What is happening? Now is Obama "caving" in to the evangelicals?

Suddenly I am besieged with questions from family and friends.  What is happening to Obama?  Why is he doing this and that and that?  Did I read the article in The Nation, Surveillance Protest Group Tops Obama Website .  Then today's Huffington Post Obama's Faith-Based Plan by Jim Wallis.  Well folks, I'm more than a bit confused.  maybe you can help me understand?  Look below and I'll explain myself and also tell you what I think is happening.  Then I hope you will try to straighten me out.

Let me first say a few things about the Nation article.  

A grassroots group of activists has been organizing on MyBo, Obama's official social networking portal, to protest the Senator's recent decision to back controversial legislation granting the President more spying powers. The effort hit a big milestone on Tuesday afternoon: It is now the largest self-organized group on Obama's website, topping networks that were launched over a year ago. The spying protest, "Senator Obama - Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity – Get FISA Right," launched last week.

 I guess I'm a bit of a nut because this sounds neat to me.  Imagine John McCain setting up a website for people to disagree with him?  Maybe he has and I don't know it?  That would sure distinguish him from Bush.  The matter certainly has come up here.  How much will it matter?

The effort comes in a pivotal period for Obama, who is tapping his enthusiastic base for fundraising and voter turnout, yet shifting his message to prioritize general election themes. In many Democratic presidential campaigns, this is precisely the time when the base is ignored – or even defied to demonstrate the candidate's independence and "centrism." Obama's base activists, however, are still getting heard. They are reaching each other directly, through the campaign's network, and indirectly, with blogs and reporters covering their argument that Obama should not have backtracked on civil liberties. So far, Obama has not responded substantively, though his campaign was forced to acknowledge the "dialogue" under media prodding. But from the message boards, it looks like most group members want Obama to respond by reaffirming his original opposition to the White House spying bill, not simply acknowledging the conversation.

 Well that all sounds quite reasonable to me.  I am as unhappy as anyone about the FISA thing.  But then I am unhappy about the failure to get the impeachment underway and I am unhappy about the covert war underway in iran.  Basically, as a politcal animal, I'm pretty unhappy!  I can't think about how unhappy I'll be if we screw this thing up and McCain gets elected.  So what about Obama and these recent events?  Let's look a little further before I get into that from where I stand.  They go on to say:

Even conservative bloggers are impressed that the Obama Campaign provides an open platform for supporters to organize against the candidate's position. "Rather than react in accordance with the practices of most campaigns by shutting and muffling dissent," observed the GOP blog The Next Right, "Obama is providing dissidents (many of whom are supporters of his) the opportunity to organize on his campaign web-site." The blog contrasted the approach to top-down campaigns on the right. "Can you imagine a Bush campaign reacting like this? I can't."

 If I am not mistaken that was what I said up above.  Oh, oh!  They said that conservative bloggers were saying it too.  Am I moving to the right too?  Then they have this update:

Markos Moulitsas, a liberal blogger and founder of the Daily Kos Web site, said he had decided to cut back on the amount of money he would contribute to the Obama campaign because of the FISA reversal. "I will continue to support him," Mr. Moulitsas said in an interview. "But I was going to write him a check, and I decided I would rather put that money with Democrats who will uphold the Constitution."

 Ummmm.  We will uphold the Constitution better by risking McCain's election?  Now I am confused.

Let's look at the Faith-Based thing for a moment and then I want to ask some questions.  Does everyone know who Jim Wallis is?Wikipidea  has a bit about him.  I once bought 5 copies of his book God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It  to hand out to some of the family who have been backing the Christian Right and therefore Bush for some time now.  They politely left them behind when they went home.  I should have known better.  What I like about Wallis is that he has the audacity to claim that the scriptures everyone seems to think have something to do with God speaking to people actually do not support the right wing agenda and do support compassion and helping others in need.

So he has some things to say in the Huffington Post article that may shed a bit of light on what Obama may be able to accomplish:

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In 2000 I was part of a small group of religious leaders invited to Austin, Texas, to discuss a new White House faith-based initiative with George W. Bush before he came to Washington, D.C., as president. I was an early supporter of the initiative because I believed that partnerships between the faith community and government in alleviating poverty were both necessary and appropriate within the framework of the Constitution.

 I'm not sure I understand the constitutional basis for this, but let's give him the benefit of the doubt and see where he is going with this.  He clearly was not into politics here, but he was into his Christian agenda.

But I was disappointed with the corresponding lack of policy commitment to reduce poverty by the Bush administration, and the eventual politicizing of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives along partisan lines. Instead of a partnership, this initiative became a substitute for necessary public policies attacking the causes and consequences of poverty within the United States. Despite this failure, my commitment to public-private partnership involving the faith community has never diminished.

 My reaction to this is simply to ask him "Why were you surprised by any of this?"  But I have read enough of his stuff to know that he will ignore the politics and try to make people live up to their words.  (With George Bush this has to be an exercise in futility).  So now he knows he was had and where does he go from there?

The key to today's proposal is that it is based on public and faith-based partnership, and will not become another replacement for sound public policy. To truly be successful, this initiative must utilize the unique resources and identity of the faith community, while at the same time recognizing the indispensible role that government and public policy must play in tackling the root causes of poverty. Obama's proposals also contain necessary protections for religious liberty, pluralism, and constitutional safeguards.

This initiative has the potential to unite people across partisan lines. I truly hope that a recommitment to engaging the valuable role of faith-based organizations doesn't get mired in the endless political debates of the past while God's concerns for the weak and vulnerable get ignored.

 Put that way it doesn't sound half bad.

So now I can get to the reason I had to write this diary.  I hope that everyone has stayed with me up to this point.  

My initial reaction to Obama's unity message was very sceptical.  I have not really lost that scepticism, but it has been tempered with a lot of thought about the reality of this election.  Anyone who has been reading my diaries knows that I am sceptical about what an election can accomplish in the first place.  In the second place I am sceptical that the ruling class in America would ever allow the kind of change that Obama has promised.  Finally, Obama seemed to good to be true.  We can add to that the fact that we have already begun the covert part of the war with Iran with the full backing of the democratic party's leadership.

So here we are dissapointed in Obama about FISA and watching the man actually reach out to the very kind of people who helped put Bush in office.  But wait a moment?  Who is he going to unite?  Only those who pass some sort of political litmus test?  Only those who are "pure"? I have known for many years that my own views could never be the center of a winning electoral effort.  I have had to do the protest vote or chose the "lesser evil" ever since I first voted in 1960.  So here we go again.  We refuse to build a political movement without centering it on these elections.  We want to win the election and we want our candidate to be like us.  Well folks that is not how it works.  There is only one reason to elect Barack Obama in November.  It is because he represents so much more of what it is going to take to make this Nation what it may or may not have the potential for becoming.  There is a risk involved.  The constitution was scrapped a long time ago.  We may be able to get some of it back.  Then again we can lose even more of it.

Causality is a very profound concept.  We can operate with a world model that simplifies causality to direct cause models.  The right wing lives this way.  They see a single agent producing an effect and through that one size fits all model they build a working model of the world.  It is totally without basis and results in people like George Bush living totally in his own world out of touch with the complexity of the real world around him.

We progressives can lapse into that mode as well.  When we have our heads on straight we bite the bullet and acknowledge the vast uncertainties in coming up with models that actually explain the complex world around us.  We risk and we try.  We fail, pick ourselves up and try again having learned from each attempt to make sense out of the very complex system that is the world around us.

Some time ago George Lakoff spoke of the success of Barack Obama in these terms.  He spoke of his willingness not to produce a laundry list of issues but to rather focus on how to go about making real change happen.  I understood then, as I understand now, that I was going to be dissapointed many times during the campaign and after Obama's election.  I also am excited beyond belief because I am part of one of the biggest political experiments in the history of the world.  So, Kos, you can hold onto your money if you wish.  Or, you can trust the ideas a little more and see if there is something left for all of us to learn about this process.  Frankly, I wish I had more money to send.  Retirement is not all that great if you want to be a philanthropist.  So instead I write diaries and hope I can encourage our group to risk.  I hope I can convince people that single issues are not what this is all about.  The word "change" here has many possible definitions.  One small aspect of that is that we might stop trying to use our money to get our way and rather see it as an investment in someone.  If. at some point, he betrays our trust, then we need to consider another course of action.  That will be a tough debate for this group.  If being a democrat means what it did during LBJs administration I won't be able to stick it out.  I could not then nor will I now.  We are nowhere near that point yet, IMHO. What do you folks all think?