Sunday morning talk open thread

1. Joe Biden impresses, to a point. He offered confident, detailed responses to Tom Brokaw's questions on MTP. But he talked and he talked and he talked. After a while, you might have thought, "OK, shut up already. You've made your point. Turn it off." This we know is a problem with Biden, but as I haven't seen him on TV since he dropped out of the Democratic primaries, I'd forgotten how annoying it can be.

2. Abortion came up in Brokaw's interview with Biden, and Stephanopoulos's taped interview with Obama. Neither answer was satisfactory or philosophically coherent, but they were the best the Democrats are going to offer. Nothing new here. Biden claimed to be personally opposed to abortion as a Catholic, but against the idea of imposing a policy derived from "faith" (his word) onto a pluralistic country. Never mind that the right to life is not primarily a theological question, but a scientific and a legal one. As right to life folks often point out, this "personally opposed, but" approach is a cowardly dodge that no politician would take with regard to other critical issues relating to human life and dignity, such as slavery.

Obama, on ABC, tried to spin it as a theological issue too, even though Rick Warren (whose questioning of Obama on this point was rehashed) didn't ask him when does a soul enter the unborn child, but rather when does the unborn child become a rights-bearing human. As long as the Democrats can keep the issue corralled inside the confines of theology, they can be persuasive. But they can't. OTOH, I don't think anybody is all that persuadable on the issue now. The salient fact in this election is that Barack Obama believes so strongly in abortion rights that when he had the opportunity to vote for a law to protect children who survive the attempt to murder them in their mother's wombs, he punted.

3. Obama made a most unfortunate gaffe when talking to Stephanopoulos about religion. He said: "You're absolutely right that John McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith --"

His interviewer quickly corrected him. It was plainly an honest misstep, but you watch: this thing is going to play over and over and over on YouTube.

4. Obama had a good answer when GS asked him about the GOP hitting him on having been a community organizer. He said that he thought Sen. McCain believed in people working for causes greater than themselves, and serving the greater good. So why (asked Obama) would the Republicans put down community organizers, who try to help people in need? GS suggested that there might have been racial code in that. The thought hadn't occurred to me, but it did bring to mind an incident from my youth, when a black community organizer in our town was shown by a newspaper investigation to have been using the money her organization got for hunger activism for improper and self-enriching purposes. I hadn't thought of it in racial terms, but Steve Sailer, in recapping Tom Wolfe's terrific "Mau-Mauing the Flack Catchers," raises the image many people have of "community organizers" as racialist poverty pimps. Mind you, some are (Al Sharpton is a "community organizer") and some aren't. When people hear that Obama was a community organizer, are they going to think of the Sharpton model, or something noble and constructive?

5. In the ABC roundtable discussion, there was general agreement that if this election is about policy, the Republicans will likely lose, because people are fed up with GOP rule, and Obama has much more detailed policy prescriptions. But there was also a general agreement, it seemed, that people generally don't vote on policy, but on a complicated series of emotions. Hence the Palin explosion last week.

David Brooks said he's gotten tons of e-mail about Palin, and that hundreds correspondents are writing about Palin to call her "trailer trash" (Brooks' characterization of these e-mails). "All these e-mails come from New England," Brooks said. I'm not sure how literal he was being here, or if he was making a general point about class, elitism and the culture war.

Jonathan Capehart of the WaPo observed that as effective as Palin has been to this point, at some point she's got to come out of hiding and answer serious questions from the press. This is plainly true. Brooks said he's hearing that she's a quick study, and very sharp. But we won't know this till we actually see her.