Oh, I think George and Bill are pretty much cut from the same Southern Baptist cloth though I suspect George and George's friends would say he is more dyed in the wool. Bill was and is what used to be known as a speechifier, able to talk without notes before any audience on any subject thrown at him. Which is why he crushed George Sr. in the debates and one of the reasons the two get along so famously now. Listen to Clinton's remarks by the coffin of Coretta Scott King to get some idea of his mastery. Speechifying, and knowing when and how to speak of God's work as our own, are things a politician like Bill must do to hold the great middle of this nation of believers.
That seems somehow wrong to deep believers like George. The rigidity of his faith and ideas do not allow him to reach out to the middle, he expects
them to come along. Which is why his numbers have reached the equivalent of the percentage of Evangelicals in this country. They, and he, are holding fast.
But that is not the best way of thinking when you are trying to run a Democratic Republic full of multitudes of people who aren't at all like you.
People like those of the subject of this thread who want to be a part while staying apart.
"John Kenneth Galbraith died on April 29 at age 97, ending one of the most consequential liberal lives of the past century." writes Eric Alterman
in a recent
column.
He ends with this:
"And in a moving tribute to his friend and co-conspirator, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recalled Galbraith observing, "The emancipation of belief is the most formidable of the tasks of reform, the one on which all else depends."
Amen. "
Joe(amen indeed)Nation
