Today, David Brooks describes "Two Obamas" that he sees in the Democratic presumptive nominee: Dr. Barack, "the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now," and Fast Eddie Obama, "the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes." He sees hope in the tough Chicago pol side both for moderating the liberal political principles and for dealing with foreign bad guys.
I have recently found these two quotes from Obama challenging.
Obama on religion (even Christian religion!) in politics:
Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King – indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history – were not only motivated by faith but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. To say that men and women should not inject their 'personal morality' into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition
Obama on the war against Islamofascism:
The terrorists are at war with us. The threat is from violent extremists who are a small minority of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims, but the threat is real. They distort Islam. They kill man, woman, and child; Christian and Hindu, Jew and Muslim. They seek to create a repressive caliphate. To defeat this enemy, we must understand who we are fighting against, and what we are fighting for.
John Kerry would never have said these things.
No comments:
Post a Comment