Well, this depends on if you accept Greenwald's implicit claims to having psychic powers. I don't see why I'm supposed to accept the notion that these actions as a deliberate attempt to "bait the left." All in all, I don't think Greenwald-style ad hominems really help the case of Obama critics.

Also, I know it's become a favored rhetorical tactic to conflate the Warrens with the Dobsons and Hagees, but this tactic can only be stretched so far. Just because they may share an opposition to civil equality doesn't mean they share all beliefs and, more importantly, all beliefs regarding the propriety of working with the left.

the idea that obama can do anything!, that would placate the warren types and his supporters is bs.

it wont work and obama fools himself if he believes he gains by this.

in fact not only was this choice not needed(who was paying attention before this?), but it has caused permanant damage to obama.

peoples rights are not subject to gentleman disagreements.

you either support those rights or you support the bigot.

obama supports the bigot.

YES.

I lived through the culture wars. I was PART of them. I was even a "socialist-feminist" in the 1970's, and the very worst thing you could do was "liberal out". The left, the women's movement, and the lesbian rights movements (yes, lesbians even saw gay men as "the enemy" before AIDS hit) were NOT inclusive. It was our way or the highway. It was ridiculous, in hindsight.

When I think back to how things have moved since the sixties/seventies, it is astounding. Personally, I was able to adopt children as a lesbian, my family came around not only to my lesbianism (now bisexual, but who the fuck cares), but to my adoption of three african-american children....and they are republican Irish-Catholics, and I had domestic partner rights before my divorce.

Even though many of my family voted for McCain, it was not because of cultural issues. It was about the economy for them. They see the republicans as protecting their money, instead of giving it away to the poor. Abortion, glbt rights, Obama's race....none of these effected their vote. It was issues. Real issues.

Obama has his "eyes on the prize" here. He is not out to advance any agenda other than saving our planet, trying to rescue our failed economy, and instituting a reality-based foreign policy.

I'm with him.

I'm not gonna get my panties in a twist about Warren. I'm looking at Chu, Solis et al, and it is consistent with everything I read/learned during the campaign.

The current Warren debate feels so "sixties" to me, and I simply will not waste my energy and time going there. I'd rather volunteer to do city clean-up, continue to work for equal rights for everybody, and raise my children with a culture of service and respect.

I'm way beyond the "victim" mentality which, to my mind, permeates much of the leftist/progressive commentary that I see on the blogs.

Is that post-partisan? If so, than that's what I am.

Obama embracing Warren has nothing to do with gay rights, and that's what seems to be missing from this discussion. Everyone who wants to understand the relationship between Obama and Rev. Warren needs to go to youtube and watch Obama's Call to Renewal Address.

I think Obama is somebody who, more then anything else, hates pretension. He is annoyed by seeing people get offended by things and he frankly doesn't care, because very little actually offends him. And that, in large part, explains why he picked Warren. Because he likes to provoke people and then defuse what he sees as empty pretension(in this case, the trumped up offense of the gay community).

My two cents.

Greg, what you and others miss on this issue is that Obama lied about who issued the invitation; Obama originally claimed the congressional committee overseeing inaugural events issued the invite. And, it's a pattern of Clintonesque word-parsing that continues to grow.

Many mainstream liberals may think that wingers made way too much about Obama's smoking statements to Brokaw, but those, too, were Clintonesque.

I'm sorry, is he giving this guy a fuckin cabinet spot? Ambassador to God? Way overblown.

but why is the play always to slap the left and not lay a finger on the right?

Right, and Clinton didn't do this either, because Obama's not sort of pretending he agrees with Warren, that he "feels his pain" when it comes to his homophobia, he's just saying, well, you're part of America, and I'm not afraid to sit in the same room with you, and I respect the sincerity of your prayer.

Furthermore, it does actually take energy to exclude people. It's work. If you do less of it, and arrange things so others are not required to answer your exclusion with their own, then you actually have more energy to focus on what is common to you.

Lots of folks on the left equate the setting up of exclusion with maintaining clarity of purpose. Obama seems to suggest that you can maintain your clarity of purpose without depending on defining everybody as either in or out.

I actually think putting Warren up is a disarming tactic because it doesn't allow either side of the cultural war divide to rev up its exclusionary efforts. It just sort of shows that it's not so relevant. It's a "mess," but it's actually a pretty good kind of a mess to have.

Good work Greg.

Well reasoned and well written, Greg.

For those who'd prefer, offer your own invocation here:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/therap/2008/12/offer-your-own-blessing.php

Glenn Greenwald? Puhleeze. If I wanted to listen to some angry ranting myopic blowhard, I'd visit my in-laws more often.

First you must believe that Obama is cynical enough to think in terms of placating one group by infuriating another.

I see no evidence of this. I do see evidence of someone who is more visionary, practical and independent than any of the other politicians cited. Obama has a vision does the things necessary to bring that vision to fruition.

To suggest that the "culture wars" were limited to the 1960's is also incorrect. The Silent Majority and the Moral Majority helped define the Reagan years and period since. Obama was definitely affected by that -- as an intelligent young man growing up in the period, and as an adult with political aspirations. While it is true that Obama did not need to "re-fight" the Vietnam War, he did see the need to fight the class war of the 1980s where every "welfare queen" was depicted as a loosely moralled black woman and every crime suspect was Willie Horton. The same "values voters" who swept Reagan into office, still cling -- yes, cling -- to guns and God and their race-based resentments.

What you all didn't expect is that Obama would not fall into the trap of "me against you" politicking and did not take the bait of campaigning (or governing) based on those old metrics.

Why are people obsessing about this?
It's not like Warren has become BHO's policy guru. He'll say an invocation for all of 1.5 minutes!
Fer chrissake! It's OK. Really.

Greg, I guess what you are saying is simply this:

The new, post-partisan politics is... leadership.

I agree. Or, more precisely, I hope.

I think the choice of Warren points out how little Obama actually thinks or cares about religion. He didn't start going to church until he was in his twenties and became a community organizer. When he discovered that churches were the strongest community orgs in that neighborhood and potentially his best allies he figured he better start attending one regularly. These days he mostly plays basketball on Sunday mornings.

Atrios is a self professed atheist. I wouldn't be surprised to find out most of the bloggers outraged by this haven't been in a church or synagogue on a regular basis since they were kids, if ever. I can understand lefty religionists feeling slighted but most of the people who are pissed off don't give a flying fig about any prayer or invocation given at in inaugural and wouldn't believe a word of it no matter who gave it. I'm a lefty, I don't go to church unless someone dies or get married and I'm in that camp. I say who cares?

What's more important is that this is just a symbolic gesture. It's not like Warren is going to be in the cabinet or making policy. What counts is what action Obama takes when he's in office. And while LGBT and abortion rights most likely won't be his first priorities in January - we're still fighting two wars and the entire world's financial system seems to be collapsing - I expect by the end of his first term there will be legal civil unions and equal protection under the law.

And if letting Warren who is only 97% creepy give the invocation boosts him and deflates the Dobsons and Hagees a little that's a plus.

As a rule, Obama tends to avoid divisive rhetoric, and he works hard to reconcile warring political points of view—an instinct, if you look carefully at his memoir, that he clearly learned in his youth. As a teenager, for example, he argued with a black friend that maybe white women refused to date him not because they were racists, but because “they just want someone who looks like their daddy, or their brother, or whatever, and we ain’t it.”

And so this impulse to reconcile now shows up in politics. In town-hall meetings, when those who opposed the war get shrill, Obama makes a point of noting that while he, too, opposed the war, he’s “not one of those people who cynically believes Bush went in only for the oil.” When I ask about Lieberman’s recent vilification of the left, Obama seems equally vexed: “His most recent comments tying the bomb threat in Great Britain to Iraq was a pretty crude political play.” Obama’s first year in office, he voted for cloture on the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court (though not for the nomination itself), earning dozens of angry posts on Daily Kos, a hugely well-trafficked liberal blog. Obama responded with a polite but stern four-page note.

“One good test as to whether folks are doing interesting work is, Can they surprise me?” he tells me. “And increasingly, when I read Daily Kos, it doesn’t surprise me. It’s all just exactly what I would expect.”
-Sept. 2005 Article In New York Magazine - Nothing new here either Obama - just the same 'ol reaction, this time not just from DailyKos.

Thanks Greg,

I spent a lot of last evening being steamed at how hateful and unproductive the commentary on this issue was becoming. Your discussion and this thread have reassured me that TPM remains the most reasonable of the left-perspective blogs. I had already given up on DKos for the most part, it's become an angry echo chamber where arguments are never settled, they just drag on until everyone's too tired to post anymore.

Hey, maybe we can disagree without being disagreeable.

There's a huge difference between (a) listening to people with differing views, & (b) putting those people on pedestals. Obama chose (b) for Rick Warren, and he did it at the expense of decent Americans. Rick Warren's best friend Jesus would have known better (had he not been a figment of the imaginations of the evangelists). In the Gospel stories, Jesus sat down with the Pharisees, but he didn't accept their prayers or their ideas; in fact, he called them names and told them they were bound for an unpleasant place.

Rick Warren's views are an affront to all Americans, not just women, gays, Jews and people who realize the earth is more than 6,000 years old. His views are anti-egalitarian and anti-intellectual, and as such they are harmful to the well-being of the nation. The aggrandizement of Rick Warren cannot be rationalized in any intellectually honest fashion. It's a very bad beginning for a presidency that will have plenty of problems without manufacturing stupid ones like this.

The Constant Weader at www.RealityChex.com

There is a shift in American ethics occurring. From the dogmatic ends driven ethos of a traditionally fundamental Christian nation, we are seeing the emergence of a means based ethos of a nation evolving existentially. In a lot of ways, the 20th century debate on Left/Right politics is reflective of this slowly forming, emerging "self" as authority and rejection of institutional authority (including the religious variety).

Here at the beginning of the 21st century, we see a new generation coming up that is intensely accepting of everyone -- no, they don't have to fight the battle for choice, that was a battle for the "self" to become authority, that was won for them. What they have to fight for now is even more difficult; acceptance, inclusion and tolerance based in the inherent equal value of every individual -- across all groups, even those that reject them. The ground work was laid for them when part of the 60s gen made the radical break with the authority of the group. It has progressed generation to generation - with each carrying forward small pieces of realization to hand off to those coming forward now. And the backlash against such realization comes from those that cannot yet surrender their need for the institution that gives them rules, which in turn is perceived to be the thing that keeps them safe. In the game of rules, those who are not with us are against us; intolerance and exclusion are part and parcel of such thought.

This perspective that such a dichotomy is "cultural" is both true and false -- it is part of the nature of the people in this society and as such is cultural. But to label it "culture wars" guts the issue of its depth and complexity. It is "spiritual" in nature, whether you ascribe human ethos as the highest moral value man as secular can reach, or if you wish to view it as participation in both phenomenal and noumenal realms.

Barack Obama stands with a foot in both ethical camps right now although I believe that he leans to the more existential view. But he himself has not managed a realization that fully internalizes his spiritual authority; realization moves slowly in linear time. He is practicing acceptance, tolerance and inclusion but has not yet seen that granting authority to the "other" is a contradiction in terms. And that is the biggest problem with the Warren selection -- Obama lends authority to not just Warren as an individual, but to the ethos he stands for -- which is divisive and intolerant. And those in the existential phase of ethics react strongly against that.

What most dems voted against in Clinton and McCain was the ethic of division, more than they voted "for" anything. Having Warren present at the inauguration would be sufficient to mend ties and be inclusive... to elevate him to invocation speaker is something else again. But tolerance argues that he must learn such lessons and we must in the end love him for trying. Just as we must love ourselves and all the others... just for "being".

I agree wholeheartedly with Greg's analysis. I think Obama said it pretty explicitly in his speech on race: that these culture war issues are deep, emotional, and intractable issues that we haven't and won't resolve by butting heads and demonizing the opposition, but which have been a terrible distraction from problems that ARE solvable and are not so fraught with emotional baggage.

I think that speech, his books, and his political rhetoric also point to another idea: that it is precisely by working with our "enemies" on these other practical issues of common ground that we actually make progress and form consensus on these issues that matter to us. I would argue that the gay rights movement has made the most progress simply by the fact that most Americans now know an openly gay person through work, or family or their community.

I think the primary difference between Obama's politics and Clinton's triangulation is that for Obama you don't "compromise" by embracing the policies of the Right (unless you think they have some merit) hoping they will later give you a pass, you compromise by embracing the people of the Right and giving them credit for those places where you agree. He didn't try to work with or sway Dick Lugar on abortion or gay rights or climate change; he worked with him on nuclear proliferation.

I think we should also remember what Obama said during the Ayers controversy: "The fact is that I’m also friendly with Tom Coburn, one of the most conservative Republicans in the United States Senate, who during his campaign once said that it might be appropriate to apply the death penalty to those who carried about abortions. Do I need to apologize for Mr. Coburn’s statements?"

And he is also unlike Clinton in that he doesn't just embrace centrists. If you look at the list of radical people who Obama has managed to be friendly with, it really is stunning:
Tom Colburn
William Ayers
Reverend Wright
Dick Lugar
Rick Warren
These are all intolerant people whom Obama has managed to tolerate.