Elections & Voting
On Obama and McCain, Hagee and Farrakhan
By Mark Crispin Miller
Online Journal Guest Writer


Feb 29, 2008, 00:53

Until the Democrats have finally nominated someone, I'm continuing to raise whatever questions strike me as legitimate about Obama, Clinton and McCain; and this piece by Glenn Greenwald, Some hateful, radical ministers -- white evangelicals -- are acceptable, offers me an opening.

Greenwald rightly notes that there's been no press uproar over John McCain's accepting the endorsement of John Hagee, a highly influential crackpot cleric who has long pushed hard for war against Iran. Such a move, he openly exults, will bring on the End Times. Hagee is in tight with AIPAC (whose members quietly laugh off Hagee's apocalyptic view of Israel and history in general) and George W. Bush (who doesn't laugh off that apocalyptic view). The press is therefore duty-bound to ask McCain about it, especially considering Bomb-Bomb's former stance against such theocratic pastors as John Hagee -- and also, of course, because of Bomb-Bomb's own overt desire to drop a lot of huge explosives on Teheran.

Greenwald makes this important point by contrasting the vast journalistic silence over that endorsement with the press's loud, indignant buzz over Obama's having been endorsed by Louis Farrakhan. Now, there is certainly a double standard here, and Greenwald is entirely right to note it. As for the Farrakhan endorsement, on the other hand, Greenwald seems a bit protective of Obama, as if it's out-of-bounds to question the Big O at all about Farrakhan et al.

I'm certainly not arguing that Obama should ostentatiously "reject" Farrakhan, as demanded by Tim Russert. I do think that it's fair to ask him more about it, though, since he has lately cozied up to AIPAC, and otherwise made reassuring noises about Israel, so as to "reassure the Jews." As for Farrakhan, it's really not the case, as Greenwald intimates, that the endorsement came as a complete surprise. After all, Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., the minister at Obama's church, gave Farrakhan one of the church's Trumpeter Awards last year, because the latter "truly epitomized greatness." So there are clearly grounds for putting further questions to the candidate.

Now, Hagee is, without a doubt, a million times more dangerous than Farrakhan, nor is his Zionism any less pernicious to "the Jews" than is the former's well-known anti-Semitism. But this is not, in fact, about the Jews (although some pundits, such as Richard Cohen, have fiercely, and predictably, played it that way). Rather, it's about Obama's tendency to play to everyone, and float the dizzying impression that he's somehow capable of bringing All Sides into the gigantic circus tent of his own personal appeal: Republicans and Democrats, labor and the corporations, white folks and black separatists, Zionists and anti-Zionists, peaceniks and pro-war types, rich and poor, right and left, and every other group and its opponents.

It's an impossible idea -- and certainly no less preposterous for the fact that so many of the candidate's supporters ("followers" is actually a better word) seem to believe it. Hence the widespread dreamy theory that the GOP just loves Obama, too, which is a notion that will make for quite a series of rude shocks some months from now.

And yet that notion of Obama's literal all-inclusiveness is not just wrong, but deeply antithetical to democratic politics. Let's face it: We the People have our differences, and always will -- and we're supposed to be the ones to deal with them, through rational debate and (endless) compromise, as we work our way toward a just society (and back, let's hope, toward one that's relatively free). Those differences cannot just melt away in the narcotic glow of any charismatic leader, and we shouldn't ever want them to.