I'm not going to jump conclusions about Sarah Palin.  It bothers me that so many people have already made up their minds about every qualification of someone 99% of them hadn't heard of three days ago, based on nothing more than which party she's affiliated with. 

What bothers me very much, though, is that it tells us John McCain's primary attacks on Senator Obama's - his "readiness to lead" - are based on no principle at all, save that he thought it would help him win.  It's the worst part of politics, if you ask me, and I hate that it's so blatant here and that we're apparently willing to put up with it.

A good article on the subject: http://www.slate.com/id/2199029/

Wow - blown away by Senator Obama's approach on the world once again.  Lots of highlights from his nomination acceptance speech, but this jumped out at me:

And it is on their behalf that I intend to win this election and keep our promise alive as President of the United States.

What is that promise?

It's a promise that says each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we will, but that we also have the obligation to treat each other with dignity and respect.

It's a promise that says the market should reward drive and innovation and generate growth, but that businesses should live up to their responsibilities to create American jobs, look out for American workers, and play by the rules of the road.

Ours is a promise that says government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves – protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.

Our government should work for us, not against us. It should help us, not hurt us. It should ensure opportunity not just for those with the most money and influence, but for every American who's willing to work.

That's the promise of America – the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation; the fundamental belief that I am my brother's keeper; I am my sister's keeper.

and later:

And Democrats, we must also admit that fulfilling America's promise will require more than just money. It will require a renewed sense of responsibility from each of us to recover what John F. Kennedy called our "intellectual and moral strength." Yes, government must lead on energy independence, but each of us must do our part to make our homes and businesses more efficient. Yes, we must provide more ladders to success for young men who fall into lives of crime and despair. But we must also admit that programs alone can't replace parents; that government can't turn off the television and make a child do her homework; that fathers must take more responsibility for providing the love and guidance their children need.

Individual responsibility and mutual responsibility – that's the essence of America's promise.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/28/us/politics/28text-obama.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1

Or in other words - we should pay attention to the internal and the external, the individual and the community, all quadrants working together.  And government chiefly plays a part in the external and the collective, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't pay attention to it all.

Maybe it's not explicitly developmental, but otherwise, I've never heard a candidate give life to a more integral approach to politics.

An excellent piece from the Washington Post - all I'd add is that the Black-and-White vs. Shades-of-Gray is, in my mind, all about taking on more, bigger, and broader perspectives:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/17/AR2008081702080.html

I recently came across a line in a post on an I-I discussion board that caught my attention:

"[I]ntegral politics means as much conservatism as liberalism."

As I understand integral, that's absolutely not true.  (Or, to be more precise: that's true but very partial.)

Now, if we're using "conservatism" and "liberalism" as synonyms for "left-hand quadrant focused" and "right-hand quadrant focused," then, of course, both are equally important.  That doesn't mean policy positions or programs should always incorporate both equally (predominantly external-quadrant probems require predominantly external-quadrant solutions, for example), but they are indeed equally important as a general matter.

Of course, if we're using those terms as they're used in American politics today, we don't just mean quadrant distinctions.  We also mean tendencies to fall values-wise along blue/orange vs. red/orange/green lines, and on top of that, some other typologies and even habits that we can't chart along levels or quadrants.

But that brings me back to the initial point - it's absolutely not true that integral means "as much conservatism as liberalism."  It does mean, of course, that both conservative and liberal perspectives need to be embodied, recognized, and integrated; but that means not just included, but transcended.  And that, as I understand it, means a couple things: one, that some situations call for choosing one over the other, and generally, that choice will mean choosing the higher (i.e., liberal) over the lower; and two, that  there's an emergent that can't be reduced to either conservative or liberal, that there's actually a new perspective at integral that isn't just one or the other at different times.

What does that mean more concretely?  I think I've seen two tendencies in "integral" discussions of politics.  One is to subtly merge "green" and "integral," thereby decrying most everything conservative as not integral and elevating everything green as integral.  The second is to simply put blue, orange, and green side-by-side and say that someone who sits somewhere along the middle of that spectrum is the most "integral."  Of course, neither a candidate operating from green nor a candidate operating from a generally-orange middle is necessarily bad, and each of us, taking an integral perspective, could probably do a good job justifying why either of those candidates is what our country needs right now (particularly when we take into account the other psychological health factors, typologies, and other characteristics that a particular candidate embodies, since all of that is vitally important).  But neither of those candidates would be operating from an integral perspective.

[This essay originally appeared as part of an e-zine produced by Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, MI - see http://campaign-archive.com/archive.phtml?cid=EyW0BvCw1A]
 
Why America Isn't Ready to Consider a Non-Christian President

By Christian Grostic

We’ve seen viable socialist candidates for president and viable libertarian candidates for president. We’ve now seen a viable black candidate for president and a viable woman candidate for president. Never, though, have we seen an atheist come anywhere near the presidency (or anyone outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, for that matter). Why isn’t America ready to consider a non-Christian president?

There are some obvious factors, of course – from prejudice to simple camaraderie – but let me suggest another consideration:

It’s atheism’s fault. Which is to say, it’s our fault.

To explain, let me set a foundation that, I hope, we can agree on. Many of us have an intuition of the spiritual, defined broadly – an intuition of something bigger than ourselves, of something that gives meaning, of God by any name. Historically, we’ve expressed this intuition via various means, culminating in the beautiful expressions of the great mythological traditions. Their myths animated life with meaning and salvation, and they welcomed different peoples into their fold, so long as they were believers.

By the time of the Western Enlightenment, however, the limitations of the great mythological traditions – mythological Christianity in particular – had become clear. We started to develop reason and science; our myths, instead of beautifully expressing our world, started to look inconsistent with our world. We started to develop broader notions of equality and humanity; our myths, instead of uniting us, began to divide us with their exclusivity. And so, in many areas of our lives, we began to add to our mythological past. We began to investigate our world with the tools of science, and we began to organize our communities with the tools of democracy and secular laws.

In the spiritual realm, though, we have not as effectively added to our mythological past. Instead, some of us equated the spiritual with the mythological and declared all spirituality false. Spirituality was replaced with a new mythology – scientific materialism, the belief (which can never be proven) that only the material is real. This materialist atheism added a new option to our choice of mythologies, but added no choice beyond mythology.

No wonder, then, that America won’t consider for president an atheist, or a Muslim, or any other non-Christian. Voting for an atheist president still means voting for an “other,” voting for an outsider. In the political realm, we are equal under the law; in the scientific realm, we are equal investigators of our world; in the spiritual realm, though, we are not one people. We remain fractured along the mythological divisions of our past.

I do not believe, though, that the world must be this way. Atheism need not be simply a materialist mythology alongside the others. The atheist impulse is a call to question our pre-formed beliefs, to apply the tools of our minds to the spiritual realm in order to enrich our spiritual lives. A rational spirituality has found expression before – in the belief of God-in-the-machine of Newton, in the rational God of Kant – and a “spiritual atheism” will always have a place in the constellation of spiritual growth.

Indeed, I see this “spiritual atheism” as part and parcel of our progressive Christianity. As those among us, especially our young people, begin to question our mythologies, we can offer them a place to express their intuition of the spiritual through reason and science. We can help them to add to our mythologies, or even outright replace them, and know that as a step in their spiritual growth. We can cherish our mythology while celebrating others, bound together in our own tradition but recognizing unity in the diversity of traditions and non-traditions alike.

And when a rational spirituality has a place in our country, adding to our mythologies and not just competing with them, we might just pick an atheist for president. After all, they’d simply be one of us.

This article captures the sense of taking responsibility vs. playing the victim that I've noticed between Senators Obama and Clinton: http://www.slate.com/id/2187189/  An excerpt:

One of the most laudable things about Obama is that he always elects to rise above the politics of victimization. One of the most troubling things about Hillary Clinton is that she is never above cashing in on it.

I spent two days in New York and DC with Genpo Roshi, and I was reminded of the vital importance of that sense of responsibility.  In DC, in fact, it was what Roshi ended with - walking us through voices until we reach the voice that consciously chooses to be human, that consciously chooses to take responsiblity for it all.

Regardless of the worldview that one candidate or the other could bring to the table, that sense of a person owning their own strengths and weaknesses, owning all of those perspectives that they have the cognitive ability to take on, is in my mind vital to becoming a vehicle that can embody the integral worldview (or any other worldview, for that matter).  Else, we're playing in shadows as much as we're embodying a worldview.

[Please note that I also fully realize that the campaigns of all candidates have played up perceived grievances in droves; indeed, that's been one of my disappointments with the Obama campaign.  I'm speaking here, though, of my perception (and the above article's authors' perceptions, it seems) of the candidates themselves.]

I went to Cleveland this past weekend to help canvas neighborhoods for the Obama campaign.  I went through two neighborhoods in two days.  Both bore the signs of a city hurting - vacant houses, many recent arrivals and departures (our voter list was almost useless), people struggling to make ends meet.

There was a superficial "this is why we're doing this" feeling, but it didn't feel deeply authentic.  What does feel authentic: I really, truly believe that an integral approach is the only way forward.  The republican solution has been reliance on the free market, or, in extreme form, denial that there's a problem at all (because if the people were really willing to work and apply themselves, they'd be doing better).  The democratic solution has been a focus on external forces - emphasis on education and government assistance, or, in extreme form, welfare.

Problem is, both those solutions are woefully partial; but both contain truths that are part of a better approach.  Long-term, an integral approach is our only chance.

There are a number of reasons why I believe Senator Obama has a solid integral intuition, as I've detailed.  There are also a number of times that I've been disappointed, and today brings one of them.

Senator Clinton is contending that some of the Obama campaign's mailings regarding NAFTA are false; the Obama campaign is defending them as fair.  I'm not all that interested in that controversy (see here if you are: http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/obama_mailings_false.html); I'm disappointed in the treatment of the subject itself.

The mailing faults Senator Clinton for alleging supporting NAFTA, and in stark terms - of the how-dare-anyone-support-such-a-thing variety.  In other places, I've heard Senator Obama discuss free trade as something we need to do carefully, with assurances of fair trade and fair labor standards.  That's a nuanced approach to a difficult issue, one that takes into account the emerging global economy and at least recognizes the values involved and the necessity for a principled - even implicitly developmental - approach (i.e., free market forces alone won't ensure that worldcentric values will be practiced, and we thus run the danger of undermining our labor force, which works in a system built on more-costly worldcentric values, and undermining our values).  And one can certainly conclude that, in this context, NAFTA isn't an ideal example of a free trade agreement.

The Obama campaign's mailing captures none of that nuance, though, and instead casts NAFTA as harmful, period (and Senator Clinton as wrong for supporting it, whether true or not).  This is part of the picture, of course, but without any of the nuance that would bring it close to a whole picture.  Perhaps this is just Senator Obama tacking left and catering to labor to secure the nomination; but dammit, catering to the partial truths of particular groups is what I want less of, not more.

(cross-posted at http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/christiangrostic/gGgNPV)

I've never been excited about a candidate before; I've always been interested in political ideas but never in politics-as-practiced.  I'm genuinely excited about Senator Obama and his presidential campaign, though, and I'm obviously not the only one.

At the height of that excitement, after a string of victories, a backlash has popped up.  CNN ran a story this weekend about "Obama Mania," quoting columnists who called it "creepy" and "cult-like," and asking whether this is all too much.  Really?  Have we gone so far down the cynical, deconstructionist, postmodern hole that we can't be simply, genuinely excited?

Like most public figures, I'm sure Senator Obama has some obsessive fans (probably more than most, in fact).  But that's not what CNN's story was about.  It was about long lines, filling arenas, cheering loudly, and being, well, excited.  I remember in most years reading columnists decrying political apathy and negative campaigns; and now we have political excitement and a positive campaign (positive in the deep sense - a coherent, optimistic, forward-looking vision - rather than simply "not negative").  Can we not be simply, genuinely excited?

Dahlia Lithwick does an excellent job cynically deconstructing the cynical deconstructionists - http://www.slate.com/id/2184536/ - but I wonder if we can develop a post-postmodern response.  Senator Clinton's joined in the cynical chorus, albeit with more political savvy (attempting to characterize Senator Obama as all excitement and no substance), so I gather we'll get to see whether Senator Obama is up to the task.

I have my answer: I'm genuinely excited.  This is what it looks like when people buy into a positive political vision, one that resonates deeply.  It's not lacking specifics or substance - there's a whole list of specifics readily accessible - but it's got more, something a cynical columnist and, unfortunately, a Senator from New York don't seem to even be able to recognize.  It's about changing what we fight about, not just trying to gain a new piece of turf in the same tired, unwinnable fight we've been waging.

(Cross-posted at http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/christiangrostic/gGgMMJ)