I have always held in this race that while of course we shouldn’t vote for a presidential candidate based on something as skin deep as skin color, that nonetheless all things being equal in terms of character, temperament, policy proposals, principles, and priorities, that there is a crucial psychological bonus to having a black president. It is simply of too inestimable a value to send the message to the youth of America and around the world about what kind of a country we live in.

This great article is about an early fruit of this impact:

As I’ve considered Sen. Obama’s accomplishment, I’ve determined the most profound impact he’s had — not considering the possibility of him becoming president and proving to be one of our better ones — is on our future more than our present or our history.

I didn’t grasp that until I took my 2-year-old to the doctor last week and he took a vision exam. It was through young Alexander’s eyes that I saw how important this moment in time could be.

The nurse administering the exam pointed to different shapes and images on a chart, asking Alexander to identify each. One of the recurring images was that of a flag. It wasn’t an American flag, but a flag just the same.

To a 2-year-old, a flag is a flag, right? Alexander is most familiar with the U.S. flag. When the nurse pointed to the flag, he answered confidently.

“Barack Obama,” he said, pronouncing it as best as a 2-year-old could.

“What did you say?” she asked.

“Barack Obama.”

As she went through the chart, she once again came to the flag.

“Barack Obama.”

“Do you know what he’s saying?” I asked her.

“No.”

“He’s saying Barack Obama.” Why? Because he was making an association. Most times when he’s seen Sen. Obama on TV, the Democratic nominee has been standing in front of the U.S. flag.

Whether Sen. Obama wins the presidency or not, he has had an untold effect on the future and psyche of America.

My son will live a lifetime in which he knows an African-American can ascend to the highest levels in this country. He won’t think it odd for a black man to seek to lead a nation. He as well as many white, Asian, Hispanic and other children, whether they like the candidate or not, won’t think it odd or a novelty to see a black man standing in front of the American flag — the ultimate display of patriotism, despite misguided and mean-spirited efforts to paint Sen. Obama as being otherwise — articulating his concerns and love for his country.

Because of Barack Obama, many of our children won’t grow up with as many of the psychological bruises those before them might have endured.

I grew up being told that I could one day be president. But much of what I saw and heard suggested otherwise. I saw and experienced the discrimination. Blacks only secured the right to vote in my lifetime. I saw many black kids in school being steered away from advanced courses and training that would have prepared them to shoot for higher goals.

Not only does Sen. Obama’s feat help shape a 2-year-old’s thoughts about himself and the world around him, but it affects so many others, from high-schoolers to college students to older folks.

As something of a Rawlsian about public discourse, I have no problem with religious people arguing in government for application of ideals that they personally discovered through their religion or their sacred texts, their religious institutions, etc. as long as they respect the need to give reasons that are publicly accessible, reasons that do not cite religious authority as though it were binding upon all rational people to take into account. As long as your religiously derived view is also defensible in terms of reason, you should feel free to argue for it.

This principle is what prevents us from having laws rooted in religious intuitions that are purely arbitrary and incapable of rational justification. If anyone can just “feel” God’s voice telling them that God wants x or God wants y and if they are able to persuade others that they had this insight straight from God, then there are no limits on theological claims made by the fiat of “Scriptural” authors or contemporaries who claim prophetic abilities that can be made into laws. There is no limit to stop those who think God indicates to them that slavery is okay or that God demands a genocide (as the Bible claims he has repeatedly before for example) from making such insistences in arguments about public policy and law. We could wind up with arguments that all Americans must be baptized for the good of their souls, that there should be no separation from church and state, etc. Any argument must be considered when it needs no further justification when it is rooted in premises chosen to be believed purely by groundless “faith.”

And that’s why Obama is extremely right in his manner of trying to explain to his fellow Christians how they should conceive of their incorporation of their religious beliefs (if they must) into their public policy suggestions. And it’s why Dobson is extremely upsetting:

Dobson reserved some of his harshest criticism for Obama’s argument that the religiously motivated must frame debates over issues like abortion not just in their own religion’s terms but in arguments accessible to all people.

He said Obama, who supports abortion rights, is trying to govern by the “lowest common denominator of morality,” labeling it “a fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution.”

“Am I required in a democracy to conform my efforts in the political arena to his bloody notion of what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies?” Dobson said. “What he’s trying to say here is unless everybody agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe.”

Dobson’s either obtuse or a liar to interpret Obama as saying that “unless everybody agrees” he has no right to fight for his beliefs. What Obama is saying is that your arguments must be of the type that could persuade those that disagree with you on the common terms of rational debate that we all share: appeals to logic, history, repeatable or universally had types of experiences, science, anecdotal evidence, etc. Obama’s not saying the ridiculous thing that unless everyone already agrees with you you cannot make an argument. He’s saying you cannot make an argument from premises that are simply idiosyncratic to you and your dogmatic faith tradition with its bald assertions that subject themselves to no thorough rational questioning but instead insist on “faith” to make up a key role in their assenting.

Unless Dobson really (and rather stupefyingly) thinks that he has no reasons to argue against abortion that do not come from the claims of “special revelation” from God, what in the world is wrong with demanding he use arguments that do not appeal to leaps of faith but actually are persuasive to “reason alone?” And if he thinks abortion is only refutable for religious reasons, because of his self-conscious, rationally uncompelled choice to believe (which is what faith is, a choice to believe) , then how dare he insist others who do not make a similarly rationally uncompelled choice to believe as a matter of law? How dare he derive laws from those beliefs he knows he chose even though they weren’t nearly conclusively proven to him? How does he not see the arbitrariness, unfairness, and theocracy in that? Is he just that unwilling to view things from the perspective of others who disagree with him? Does he have that little respect for them?

The irony of Dobson’s anger and contempt for Obama is that he goes right ahead and in defense of his right to argue on religious terms makes an explicit appeal that is accessible to all people after all—-he appeals to “what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies.” One does not have to be religious to have an interest in the well being of “tiny babies.” That he thinks you must is just religious arrogance. That’s not to say of course that all irreligious people accept his views on what is or is not a “tiny baby” or what is right or wrong with regard to them. But neither do all religious people agree with him. The issue can be debated among reasonable people on rational and reasonable terms without appeals to religious authority and without the assumption that only religious people can have the most robust senses of goodness possible.

It is Dobson’s pure arrogance that his religion makes his moral intuitions and moral insights superior and that arrogance translates in an unflinching willingness to theocratically impose his moral intuitions on people by appeal to reasons they could not even theoretically assent to as long as they are not adherents to his theology.

That’s obnoxious, that’s authoritarian, that’s anti-rational, and that’s flat-out regressive.

Flip-flopping on NAFTA, Obama explains his position in his native politician language:

“Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified,” he conceded, after I reminded him that he had called NAFTA “devastating” and “a big mistake,” despite nonpartisan studies concluding that the trade zone has had a mild, positive effect on the U.S. economy.

What that means in English is “Politicians pander and lie to get elected and I’m a politician, so I’m no exception.”

I give Obama the credit of having enough honesty that he here and elsewhere not only admits he lied but also accurately attributes it to his being a politician. Problem is with the lies and with the attempt to excuse his behavior on those grounds.

I understand the felt need to pander. I actually also prefer his true position on NAFTA to his rhetorical one for the primaries.

What I don’t appreciate is his consistent unwillingness to take an unpopular stance on principle. On gay marriage, he has given tacit approval of the California Supreme Court’s position, so there is reason to hope he won’t sell out the gays like Clinton did with DOMA. But his official position says he will indeed oppose marriage for gays. He claims he will reverse Bush’s assaults on the constitution, but thus far is silent on the Congress’s contempt for the constitution expressed in its passing of the FISA legislation. I put up with pragmatically, but less and less appreciate, his pandering to evangelicals on both the left and the right to insist on increasing rhetoric that insists religion should play a large role in governmental thinking. It would be nice if maybe he could take leadership and combine the Democrats’ just call for universal health care with the Republicans’ just call for tort reform that would eliminate the enormous amount of money wasted on unnecessary medicine aimed at protecting doctors’ from irrational malpractice suits. It would be nice if Obama didn’t pander to ethanol producers in Iowa. It would be nice if he could take a principled, controversial stand on anything, actually.

I agree with most of Obama’s platform and McCain is an extremely dangerous, militaristic Neo-Con and scary deficit spender who wants to stack the Supreme Court with people with no concern for civil rights. Plus McCain is as big a flip-flopper, if not bigger,than Obama is. So, there’s no doubt the only remaining hope in this campaign for any kind of reversal of the disastrous Bush policies and mindset in government is a President Obama. But it’s increasingly clear that while Obama will not have Bush’s vices, he can be expected to have most of Bill Clinton’s, excluding only the sexual ones.

It is definitely a lesser of two evils election as usual though, I’m finally coming to see and accept that. For a short period there I actually thought it might be something else.

From a New York Times profile on quotes Obama:

“I love when I’m shaking hands on a rope line and”— he mimes the motion, hand over hand — “I see little old white ladies and big burly black guys and Latino girls and all their hands are entwining. They’re feeding on each other as much as on me.”

He shrugs; it’s that distancing eye of the author.

“It’s like I’m just the excuse.”

regardless of whether it’s put-on humility—there’s something in there to meditate on a bit, I think.

Fascinatingly thorough and multiple treatments of the hard numbers about Obama and Clinton’s respective prospects against McCain. That and more important analysis that should go into superdelegate thinking about whom to support.

And all this info and analysis is on one page of multiple mathematical pleasures

Senator Coburn writes,

Compassionate conservatism’s starting point had merit. The essential argument that Republicans should orient policy around how our ideas will affect the poor, the widow, the orphan, the forgotten and the “other” is indisputable – particularly for those who claim, as I do, to submit to an authority higher than government. Yet conservatives are conservatives because our policies promote deliverance from poverty rather than dependence on government.

Compassionate conservatism’s next step – its implicit claim that charity or compassion translates into a particular style of activist government involving massive spending increases and entitlement expansion – was its undoing. Common sense and the Scriptures show that true giving and compassion require sacrifice by the giver. This is why Jesus told the rich young ruler to sell his possessions, not his neighbor’s possessions. Spending other people’s money is not compassionate.

That’s right folks, all that disgust with the George W. Bush and the Republican party these days is based on their being too compassionate. Shame on Mark Foley and his “compassion” towards his interns. Shame on the compassion of Jack Abramoff. Shame on the president for killing tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, thousands of American soldiers, and trillions of dollars out of his blind compassion.

And according to Coburn, politicians need to be governed by the principles given from “a higher authority,” a “Scriptural” Christian higher authority that should determine our legislation. And what is the message of this Christian Gospel? Apparently the sole Gospel truth that should be guiding our government is “Thou shalt not force thy rich neighbor to sacrifice for his fellow man.”

Now that’s what I call creative hermeneutics!

That this man gets to be one of the most powerful legislators in all the world, a freaking United States Senator, is shudder-inducing.

I used to consider myself a conservative. I have a whole lot of sympathies with libertarians like Ron Paul. On social matters I’m almost extremely libertarian. On fiscal matters, I’d be one if it weren’t that I thought markets are too capricious to be just or stable when unfettered and totally deregulated; if I didn’t believe that some government regulation is needed as a check and balance that prevents de facto oligarchies of undemocratically controlled multinational corporations that threaten liberty and safety in comparable ways to government’s threats to these things; and if I didn’t think that since health insurance arrangements are already by their nature socialistic arrangements, they’d might as well be run as a not-for-profit by a just government and include everyone. So, those caveats restrain my libertarianism. But at the core of classic libertarian conservative principles of small government, promotion of competition, and personal independence appeal to me.

But simply nothing about the present day Republican party appeals to me. Its combination of theocratic longings, pandering to ignorance, antipathy to science, homophobia, racism, contempt for civil and privacy rights, self-righteous hypocritical religiosity, materialism, arrogant jingoistic chest-thumping imperialism, and obscene corporate corruption make the party as repulsive as toxic waste.

And none of this has to do with the party’s “compassion!”

There’s probably never been another presidential candidate so willing and able to completely satirize himself like this.

Andrew Sullivan posts an e-mail from one of his readers:

I live in SD and I am a candidate for the State House. I was out walking my district last month and spoke to a woman about the primary. She has a statue of the Virgin Mary in her front yard and was wearing several crosses around her neck. Here is our conversation:

Woman: “I don’t know about that Obama guy.”

Me: “I’m an Obama supporter, do you mind if I ask what you’re unsure about.”

Woman: “He’s a muslim and there is a biblical prophecy that a muslim will take over our country and destroy the world.”

Me: “You’re aware he is not a Muslim.”

Woman: “He can say anything he wants.”

A prophecy in the Christian Bible about a Muslim? And it mentions America? And she thinks that she can prevent a prophecy from happening by voting against it?

Has this woman ever read the Bible? She can say anything she wants.

Yesterday I talked to the local convenience store owner with whom I’ve long been friendly. He’s from Kosovo and he’s so anti-Muslim that as far as he’s concerned Obama is a Muslim because “it’s in his blood.” Last night in order to emphasize how anti-Obama he is, he explained that, “I hate work. I hate it. But if you told me, if I vote for Obama, I never have to work again, I still won’t vote for him.”

We’ve already seeing the beginning of 6 months-8 years worth of pushing away the giant rock of public political correctness to see the slime and maggots that normally hide in the dark.

Well, now it turns out that anyone that Barack Obama endorses is magically endorsed by Jeremiah Wright. By November’s time it is the Republican party’s wish that not only Barack Obama is equated with any one he’s ever been associated with in any capacity but that pretty much every Democrat who aligns him or herself with Obama or whom Obama aligns himself with is magically converted into a member of Jeremiah Wright’s fold.

By November, the Republicans are going to want Jeremiah Wright to be perceived as the pope of Democrats essentially.

Thankfully, this hilarious ad with all its baseless character assassination and insult to intelligence failed and Childers was elected. The Republican party is horrified.

As the Democratic primary season is winding down, Barack Obama has an insurmountable lead in pledged delegates.  Because of the nature of this lead the race is being declared over and done with in his favor.  It makes a lot of sense to think that if the superdelegates were to overturn a clear mandate for the first African American nominee they would devestatingly alienate the incredibly enthusiastic African American and youth voters who have been galvanized by Obama’s candidacy.  A figure that left wing idealists of many ethnicities and colors see as potentially embodying in his nomination a landmark of social progress cannot be denied such a nomination by the will of party bosses without causing deeply bitter feelings and accusations that the Democratic party thereby takes a deeply undemocratic turn.

Now, in this brief essay, I want to ask whether the superdelegates voting in a way contrary to the pledged delegates really would be an undemocratic gesture.  Why should the pledged delegate count be taken as the truest measure of the will of the people?  A couple of days ago there was an excellent profile in the politico  of the lawyer Obama’s employed to master the delegate rules and maximize his campaign’s delegate total. Delegates in the Democratic primaries do not exactly represent raw vote totals. Sometimes districts get disproportionately more delegates than neighboring districts in their own states because in those districts the Democrats have in the past turned voted more heavily Democratic in previous elections. Sometimes quirks of math make for uneven delegate distribution. For example, in a district with only 4 delegates, a 59%-41% margin in favor of one candidate over the other results not in 3 delegates for the winner but a tie in which both candidates get 2 delegates. I think in general proportional delegation is a far fairer and more representative way to allocate delegates than winner take all set ups like the electoral college because proportional delegation more accurately tracks the will of the people in a state. Why should a candidate who gets only 60% of a state’s votes get 100% of its delegates? The problem with our general presidential elections is not the use of the delegates in the electoral college—its that the electors in almost all the states do not proportion their delegates in a way representative of their outcomes. Lately Hillary Rodham Clinton has noted that with Republican rules, she would have already won this primary battle. That does not mean however that that would have been a fairer measure than proportional delegation is giving us now. I think it would be a worse one, frankly.

But, proportional delegation as presently set up comes with these quirks in which quite unfairly a 59-41% split in some districts yields a decidedly unrepresentative 2-2 tie in delegates. Now it is to Obama’s credit as a politician (or to his team’s credit anyway) that his campaign was shrewd enough and gifted in foresight and calculation enough to run up the maximum delegate totals it could by pouring its resources as efficiently as possible into the regions where delegate rules meant that a lost district could be turned into a tie or a big win meant more delegates than a big win elsewhere in the state. But does this shrewdness translate into legitimacy as “the people’s choice?” Not necessarily at all.

David Plouffe recently stressed that even though Obama is winning the popular vote contest that superdelegates should not take that into account but only take into account the pledged delegate score since those were the rules the campaigns campaigned under. Their campaigns were designed to rack up pledged delegate totals and not popular votes. But why should the superdelegates care about campaign strategies? Just because the Obama campaign sought to rack up the most pledged delegates it could by gaming the system as well as it could does not mean that they couldn’t also put efforts into genuinely being the candidate chosen by the most people. And it doesn’t mean that a superdelegate should see their victories tallied up in delegate rich pockets as necessarily indicative of the will of the people. By the rules, their shrewdness in attaining pledged delegates is already rewarded in pledged delegates. Superdelegates are free to take in other considerations with respect to what legitimately represents the will of the people and what legitimately represents the good of the party. When the superdelegates see that the popular vote totals are far narrower than the pledged delegate race—which was essentially over before March 4 even—-why shouldn’t they take that to mean that the will of the democratic party is split, regardless of how that is reflected in the pledged delegate count?

One reason to think the superdelegates should just endorse the pledged delegate results is that it is unfair to caucus states which take a smaller sample of the population to determine delegates. Since caucuses occur in a narrower time-window and require a greater time commitment proportionally fewer people show up. In this respect, Obama’s campaign has a solid case to make that it put resources into caucus states expecting their delegates to be proportional to those in popular vote states. If the popular vote was the primary metric under consideration and not delegates then the caucus states wouldn’t even have caucuses since such would lead to under-representation of their state in the total popular tally. Caucus states and the Obama campaign which put great resources and strategy into them deserve to be given the equal consideration that primary states did. It is reasonable to assume, without doing the numbers, that were we to extrapolate the caucus vote totals to a more equivalent representation of total voters in those states to the representation in other states, then Obama’s popular vote lead would increase significantly.

So even though I don’t think it’s any more legitimate or democratic to consider sacrosanct the results of districts where mathematical idiosyncracies misrepresent the will of the people of a given district, I do think superdelegates should pay more attention to the pledged delegates to the popular vote. But three further challenges must be considered before settling on the opinion that the superdelegate ratification of Obama as Democratic nominee is sufficiently democratic to be considered fair. Are caucuses sufficiently representative of the people’s will? Caucuses favor party activists more willing to commit time, more willing to proclaim openly their support, and less susceptible to peer pressure in standing by their decision. Would primaries in states with caucuses really produce popular vote verdicts of similar percentages to caucuses? If Texas is any indication, a state where they prominently held both a primary and a caucus, the answer is no. Obama lost the popular vote in the state but dominated in the caucus percentages enough to net more delegates total from the state. Take out the caucuses and replace them with primaries and do more of his wins turn to losses? Does more of his popular vote total move into Clinton’s column instead? We don’t know definitively, but I’m afraid that would likely happen.

So, is this democratic? Is it fair? I think it is an acceptable situation because a political party in the United States is in some sense a “private” institution. The selection of a nominee is different than the selection of an office holder. If we are to be truly democratic in our elections, selecting office holders our government must be as democratic as possible, showing no favoritism to party activists or traditionally active voters over casual ones, etc. There should be no party bosses reaching in to decide elections to offices. But a party is a party and not a government institution. The Democratic party has every right to maintain a little hierarchy within its structure and reward those who are more committed to their party with opportunities like caucuses to show their commitment and have it count more. They are open in allowing any one to caucus. That the greater commitment involved requires a little more from their voters only allows those more committed to the party to have a greater say. Similarly all districts in any state are welcome to vote democratic. Rewarding party loyalty with greater say in future nominees to those districts is similarly fair and so I say, “more power” to those districts with a little extra representation in pledged delegates. And since the superdelegates are only superdelegates because along the way they’ve been voted into leadership roles by other members of the party, again the Democratic party is remaining at its core democratic even though it is introducing hierarchical structures that allow a little more say to those who are a little (or, in the case of many superdelegates, a whole lot) more committed to the cause of their party.

I think that the introduction of these hierarchical dimensions is fair for parties. In general elections, every vote should count the same and the voting procedures should be far more normalized. But the party seems legitimate in its weighting pledged delegates to reflect party loyalty and its use of caucuses for party building and for giving special say to the most committed party members. I also think though that along this same logic, the superdelegates have every right to break with the pledged delegates and favor popular vote totals with their votes if they disagree with their judgment. The more committed activists have had their extra say with their extra proportion of pledged delegates. If the total pledged delegates are not enough to seal a nomination and a superdelegate wants to use his or her extra say to vote against that nomination, that’s as fair as the caucuses and disproportionate delegation that went in to creating the initial pledged delegate total. And if enough superdelegates are willing to overrule the pledged delegates, then that means there is a solid enough agreement to overcome the pledged delegates’ current advantage, and so that’s an accomplishment of great support in favor of the candidate who lost the pledged delegates.

So, even though if I were a superdelegate, I would not overrule the nomination of Barack Obama personally, I think they’re entitled to. Fortunately, enough of them will accept the judgment of the pledged delegates (and, incidentally, the legitimate current popular vote total taken from the officially sanctioned contests) and informally ratify Obama’s nomination in a matter of weeks. But, I don’t begrudge Hillary at all her appeal (in general) to the closeness of the popular vote as a justification to be reconsidered by the superdelegates. I don’t think it’s just games with math. Yes, her campaign only emphasizes the math that favors her. But any campaign would do this and it’s unnecessary to demand her to do otherwise. There is a legit way to read the math that says the superdelegates are legit in using their superifluence to overturn the superinfluence of party activists in caucuses. It’s also a legit reading of the math to say, the pledged delegates and the actual popular vote lead in legitimate contests (i.e. contests not in Michigan or Florida this year) should be ultimate.

Both campaigns have a defensible case. There’s not a simple answer to what the superdelegates should do and there’s no rule that tells them to favor one metric over another.

Your thoughts?