. It's not actually about hearing out real past grievances - particularly since Christianity itself often had a major role in legitimizing, even perpetrating those grievances in the first place, such as justifying Southern slavery with biblical arguments, as described by Larry E. Tise in his 1987 book, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840. Christianity played an equally important role in justifying the genocide of Native American peoples from the early colonial period onward, with Native Americans themselves often portrayed as demons.
Setting aside their revisionist history for the moment, there's the more immediate question of how to square the rhetoric of reconciliation with the reality of a de facto culture war. In a guide to Talk2Action's articles on the NAR, put together last October, Tabachnick wrote that "they literally demonize religions outside of evangelicalism, including burning of Mormon, Catholic and Native American artifacts, and excursions in which they claim their 'spiritual warfare' supernaturally damages icons and infrastructure of other faiths."
A report from the Trinity Apostolic Prayer Network website describes one such ceremony - held in Olney, Texas, on April 21, 2007 - in which Native American artifacts were destroyed. The report has since been scrubbed but was saved by Talk2Action researchers. Central to this reconciliation ritual was the destruction of Native American artifacts, which had to be carried out by NAR-designated "representatives" of the Native American people. These were Jay Swallow, a prominent Native American "apostle" and Mark Wauahdooah, an NAR-affiliated Comanche. Picking up in the midst of a detailed description, we are told, "Jay then proceeded to lead Mark in the smashing of vessels. One vessel depicted the snakelike features of Leviathan, and the other depicted the Sun god, Baal. They were placed in trash bags, and Mark used a dogwood rod presented to Jay by Chuck Pierce to destroy the pottery. It shattered into many pieces at the joyous shouts of the body of Christ. Tom Schlueter, as an apostolic leader of the region, was invited by Jay and John to lead the group through the Divorce Decree. Then judgment was declared. The divorce was finalized. A crystal gavel (presented to Tom by Chuck Pierce) was used to declare the judgment..."
Finally, to round things off, the report noted, "A spirit of reconciliation was released as we embraced each other. There was a representation of Native American, Hispanic, Asian, African American and Anglo. What an awesome day!"
Not one Anglo-American artifact was destroyed, of course. What would the NAR leaders endorsing Perry's prayer event say to Native Americans who see such acts of cultural destruction as a continuation of past hostility, even genocide, rather than of reconciliation? Would they say that such Native Americans were possessed by demons? Would their answer be to smash still more artifacts? "The beatings will continue until morale improves." Is that the logic?
Surely, there are important questions here for intelligent rePeters to ask.
7. The NAR's "Factual" Claims Don't Always Stand Up.
It's often said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. NAR propaganda has plenty of extraordinary claims. But proof? Not so much. For example, consider the case of Kenyan witch-hunter Thomas Muthee. A video of Muthee anointing Sarah Palin came to light during the 2008 campaign, but little of the background involved made it into the corporate media. Far from being an obscure backwoods figure, Muthee was one of the stars of a 1999 video, the first in the Transformations series, a pseudo-documentary series advancing strategic-level spiritual warfare that is advertised as having been seen by 200 million people in 70 languages. Muthee's reputation was reputedly established by vanquishing a Kenyan "witch" around 1990, as recounted in that video. This then lead to a spiritual, moral and cultural revival, with plummeting crime rates and joy for all. There's just one problem: It's not true.
First off, the vanquished "witch" is actually a rival preacher, and she never went anywhere. On Oct. 15, 2008, a leading British newpaper, The Telegraph, ran a story datelined Nairobi by Nick Wadhams, "False claims exposed of Kenyan pastor who protected Sarah Palin from witches".
"In fact, Mama Jane never left. She is a pastor just down the road from Muthee's Word of Faith Church," Wadhams reported. "'Muthee was saying that this was a place of witch doctors. Where do you see the witch?' said Mama Jane, whose real name is Jane Njenga."
Further down, Wadham wrote, "Rival pastors in Kiambu now denounce Muthee for his treatment of Mama Jane. 'You cannot make personal gain on crucifying a woman,' said an ally of Mama Jane, Pastor Gideon Maina. 'As a man of God, you don't make your name by stepping on other people's names.'"
Nor were Muthee's claims of dramatic quality-of-life improvements backed up by facts, either. Indeed, a nine-page 2002 letter from Dutch Christian work group "Back to the Bible" found numerous factual problems in the various segments of the first two "Transformations" videos that had been released at the time. Regarding Muthee's claims, they wrote, "We are told in the video that this area had the worst reputation in the land and was full of violence and rape. But this is not backed up by police reports, authorities of justice or any other official source. There are also no official reports of reform because of the "revival." We do realize that often things work differently in an African land, so we consulted the magazine "Internationale Samenwerking" (International Co-operation) of the Dutch Ministry of development aid. In this paper, there is no report of a decline in crime during the last years in Kenya."
Not everything in the videos is false, of course. But when it comes to matters that routinely are documented by authorities, the NAR's record for truthfulness does not warrant any rePeter treating them as a reliable source.
8. NAR-Related "History" Often Stands Real History on Its Head.
Blaming liberals and Democrats for America's racist past is par for the course in NAR circles. They are hardly alone in this, however. They heavily rely on self-trained "historian" David Barton, along with many others, not just on the religious right, but among conservatives and Republicans more generally. Barton is also quite popular for his "historical" arguments that America was established as a Christian nation - a claim that professional historians reject with mountains of evidence to the contrary, not least the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, which explicitly states, "The Government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
Barton's argument blaming liberals and Democrats for America's racism depends on a double deception: First, Barton focuses on pre-1960s history, the time period when the national Democratic Party decisively broke with its racist past - and set in motion the long-term decline of its support among Southern whites, which Republicans immediately took advantage of with Barry Goldwater's candidacy in 1964, when his home state of Arizona was the only non-Southern state the GOP carried - a complete reversal of the 1956 election.
This minor detail - later cemented into the long-term electoral "Southern Strategy" under Richard Nixon - is completely missing from Barton's account. A second deception is that Barton presents the impression that racist Democrats - who predominated most heavily in the South - were synonymous with liberals, while anti-racist Republicans were conservatives. Both impressions are historically false. Indeed, anti-racist Republicans in the 1960s were the much-maligned "Rockefeller Republicans," who movement conservatives worked very hard to drive out of the party.
Yet, the NAR goes much further than Barton in creating its own alternative history. In her book Bridging the Racial and Political Divide: How Godly Politics Can Transform A Nation, Texas apostle Alice Peterson not only ignores the mass exodus of racist whites from the Democratic Party, she asserts a continuity over time based on an "invisible network of evil comprising an unholy structure," which she then identifies with the biblical figure Jezebel, interpreted not as the human figure she actually is in the Bible, but instead as a demon, a typical example of how the NAR reinvents the Bible for their own political purposes. Since the same demon has been associated with the Democrats at least since the 1860s, mere matters like LBJ's heroic arm-twisting passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act - and Nixon's race-based "Southern Strategy" to lock up Southern whites for the GOP - are without any historical significance so far as Peterson is concerned. Lest anyone question her too closely, Peterson assures us that she has actually seen the demon Jezebel with her own two eyes - and not only Jezebel, but a few smaller demons underneath her skirt.
9. Be Skeptical About NAR's Self-Proclaimed "Christianity."
Like many conservative Christians, members of the NAR are often quick to dismiss other Christians they don't agree with, so it's probably not a good idea to do the same with them.
Yet, it would not be good, thorough reporting to ignore the fact that, mentioned above, other conservative Christians have been highly critical of NAR doctrines and practices, often labeling them "unbiblical." I've already cited the Assembly of God's warnings from 2000. Additionally, the letter from the Dutch Christian work group "Back to the Bible" mentioned above, criticized NAR's unbiblical teachings as well at the factual errors in the Transformations videos. Another extensive critique can be found in the 2002 book Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare: A Modern Mythology? by Bishop Michael Reid, who has three degrees from Oral Roberts University, including an honorary Doctorate of Divinity, and a gay sex scandal just licked Wagner's long-time close associate, Ted Haggard. Other critical voices from conservative Christians can be easily found online, repeating many of the same criticisms.
As stated earlier, Wagner brags that the NAR is the most significant change in how Christianity is practiced since the Protestant Reformation, and all these critics agree - except, they say, it's changed so much that it's no longer consistent with the Bible.
A Call to Question
This is hardly an exhaustive list of potential stories that in no way depend on fireworks at The Response this coming Saturday. But they are certainly enough to show that there's no shortage of explosive material lurking just beneath the surface, waiting to be more fully explored.
Paul Rosenberg is senior editor at Random Length News.
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The Day the Middle Class Died |
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Saturday, 06 August 2011 10:51 |
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Intro: "From time to time, someone under 30 will ask me, 'When did this all begin, America's downward slide?' They say they've heard of a time when working people could raise a family and send the kids to college on just one parent's income (and that college in states like California and New York was almost free). That anyone who wanted a decent paying job could get one. That people only worked five days a week, eight hours a day, got the whole weekend off and had a paid vacation every summer. That many jobs were union jobs, from baggers at the grocery store to the guy painting your house, and this meant that no matter how 'lowly' your job was you had guarantees of a pension, occasional raises, health insurance and someone to stick up for you if you were unfairly treated."
Portrait, Michael Moore, 04/03/09. (photo: Ann-Christine Poujoulat/Getty)
The Day the Middle Class Died
By Michael Moore, Open Mike Blog
06 August 11
 rom time to time, someone under 30 will ask me, "When did this all begin, America's downward slide?" They say they've heard of a time when working people could raise a family and send the kids to college on just one parent's income (and that college in states like California and New York was almost free). That anyone who wanted a decent paying job could get one. That people only worked five days a week, eight hours a day, got the whole weekend off and had a paid vacation every summer. That many jobs were union jobs, from baggers at the grocery store to the guy painting your house, and this meant that no matter how "lowly" your job was you had guarantees of a pension, occasional raises, health insurance and someone to stick up for you if you were unfairly treated.
Young people have heard of this mythical time - but it was no myth, it was real. And when they ask, "When did this all end?", I say, "It ended on this day: August 5th, 1981."
Beginning on this date, 30 years ago, Big Business and the Right Wing decided to "go for it" - to see if they could actually destroy the middle class so that they could become richer themselves.
And they've succeeded.
On August 5, 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired every member of the air traffic controllers union (PATCO) who'd defied his order to return to work and declared their union illegal. They had been on strike for just two days.
It was a bold and brash move. No one had ever tried it. What made it even bolder was that PATCO was one of only three unions that had endorsed Reagan for president! It sent a shock wave through workers across the country. If he would do this to the people who were with him, what would he do to us?
Reagan had been backed by Wall Street in his run for the White House and they, along with right-wing Christians, wanted to restructure America and turn back the tide that President Franklin D. Roosevelt started - a tide that was intended to make life better for the average working person. The rich hated paying better wages and providing benefits. They hated paying taxes even more. And they despised unions. The right-wing Christians hated anything that sounded like socialism or holding out a helping hand to minorities or women.
Reagan promised to end all that. So when the air traffic controllers went on strike, he seized the moment. In getting rid of every single last one of them and outlawing their union, he sent a clear and strong message: The days of everyone having a comfortable middle class life were over. America, from now on, would be run this way:
- The super-rich will make more, much much more, and the rest of you will scramble for the crumbs that are left.
- Everyone must work! Mom, Dad, the teenagers in the house! Dad, you work a second job! Kids, here's your latch-key! Your parents might be home in time to put you to bed.
- 50 million of you must go without health insurance! And health insurance companies: you go ahead and decide who you want to help - or not.
- Unions are evil! You will not belong to a union! You do not need an advocate! Shut up and get back to work! No, you can't leave now, we're not done. Your kids can make their own dinner.
- You want to go to college? No problem - just sign here and be in hock to a bank for the next 20 years!
- What's "a raise"? Get back to work and shut up!
And so it went. But Reagan could not have pulled this off by himself in 1981. He had some big help:
The AFL-CIO.
The biggest organization of unions in America told its members to cross the picket lines of the air traffic controllers and go to work. And that's just what these union members did. Union pilots, flight attendants, delivery truck drivers, baggage handlers - they all crossed the line and helped to break the strike. And union members of all stripes crossed the picket lines and continued to fly.
Reagan and Wall Street could not believe their eyes! Hundreds of thousands of working people and union members endorsing the firing of fellow union members. It was Christmas in August for Corporate America.
And that was the beginning of the end. Reagan and the Republicans knew they could get away with anything - and they did. They slashed taxes on the rich. They made it harder for you to start a union at your workplace. They eliminated safety regulations on the job. They ignored the monopoly laws and allowed thousands of companies to merge or be bought out and closed down. Corporations froze wages and threatened to move overseas if the workers didn't accept lower pay and less benefits. And when the workers agreed to work for less, they moved the jobs overseas anyway.
And at every step along the way, the majority of Americans went along with this. There was little opposition or fight-back. The "masses" did not rise up and protect their jobs, their homes, their schools (which used to be the best in the world). They just accepted their fate and took the beating.
I have often wondered what would have happened had we all just stopped flying, period, back in 1981. What if all the unions had said to Reagan, "Give those controllers their jobs back or we're shutting the country down!"? You know what would have happened. The corporate elite and their boy Reagan would have buckled.
But we didn't do it. And so, bit by bit, piece by piece, in the ensuing 30 years, those in power have destroyed the middle class of our country and, in turn, have wrecked the future for our young people. Wages have remained stagnant for 30 years. Take a look at the statistics and you can see that every decline we're now suffering with had its beginning in 1981 (here's a little scene to illustrate that from my last movie).
It all began on this day, 30 years ago. One of the darkest days in American history. And we let it happen to us. Yes, they had the money, and the media and the cops. But we had 200 million of us. Ever wonder what it would look like if 200 million got truly upset and wanted their country, their life, their job, their weekend, their time with their kids back?
Have we all just given up? What are we waiting for? Forget about the 20% who support the Tea Party - we are the other 80%! This decline will only end when we demand it. And not through an online petition or a tweet. We are going to have to turn the TV and the computer and the video games off and get out in the streets (like they've done in Wisconsin). Some of you need to run for local office next year. We need to demand that the Democrats either get a spine and stop taking corporate money - or step aside.
When is enough, enough? The middle class dream will not just magically reappear. Wall Street's plan is clear: America is to be a nation of Haves and Have Nothings. Is that OK for you?
Why not use today to pause and think about the little steps you can take to turn this around in your neighborhood, at your workplace, in your school? Is there any better day to start than today?
P.S. Here are a few places you can connect with to get the ball rolling:
Main Street Contract for America
Showdown in America
Democracy Convention
Occupy Wall Street
October 2011
How to Join a Union by the AFL-CIO (they've learned their lesson and have a good president now), or
UE Change to Win
MoveOn
High School Newspaper (Just because you're under 18 doesn't mean you can't do anything!)
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