The case for Barack Obama, in broad strokes:
He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief. He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections. He rose with guts and gifts. He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make. We witnessed from him this year something unique in American politics: He took down a political machine without raising his voice.
A great moment: When the press was hitting hard on the pregnancy of Sarah Palin's 17-year-old daughter, he did not respond with a politically shrewd "I have no comment," or "We shouldn't judge." Instead he said, "My mother had me when she was 18," which shamed the press and others into silence. He showed grace when he didn't have to.
There is something else. On Feb. 5, Super Tuesday, Mr. Obama won the Alabama primary with 56% to Hillary Clinton's 42%. That evening, a friend watched the victory speech on TV in his suburban den. His 10-year-old daughter walked in, saw on the screen "Obama Wins" and "Alabama." She said, "Daddy, we saw a documentary on Martin Luther King Day in school." She said, "That's where they used the hoses." Suddenly my friend saw it new. Birmingham, 1963, and the water hoses used against the civil rights demonstrators. And now look, the black man thanking Alabama for his victory.
This means nothing? This means a great deal.
...
And there is this. The past few months as the campaign unfolded, I listened for Mr. Obama to speak thoughtfully about the life issues, including abortion. Our last Democratic president knew what that issue was, and knew by nature how to speak of it. Bill Clinton famously said, over and over, that abortion should be "safe, legal and rare." The "rare" mattered. It set a tone, as presidents do, and made an important concession: You only want a medical practice to be rare when it isn't good. For Mr. Obama, whose mind tends, as intellectuals' minds do, toward the abstract, it all seems so . . . abstract. And cold. And rather suggestive of radical departures. "That's above my pay grade." Friend, that is your pay grade, that's where the presidency lives, in issues like that.
But let's be frank. Something new is happening in America. It is the imminent arrival of a new liberal moment. History happens, it makes its turns, you hold on for dear life. Life moves.
A fitting end for a harem-scarem, rock-'em-sock-'em shakeup of a year -- one of tumbling inevitabilities, torn coalitions, striking new personalities.
Eras end, and begin. "God is in charge of history." And so my beautiful election ends.
A few days ago, I mentioned the October 27 edition of America magazine, the national Catholic weekly (published by the Jesuits).
Last night, I headed to St. Francis College in Brooklyn for a debate between the candidates standing for election on November 4 to the New York State Senate from the 25th Senatorial District: John Chromczak and Daniel Squadron.
Final call for help:
My old stomping grounds in Western PA continue to get significant national press in the run up to Election Day. The New York Times, to name one, has been traipsing around Beaver County ... again.A win in Pennsylvania also hinges on McCain’s at least breaking even in the Chippewa part of the state. One bellwether is Washington County, just outside Pittsburgh, which Kerry carried by less than one point in 2004 and where Obama got only 29 percent in this spring’s primary.
This afternoon, we caught the new movie "Rachel Getting Married." The film looks at a few days in the life of a young woman named Kim, played by Anne Hathaway, who leaves a drug rehabilitation clinic to attend her sister's wedding festivities.
The Gospel at Mass today contains "The Great Commandment."First, a disclaimer: This is not one of those nod-and-a-wink exercises, technically phrased in non-partisan language but obviously crafted to support one candidate or another. There's plenty of that already in Catholic discourse, from a handful of bishops on down. Instead, I'd like to try to think for a moment beyond Nov. 4, to the long-term implications of these elections for Catholicism in America.
Political Homelessness
Most analyses of the "Catholic vote" presume there are three basic camps: pro-Obama Catholics, pro-McCain Catholics, and the undecided. For purposes of electoral handicapping, that's a natural way of slicing the pie, but it neglects another important constituency. This block has no candidate, no network of think-tanks and advocacy groups, and it only registers indirectly in the polls: Catholics alienated from both parties, who aren't undecided but rather disenfranchised.
I was in Baltimore earlier this week for a speaking engagement, and fell into conversation with a bright young Catholic theologian who offered a terrific sound-bite for this camp: "I can't help thinking that both parties are addicted to preemptive strikes," he told me, "whether it's in the womb or on the battlefield."
John Carr, a veteran policy expert for the U.S. bishops, has said that Catholics who take the church's social teaching seriously wind up "politically homeless" in America. Just like the real homeless out on American streets, the politically homeless are often forgotten, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
If you want proof of the point, just look at the data from the Pew Forum about the preferences of religious sub-groups. The results for white Evangelicals, white mainline Protestants and black Protestants form flat lines since June; their attitudes haven't really budged in statistically significant fashion. White non-Hispanic Catholics, on the other hand, have oscillated dramatically. In July, they were going 47-44 for Obama; in late September, it was 52-39 for McCain; and by early October, it was 54-39 for Obama. One obvious reading is that there's a sizeable chunk of the Catholic population that simply isn't persuaded by either guy.
Here's a thought exercise: In the abstract, what would the political fortunes be in America of a candidate who actually embodied the full range of Catholic social concerns? What would happen if a serious candidate came along who's pro-life, pro-family, anti-war, pro-immigrant, anti-death penalty, pro-sustainable development, and a multi-lateralist in foreign policy concerned with religious freedom and a robust role for believers in public life? My hunch is that such a candidate could be attractive to a broad cross-section of moderates and independents. The machinery of both major parties, however, appears almost designed to prevent such a person from ever being nominated.
Today's New York Times carries a high school sports story out of the foothills of western Washington County, Pennsylvania.At practice earlier this week, only 10 boys and a girl were willing and able to put on pads. Against the powerhouse Clairton last week, Avella dressed 11 players, leaving not a single substitute on the sideline. One player was hurt in the second quarter, and the Eagles played the rest of the game with 10. They lost, 56-0. It was Avella’s 26th defeat in a row and the 50th in 51 games dating to 2003.
Coach Frank Gray sent a thank-you note this week to his Clairton counterpart for showing class and restraint.
People around town are rather embarrassed by how far the program has fallen. They bemoan a teenage culture in which playing for the high school team has lost its allure in western Pennsylvania, of all places, where football and coal long represented toughness and resilience, where names like Joe Namath and Joe Montana were forged. But slowly this season, the remaining Eagles have come to represent something completely different from losing. They are being appreciated simply for showing up.
I've been remiss in mentioning here that, on Sunday afternoon, we caught the matinee performance of the Broadway play "The 39 Steps" at the Cort Theater.But the appeal here is ultimately more to theater aficionados than to movie buffs, and you don’t need to have seen the movie to appreciate the accomplishment of the show. Ms. Aitken and company are using their cinematic template to celebrate the art of instant illusion making that is theater. Much of the show’s pleasure comes from being in on the magician’s tricks even as, on some primitive level, you accept them. ...
For in addition to providing the relief of being committedly silly in a season of fine dramas about unhappy families, “The 39 Steps” stands out for its plying of minimal resources to maximal effect.
A word of thanks to the pastoral council, pastor and parishioners of St. Thomas More Church in Fairfield, New Jersey, for asking me to join them earlier tonight for a presentation on "Faithful Citizenship."
The Gospel at Mass today is the well-known "Render unto Caesar" passage. 
The last of the presidential debates between Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama is slated for tonight at Hofstra University on Long Island. My tentative plan is to watch it at a YR debate watch party at the Houndstooth Pub in Midtown Manhattan.Both campaigns, in the closing stretch, seem not fully worthy of the moment. We are in crisis—a once-in-a-century event, as we now say. And what we got from the candidates, in this week's presidential debate, was a bunch of gummy meanderings—smooth, rounded sentences so full of focus-grouped inanities that six minutes in viewers entered a kind of trance in which we almost immediately gave up on trying to wrest meaning from what was being said and instead focused on mere impressions. The look of things. The men on the plane, the pseudo-tough political operatives who surround both candidates, sometimes grouse, in private, that it's all symbols now, all mood, all about the visual.
But they have some real responsibility here. They send their candidates out to speak such thin gruel, such spat-out porridge, that we are struck dumb, and left daydreaming about the fact that Mr. Obama's suits are always slate gray and never seem to wrinkle, and Mr. McCain tonight seems like a rabbity forest creature darting amid the hedgerows.
As to what they will do about the crisis, Mr. Obama will raise taxes on the rich and help us weatherize our homes, while Mr. McCain favors "energy independence" and buying up mortgages. On the causes of the crisis they spoke of insufficient regulation, or high spending.
But these were not the great causes. Neither party has clean hands. Or rather, both parties have dirty hands. Here is the truth, spoken by the increasingly impressive Sen. Tom Coburn: "The root of the problem is political greed in Congress. Members . . . from both parties wanted short-term political credit for promoting homeownership even though they were putting our entire economy at risk by encouraging people to buy homes they couldn't afford. Then, instead of conducting thorough oversight and correcting obvious problems with unstable entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, members of Congress chose to . . . distract themselves with unprecedented amounts of pork-barrel spending." That is the truth.
And yet at the debate, when one citizen-questioner invited both candidates to think aloud about the responsibility of our representatives in Washington, they both gently suggested she was cynical.
She was not cynical. She was informed.
Why would anyone trust either candidate to help dig us out of this if they can't speak frankly about what got us into it?
One had the sense this week that our entire political class is playing Frisbee on the edge of a precipice, that no one is being serious enough, honest enough, that it's all too revved, too intense, and yet too shallow. I have grown impatient with the strategists from the campaigns, the little blond monsters who go on cable TV to give us their bouncy, aggressive, tendentious talking points. They are like the men on the plane, the gargoyles with BlackBerrys who think the race is about them and their personal win/loss ratio, who think history is their plaything, who stay up with the press in the bar sipping Perrier and calling it seltzer, and who advise their candidates, in essence, to talk down to the voters, to the American people. They treat every crisis as if it is a political fact to be used for gain or loss, and not as a real crisis, something that deserves a response of gravity and seriousness.
It is asking a lot to ask a political animal to be thoughtful, because they find meaning in action. They are propelled through life by the force of their hunger. But now and then you want to see them think. You want to see them speak the truth. This is one of those times.
I have been remiss in doing a post on the new movie "Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist," which we caught last Thursday evening.
A reminder:
At these moments, central bankers and Treasury officials leap in to try to make the traders feel better. Officials pretend they’re coming up with policy responses, but much of what they do is political theater. In reality, they’re trying to cajole, bluff and calm their audience of global money-sloshers.
This is more than a mortgage problem. We live in a world in which trillions of dollars can move instantly, but they are in the hands of human beings who are, by nature, limited in knowledge, and subject to self-deceptions and social contagions. By one count, financial crises are twice as prevalent now as they were 100 years ago.
In his astonishingly prescient book, “The World Is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy,” David M. Smick argues that we have inherited an impressive global economic system. It, with the U.S. as the hub, has produced unprecedented levels of global prosperity. But it has now spun wildly out of control. It can’t be fixed with the shock and awe of a $700 billion rescue package, Smick says. The fundamental architecture needs to be reformed.
-- John Henry Newman, "Dream of Gerontius"
Some of these words of Cardinal Newman (1801 - 1890) were recalled Thursday by Fr. Paul Chavasse, provost of the Birmingham Oratory and postulator of the cardinal's cause for beatification and canonization.
He recalled the lines after announcing that no physical remains of the great 19th Century English churchman were found in his grave in a small secluded cemetery. The discovery means Cardinal Newman's casket did not have a lead lining as had been expected.
The body of Cardinal Newman was to have been exhumed and moved to a prominent location in the Birmingham Oratory in anticipation of his beatification -- a not uncommon practice for Saints of the Church.
The inscription plate of Cardinal Newman's coffin was found in the grave:
From the Archdiocese of Birmingham statement:"During the excavation the brass inscription plate which had been on the wooden coffin in which Cardinal Newman had rested was recovered from his grave. It reads:
'Eminent [issimus] et Reverend [issimus] Joannes Henricus Newman Cardinalis Diaconus S Georgii in Velabro Obiit Die XI August. MDCCCXC RIP'
English Translation:
'The Most Eminent and Most Reverend John Henry Newman Cardinal Deacon of St George in Velabro Died 11 August 1890 RIP'
Somewhere in heaven I think an old Englishman may be smiling at our earthly presumptuousness.
Hat-tip: Whispers in the Loggia
The Gospel at Mass today brings us another parable set in a vineyard in which Jesus speaks about the Kingdom of God.
Speaking of Governor Palin, I was pleasantly surprised Thursday evening to get a call from one of the long-time readers of this blog looking for me to be live-blogging on the vice presidential debate.What now seems like eons ago, the presidential race began with arguably the most diverse cast of candidates in our nation’s history. As we enter the fall stretch, the field includes an African-American and a woman, a heartening display of the diversity that is now acknowledged as a fact of life by most Americans. The ascendancy of both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin was unexpected, and in many ways they are unlikely representatives of their respective demographic groups. Unlike most African-American leaders of the last 40 years, Obama did not take part in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, nor is he is a descendant of American slaves. Palin is a pro-death penalty, pro-drilling-in-the-Arctic-Reserve member of the National Rifle Association and Feminists for Life. She has little in common with Hillary Clinton, much less with Gloria Steinem.
Perhaps because of their unusual biographies, both Obama and Palin have proved able to confront divisive issues and mend longstanding rifts. In a speech delivered on Father’s Day, Obama called for African-American men to play a greater role in their children’s lives, a neuralgic issue in the black community, and under his leadership the Democrats have started to bring some pro-life Catholics back into the tent. Sarah Palin targeted members of her own party suspected of corruption, and her rise to prominence is proof that the term anti-abortion feminist is not an oxymoron.
Much has already been made of the youth of these candidates (both are in their 40s) and their relative inexperience. Yet could it be that their youth is an asset, that it allows them to see old problems with fresh eyes?
Tiffany Boardman, a friend from the years of my PA State House races, has started her own Christian inspiration blog called "t-time.""About five years ago, when our church started its “Contemporary Service,” I would send out the weekly 'order of worship' via e-mail to those that attended so they would have a clue about what was coming up on Sunday morning. Because I couldn’t just send out the order by itself, I started adding my own little bits of inspirational messages to go with the week’s theme. After much prayer, I felt it was time to 'go public' with my messages. Well, the time is now and “t time” is alive and running. Check it out!"
