Election 08

Russell Moore:

The Ethics and Public Policy Center offers several thought-provoking essays on election 2008. Yuval Levin writes a piece,originally published inNational Review,on Sen. John McCain as an "honor politician," a breed of politico not quite "conservative" in a traditional sense but that's not necessarily, in Levin's view, an entirely bad thing. Levin concludes: "Conservatives should view McCain not as a hostile force, but as a foreign and unfamiliar presence, bearing real potential as well as real risk."]

Even more interesting is Christine Rosen's article on gender politics and the campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton. Clinton offers the worst of American feminism, without its more positive claims. Rosen writes:

The political has always been personal for Hillary. It is this eerily seamless merging of the two that leaves some voters unsettled and others impressed with her discipline. In the final primary debate in Los Angeles, she avoided answering a question about her husband's role in the campaign by saying, "I have made it very clear that I want the campaign to stay focused on the issues that I'm concerned about, the kind of future that I want for our country, the work that I have done for all of these years. And that is what the campaign is about." Hillary's choice of language is noteworthy: she talks about "the kind of future I want for our country" rather than what the country needs. This is the language of paternalism, and just as "paternalistic" has become a pejorative term in political parlance, so too, might Hillary's unique brand of maternalism - a stern and instrumental, mommy-knows-best progressivism that has at least had the effect of irrevocably undermining the tenets of difference feminism.

Finally, James Bowman, in an article written for theAmerican Spectator, looks at the utopianism at the core of enthusiasms for the candidacy of Sen. Barack Obama.

However much or little one thinks of any (or all) of these politicians, these essays speak to some of the more important underlying issues for Christians, issues neglected entirely by the horserace coverage of MSNBC, Fox News, Air America, and Rush Limbaugh.