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(A few excerpts from an article by Sarah Posner from The American Prospect - August 20, 2009)
Faith in Public Life — a leading a coalition of 22 religious groups — hosted a conference call for "people of faith" and the White House on health-care reform. The 40-minute call, filled with platitudes about religion and ambiguities on policy, demonstrated just how much a political organizing effort based vaguely on what "people of faith" think falls short….
The coalition does not take a position on, say, the public option, or reproductive health coverage, issues that could make or break the effectiveness of reform. The non-position was obviously by design in an effort to broaden the coalition. But it weakened the message…
The call seemed designed to support but not question the president, which deeply disappointed some religious folks — showing, again, the uselessness of speaking broadly about what "people of faith" want. The Rev. Jim Moss, a Presbyterian minister I know in South Carolina, was updating his Facebook status during the call. He expressed disappointment at the failure of Sojourners’ Jim Wallis, who spoke on the call, to question the White House’s abandonment of single-payer and waffling on the public option. After Obama spoke — and didn’t take any questions — Moss wrote, "What? Obama didn’t answer any questions on the Faith for Health online chat. And he didn’t say anything he hadn’t already said a thousand times. That was kind of a waste of time."
2 Comments
Thanks Jim Moss. I totally agree with Posner’s assessment of the conference call. I was one of 140k folks listening in on this pitiful exercise that made me ashamed of the faith communities, Melody —- the Director of Domestic Policy, and President Obama. The questions from clergy were pleas to say the rumors and myths aren’t true; the answers were spinning non-committal idiocies as far as I was concerned. NO ONE ever asked anything substantive about what was actually in the bills and whether those things were good or bad from the stand point of justice and moral validity as Obama’s rhetoric attempted to proclaim in the press reports.
I was very deeply saddened by the experience and made my views known to the man from the national PICO office, coordinating the event for the coalition of 30 faith communities and organizations. (My comments were included in a couple of post threads after the event, but I don’t remember which ones. His personal response assessment (not PICO’s official analysis) something like this: Obama feels he can’t get public option and so he’s kind of setting us up to not be too disappointed with the final outcome.
I told him about the FDL pledge and said he should have been pushed on those terms and the PICO rep essentially had no response. I emailed him several FDL posts to say, the faith community needs to be educated in depth about what’s going on and what’s really in the bills and what it will mean for consumers and the medical industry, etc. I’m not seeing or hearing anything that even remotely suggests that is going on. That’s a disservice to the faith communities and their members.
So thanks for bringing this up. I hope that FDL folks who are part of faith communities will do all they can to get their congregations educated about health care reform, not only to counteract the screamers, but to somehow get them committed to shared/us benefits and not me/mine mentalities that lies at the basis of the anti-reformers above and beyond the racism.
Blessings to all
This sounds like the platitudes I heard on the call Thursday. Position statements work in campaigns, but governing is about actions. So when Obama tells activists the system is broken, he is wasting his time. We need leadership, not platitudes.