Left Flank

The Dems have opened the Denver convention.

Jesse Jackson, Jr., Senator Barack Obama's national co-chair has finally gotten the evening off to a good start after a very poor performance by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

One theme I will look for is the contest between economics versus culture, i.e., whether it's rich versus poor, or the high school grads versus college grads, blue versus white collar.

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I started thinking about writing a post-Philadelphia Obama blog, and I recalled several mystic chords of my own. My born-again grandmother with anti-Semitic opinions, my own childhood near disintegrating South Baltimore in the 70s, and Dr. Acklyn Lunch's class at UMBC.

I'm amazed Dr. Lynch is still so animated, so passionate after these decades. Some might find the clip confrontational, or over-the-top. I always thought the man was inspiring. I had to hold my ground in his African-American Studies class, and he gave me plenty of rope. My classmates had families richer than my own, and, for a university vacillating between )% and 18% minority enrollment, they treated the campus like a consolation prize for all those alumni donations. Lynch's was the second-most difficult class I ever took, the most difficult being a Critical Thinking class taught by another African-American teacher, Roye Templeton. His orations—and, week after week was like this—never ceased to be inspiring. It's not like I went out and became African-American, though. I just left the classroom struggling with life with a little more awareness.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Amazingly, I never read Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., or George Jackson, men who lived in my lifetime, before I so naively entered Dr. Lynch's class. I never knew both Malcolm and Martin, men Dr. Lynch met—and the former he refused to join to head south from Harvard to campaign for civil rights in the Deep South. Or, like a hook in Lynch's oration, how it was that both reconciled their views before they both were assassinated. The steamroller killing us wasn't the blood in our veins, but the economics in our society. America still has not read its own history.

Bob Wright and Mickey Kaus demonstrate how two white guys can can't even have a polite discussion about race in America. Firstly, I don't want to elect a president of the Democratic party, but of most Americans. TNR's Barron YoungSmith rebuts Kaus' conservative talking point on welfare reform. And, all that cant about Senator Obama's chutzpah? Don't take my word for it, when so many others have disagreed. All this pomposity reminds me of a quote from a Shelby Foote interview about the need for fighting the Civil War (and, read what he also has to say about emancipation):

And indeed, the differences were so sharp, especially by the extremists on both sides: the Abolitionists in the North and the Fire-eaters in the South. The differences were so sharp that there was scarcely any way to settle it except fighting. Just as two men can get so angry at each other, the only way to settle a thing is to step out in the alley and have a fistfight. People don't do that much any more. They're more apt to take some blind-side swing at somebody instead of a real fight. But I think there probably wasn't any other way to settle it. Now if we were the superior creatures we claim to be as Americans, we would not have fought that war, but we're not that superior by a long shot.

Only there's no "we", no, none of us, or them, and even you are not perfect. James Garney and Amy Sullivan might understand that fallibility.

That desire for a more challenging faith helps explain the appeal of Trinity, despite its potential for controversy. The church, which has ministered to poor South Side families and Oprah Winfrey alike, isn't fringe, but neither is it a likely home for someone plotting a political career in Chicago. "If you're black and you're trying to get ahead in politics, you're not going to join Trinity," says Dwight Hopkins, a Trinity member who is also a professor at U. of C.'s Divinity School. "Not because it's radical — it isn't radical in its context. But it would be safer to join a North Side ecumenical church — the sort of place where people are quiet. They stand up, sit down, listen and leave."

As Obama's political career blossomed, he could have quietly left Trinity for one of those more staid black churches, but he chose to stay. In his speech, he said he disagreed with Wright strongly, and yet he didn't leave the church (or even criticize his pastor until Wright's sermons became a campaign issue). He didn't explain why he stayed, but by trying to show black and white resentment as the backdrop for Wright's comments, Obama suggested that his response to controversy isn't to walk out of the room but to try to understand what's fueling the fire. He also drew a distinction between political advice and spiritual guidance, arguing that many Americans know what it's like to disagree with something their pastor or priest or rabbi says.

By asking voters to understand the context of Wright's anger, though, Obama is counting on voters to accept nuance in an arena that almost always rewards simplicity over complexity. Politicians tend to offer deliberately banal choices: Either we move forward or we fall backward, either we let the economy falter or we help it grow, either we succumb to our enemies or we defeat them — the choice is up to you, America! Obama's formulation was different. Explicitly asking Americans to grapple with racial divisions and then transcend them — that's a bolder, riskier request.

There's nothing wrong with ambition, and I don't knock Senator Clinton for it. But, there's something to say for the resolute who stay true to themselves, take chances, and aim not to win, just change everyone around them. Leaders do that.

About William F. Buckley, Jr., tributes have flourished. I watched Firing Line occasionally, and, although the debate format kept my interest, Buckley's taunting often didn't. Sometimes I wondered if he would fall out of his chair and choke on his pen. But, the devilish taunting was never to my liking, so it's fitting to post this with a Charlie Rose retrospective. I enjoy Charlie Rose in a way I didn't like Buckley. I also admired John McEnroe, with his tortured windmill serve, but his histrionics annoyed me just the same. Perhaps because my temper is vitriolic, I just can't appreciate someone who taunts. I have to sublimate lest I start swinging a pipe.

In the same way I admired Buckley's Catholicism. However, I inherited a Lutheranism I'm still sublimating, and I'm damn angry about it. I'm ignostic due to the fanatical faith Lutheranism foisted on me, that God is just too damn inscrutable and remote, and Christ is a luxury most peons don't deserve. Somewhere in my youth I lost joy. Buckley was less skeptical, and a little more animated.

Buckley's Catholicism was not the docile faith of the working-class Irish or Italian. Instead, he was very much in the mold of the English Catholic, for whom religion is a fighting faith against the prevailing Anglican Church. Thus, Buckley would feel no compunction in challenging American Catholics' deeply held support for welfare capitalism or later in rebelling against Pope John XXII's Pacem in Terris.

Yet the key to Buckley is to understand that he was a rebel, but not a heretic. He fancied himself and his politics to be anti-establishment, yet he was part of the American establishment against which he rebelled. He never went so far as to be cast out, or to attempt to be cast out.

Yet, as Judis himself pointed out, Buckley was tactful.

In 2004, when I had lunch with Buckley at a French restaurant a few miles from his house in Stamford, I asked him what exactly made Bush a conservative. He pondered for a moment, then said, "Well, he's a patriot and he believes in God." By this definition, of course, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton would qualify as conservatives, too. Then again, it's never been entirely clear to Buckley just what constitutes an American conservative. "I confess that I know who is a conservative less surely than I know who is a liberal," he wrote in 1970. "Blindfold me, spin me about like a top, and I will walk up to the single liberal in the room without zig or zag and find him even if he is hiding behind a flower pot. I am tempted to try to develop an equally sure nose for the conservative, but I am deterred by the knowledge that conservatives, under the stress of our times, have had to invite all kinds of people into their ranks to help with the job at hand."

Buckley, a paragon of courtesy, will not say so, but I suspect he questions today the wisdom of having opened the gates quite so wide. For now, in the winter of his discontent, and from his perch above the partisan fray, he is watching the disintegration of the movement that has dominated U.S. politics for the past quarter-century--the movement Buckley did so much, perhaps more than anyone else, to create.

Now, there's a denouement only a Lutheran could appreciate.

The DLC's Harold Ford, Jr. offers good reasons on Charlie Rose why one should vote for the Democrats, either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, and not John McCain. in November, 2008.