In terms of Faith and Values politicking, it's kind of hard to get psyched up about the prospect of Joe Biden coming aboard as Barack Obama's running mate. I can't think of any religious constituency he singularly and automatically delivers to the Senator from Illinois Come to think of it, I can' think of any constituency he singularly and automatically delivers. (Admittedly, that's not the only thing a vice-presidential candidate can bring to the table).
Biden is a Catholic. He is reliably liberal. He is reliably pro-Choice. But nothing I have seen in the general election indicates that Obama has difficulties with reliably liberal, pro-Choice Catholics.
But--note this--there is reason to believe that pro-Choice Catholic politicians can have tremendous difficulties with the Church. These difficulties can become debilitating distractions. The case study here was the candidacy of John Kerry in 2004. As I have noted elsewhere, the "communion denial" stories that trailed him from archdiocese to archdiocese for months mired his campaign in awful publicity.
It's hard, I would surmise, to claim to religious Americans that you share their esteem for the importance of faith when a representative of your own Church is criticizing you at every campaign stop. Although he didn't hang around for long, Rudy Giuliani found himself dogged by the same storyline this past fall.
In terms of getting a faith-based edge, Obama could certainly find a better sidekick than Joe Biden. (He could also probably find a sidekick who hasn't created a Golden Treasury of anti-Obama and pro-McCain quotes for the Maverick's people to bring to our attention).
Up until a few months ago, I was under the impression that it was John McCain, not Barack Obama, who needed a faith-based edge. This is most likely still the case, but in the past few weeks Obama's F and V supremacy has taken a few hits.
For one, John McCain is on (negative) message. His "The One" smear was brazen and raucous, a fratboyish panty raid of an ad. Like all panty raids it was a mixture of playfulness and hostility. Yet, it prompted no comparable payback from the Obama camp. Why?
Also inexplicable was Obama's lackluster performance at the Saddleback Forum this past Saturday. In many ways that was the moment the Democrats had worked years to experience. They learned from the autopsy conducted on Kerry 2004. They got religion. They shunted secularists aside ignominiously. They fielded three frontrunners who could all do God Talk and thump the Bible. (Though one of them, we later learned, was apparently not right with God).
Of this cohort, Senator Obama was the shining star. An authentic Christian, an orator without parallel among his political generation, and a man with an uncanny ability to bond with diverse sorts of religious audiences. In short, his appearance on Saturday night was supposed to be the coming out party for Democrats who vowed to get religion and get the White House.
Yet what happened with Pastor Warren defies explanation. I am still trying to make sense of it. Of all the rhetorical gears that Obama possesses, he locked himself into the lowest, slowest, most placid and subtlety laden of them all. This from a politician who knows how to speak "Evangelical" and knows how to light up a house of worship.
In retrospect we might say that one of the biggest mistakes Obama made in this campaign was accepting Warren's invitation. He was, after all, sure to be confronted with questions about abortion and gay marriage in front of an audience that did not share his views. Recall that John McCain did not accept the invitation to speak at the Compassion Forum in April, possibly because the sponsoring groups had a reputation for being on the more progressive side of things.
A final error was the "cone of silence" debacle (I am a bit amazed that so little attention has been devoted to that scandal--after all, this was a forum about integrity and values). Shouldn't an Obama staffer have been stationed outside the non-existent cone? Or, did the campaign convince itself that no skullduggery could possibly occur within a Church?
In any case, for the first time this election I am wondering if Obama needs a little boost in the F and V department. On this count, Senator Biden, whatever his other virtues might be, does not offer much.
Jacques Berlinerblau is the Rabbi Harold White Chair in Jewish Civilization in Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior advisor to the Center for Jewish Civilization, where he was director from 2006 to June 2020. Berlinerblau has published on a wide variety of issues ranging from the sociology of heresy and modern Jewish intellectuals to African-American and Jewish-American relations.
