Cory Booker, Paula White and other news of interest
Enough has caught my interest over the last 48 hours or so that I thought a post would be worth it.
Cory Booker and Civic Grace
Watch Cory Booker interact with Meghan McCain:
This video, to me, is a good example of a) the decency and rootedness Cory Booker would bring to The White House b) how wrong it is to equate civility with weakness or ineffectiveness. Booker’s approach here has McCain looking like an absolute fool, as she waves away Booker’s appeals to decency in our politics as if that’s a nuisance.
Booker explains his approach to faith (including a rejection of the idea that voters and politicians should leave their faith at the door that reminded me of Obama in 2006), civic grace and polarization in this new episode of Jim Wallis’ podcast that just dropped today.
We’ve covered some of the political weaknesses and substantive errors of Booker’s approach to faith in this newsletter before, but that exchange with McCain is a testament to the fact that Booker seems to really mean what he says.
Paula White Now Getting Paid by Taxpayers
Well, folks, I’d been hearing the rumors since the first year of the Administration, and came very close several times to being able to break the news myself, but alas, The New York Times beat me to it. Paula White is now a White House staffer. According to the Times:
Ms. White will work in the Office of Public Liaison, the official said, which is the division of the White House overseeing outreach to groups and coalitions organizing key parts of the president’s base. Her role will be to advise the administration’s Faith and Opportunity Initiative, which Mr. Trump established last year by executive order and which aims to give religious groups more of a voice in government programs devoted to issues like defending religious liberty and fighting poverty.
A few things to note here:
Paula White is completely unqualified for this role.
Earlier rumors suggested she would run the White House faith-based office. That office, to my knowledge, continues to have no one actually working in it. So Ms. White will be advising an office with no staff. Regarding her role in OPL, what serious religious leader is going to trust Paula White to convey the policy intricacies of any Administration initiative?
President Trump has now elevated a woman many of his own supporters consider to be a heretic to an official government role where she will be convening and organizing religious (read: white evangelicals) leaders to speak into policy decisions and support the president politically.
After the Bush Administration, there were concerns a Democratic successor would end the faith-based initiative. Instead, his Democratic successor strengthened it, and ensured it was now an assumed part of the federal government that would be difficult to scrap. Or so I thought…President Trump’s continued, transparent misuse of religion for expressly political purposes might just undo the faith-based initiative for any future Administration. At the very least, he has now set a precedent that the faith-based initiative is merely an expression of the personal faith and political interests of whoever is in office, which has the potential to be deeply damaging in the future as it is now.
Obama Foundation Sparks Conversation
Two videos from the Obama Foundation’s recent summit. First, watch this video. This man no longer has to win elected office. There’s no political constituency he really has to please. He’s basically self-sufficient. Yet, watch this video and you’ll see someone who’s vision for how you bring the nation together and make progress is deeply steeped in religious narratives in a way that is completely natural to him. I’m not sure we’ll have another president who believes in our better angels, and the role of religion in bringing those better angels out (even if he sometimes bent a little utilitarian in this way, and even as his frustration with faith/politics grew in his second term, as I outline in Reclaiming Hope) as much as this one did, but gosh do we need it now more than ever.
Here’s the second video worth watching. Just another one of those examples of the kind of thing Barack Obama has said all along, but that both the far-left and the far-right deemed it in their interest to ignore. It always amazed me when working for him and after, when he would say something with a particular audience in mind, and that audience would in their own imagination convince themselves he was talking about everyone BUT them.
That’s all for now…
As always, leave a comment or email if you have a question you’d like answered.
Hope you have a great weekend!
-Michael