Ed Kilgore: July 2008 Archives

The proprietors of Progressive Revival have encouraged us original bloggers to comment on a post by pastordan at Street Prophets offering a conditional disparagement of the ideological disposition of this crew. 

Since Pastordan singled me out for abuse as nothing more than a "DLC hack," guess I should rise to a point of personal privilege by responding.  First off, pastordan, if you are going to insult someone you don't actually know, you should keep up. I make no apologies for my background, but did give up my policy director gig and spokesman role with the DLC well over a year ago, and am now principally occupied as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist. You might want to go to that site and read what I'm writing. You could also ask, say, Markos Moulitsas and Joan McCarter of DailyKos, or Chris Bowers of OpenLeft, or Josh Marshall or Ezra Klein or Rick Perlstein, just to name a few progressive notables, if they consider me a "DLC hack." 

Enough of that. My broader point is that the people initally recruited for Progressive Revival were chosen not for sitting at some presumed point on any ideological spectrum, but because they've challenged in one way or another the identification of organized religion with the political and cultural Right (that's why I'm here, for example, via jeremiads like this and this), as spiritually as well as morally and politically dangerous. This remains, as I hope pastordan would agree, a pretty important mission, particularly among the very broad readership of Beliefnet. 

Trying to pigeon-hole complicated people with complicated points of view as belonging to the "left" or "center" is typically a tiresome and reductive exercise, and the ancient struggle for ownership of the word "progressive" will probably never be resolved.  Moreover, I suspect most Progressive Revival contributors would agree that religious faith involves a supernatural commitment to principles of truth, justice and love that can never be completely encompassed by any secular ideology. 

This commitment, as pastordan rightly suggests, often demands a willingness to confront the authorities, whoever they might be, and to challenge "friends" as well as "enemies"--even "progressive" friends on occasion. But I'd encourage skeptics to put down the label-maker and judge Progressive Revival's actual product, instead of pre-judging it based on, well, prejudices about its contributors. 

As Barack Obama gets closer to his choice of a running-mate, speculation today is focusing on Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, whose allies are letting it be known that he's being fully vetted as a short-lister. 

Kaine's political strengths and weaknesses are pretty well known.  He's a very successful politician in a state that hasn't gone Democratic in a presidential election since 1964, but that may be winnable this year. He's a civil rights lawyer by profession, but has built on Mark Warner's efforts to reach beyond party lines for both electoral and legislative support. On the other hand, he's still in his first term of office (and ineligible to run for re-election in 2009), and has no significant foreign policy experience. 

It's Kaine's faith background that makes him an interesting option for Obama. 

He's not only a practicing Catholic (an area of relative weakness for Obama during the primaries); he once served as a missionary in Central America. (His Spanish-language fluency is definitely an asset beyond Virginia). And in his 2005 gubernatorial campaign, he provided an interesting example of how faith can provide a defense against wedge-issue attacks.  

His Republican opponent, Jerry (No Relation!) Kilgore, launched a barrage of ads attacking Kaine's opposition to the death penalty, as part of an effort to convince Virginians that the Democrat was well to the left of the popular Warner.  Kaine responded by attributing his death-penalty position to Catholic teaching, and then argued that he could be trusted nonetheless to enforce the death penalty after he took the oath of office on a Bible.  By most accounts, Kaine won this exchange decisively, without changing his position or acting evasively.    

If Obama and his team are fully familiar with this incident, it may add to Kaine's appeal as a running-mate, given the avalanche of wedge-issue attacks the Democratic ticket is going to undergo in the fall.