Mitt Romney is rich? So is Obama

Over at The Philly Post, my column this morning is about how I don't really care about Mitt Romney's attempted $10,000 bet with Rick Perry:

The fact that our presidential candidates are rich isn’t a big deal. The fact that Mitt Romney wants to make a $10,000 bet isn’t a big deal. The fact that Romney and Newt and Perry all the rest of them want to govern the country on behalf of the rich—that’s the big deal. The fact that they want to do so at a time of skyrocketing income inequality is a big deal.

Instead of having a forthright discussion about those issues, though, we’re forced to sit through a kind of minstrel show where rich candidate after rich candidate after rich candidate pretends to be a “regular guy” with the “common touch.” And it has nothing to do with whether or not that candidate would be a good president.

Obama is among the rich candidates, incidentally, and Republicans are just as interested in tarnishing him with a silver spoon. To wit, take Andrew Malcom's column in today's Investor's Business Daily, which takes the Obamas to task for all their ... Christmas decorating:

The extravagance of 2011's decorations, however, are striking given the widespread joblessness, pale economic growth, home foreclosures and grim outlook for 2012, not to mention the incumbent president's historically low approval rating heading into his reelection bid.

How simple, politically astute, symbolically helpful and cost-effective it would have been for the Obamas this year to say that in sympathy with so many struggling countrymen, they were curtailing holiday decorations to match the sacrifices of others.

How tedious. I could get into all the ways that White House Christmas decorating isn't just about the family occupying the White House, but serves as part of the national celebration, but ... meh. How tedious.

Obama is comfortable. Romney is comfortable. There is no likely candidate for president who isn't far and away richer than the rest of us. So who cares? The question is: Who do you trust to govern on behalf of your interests? Net worth makes little difference in answering that question.

On writing about religion

Some people like writing. Others like having written. Me? I like having written without giving offense to people I love and respect.

By that standard, my musings in "Tim Tebow's ostentatious faith" and "Tebow, revisited" have been flaming disasters, with responses from my Christian friends generally ranging from stern disagreement to angry chastisement. The common theme in those responses: That (perhaps) I'd let antipathy to Christianity cloud my judgment.

The estimable William Voegelli weighed in with the least-angry but still-pointed variation on this theme: "If your point is that we would be better off rediscovering the value and satisfactions of reticence, I'm on board. If you're singling out Tebow because fundamentalist Christianity gives you the heebie-jeebies, I'm not." Privately, a close friend suggested (in not-so-many words) that I'd made a shtick out of being a big-city agnostic who was once a small-town Christian.

I didn't sleep much, or well, last night. It's quite a thing to have produced as intense a reaction as that.

But having examined my conscience, let me say this, unreservedly: Christianity doesn't give me the heebie-jeebies.

Here's my dirty little secret: You can take the man out of the church, but you can't really take the church out of the man. I know that 30 years of immersion in Christian circles—particularly among Mennonites—still shapes both me and my worldview. And though I've been frank about my own fall from faith, I've also felt a deep desire that (in the words of Paul writing to the Romans) I "not cause my brother to stumble." I've never wanted to undermine anybody else's faith: They have their journeys and I have mine. The idea of evangelical agnosticism is kind of silly if you think about it, anyway, and I've not had much use for the fundamentalist atheism of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

There's a "but" coming, however.

I also don't believe that religion or Christianity are necessarily unmitigated forces for good, nor above critique. Just this week, Rick Perry released an ad that I believe to be a shining example of Christian chauvinism. It's not his faith that offends me; it's the political and societal implications of how he wields that faith that I find frightening and objectionable. I think it's possible to criticize that without being anti-Christian. But I also understand that if you're a conservative Christian, such criticism might look anti-Christian to you. To some extent, then, I have to offer my critiques in (er) good faith and let the chips fall where they may.

So what does any of this have to do with Tim Tebow, you may be asking. He's just a guy who is public about his faith, right? It's not like he's running for president or anything. Fair point. Why does an athlete deserve my critique?

Well, for one thing: Tebow's big news. His faith is big news, and controversial. Seems worthy of discussing in an op-ed column, then.

But let me tell a personal story. A number of years back, I was walking down Massachusetts Street in Lawrence, Kan. A church had gathered at one corner—as it often did weekly during early summer evenings—and one man stood atop a planter, shouting a hellfire-and-brimstone sermon at traffic and passerby. This was when I was still immersed in faith and church, but I stopped and chatted with one of the leaders. And what I told him was this: If the church was trying to win converts to Christ—it was—then the planter sermons were a bad idea. They were alienating far more people than they were attracting; the result being that by the church's own lights it was pushing more people away from Christ (and thus possibly condemning them to hell) than it was saving. This seemed alarming to me. It didn't seem to bother the street preachers.

In other words: What I say now is pretty much precisely the thing I was saying when I was a Christian.

Obviously, I'm not a man of faith anymore, so maybe I'm not the best person to counsel Tim Tebow about the effectiveness of his ministry. But if you look not-terribly-closely at what I wrote, some of the main thrusts were A) the Christ that Tebow worships seems to urge modesty in one's public displays of faith and B) evangelizing the way Tebow does might be counterproductive. I didn't tell Christians to shut up; in fact, I proclaimed that idea "undesirable." Given that I'm not a Christian, it seems likely that I was perceived as using Scripture to try to stifle Christians. I can see how it would look that way. From my perspective? I was evaluating Tebow by the standards of the Scripture he claims to adhere to. When you are so very public about your faith, that is going to happen. And it's often going to be people with a real antipathy to the faith doing the evaluating.

It legitimately grieves me that my Christian friends would perceive me as attacking their faith. I'm not sure what to do about that without forfeiting my option to write about issues involving Christianity—a bad idea in a still-quite-religious nation.

But I wrote in a provocative tone. And I provoked. I accept that some of my friends found that hurtful. I can't say I won't do it again. I will, however, be mindful.

How much money makes you rich?

Americans say they would need to earn a median of $150,000 a year to consider themselves rich. However, 30% say less than $100,000 would be enough, including 18% who would consider themselves rich if they made less than $60,000 a year. On the other hand, 15% say they would need to earn at least $1 million per year before thinking of themselves as rich.

via gallup.com

This should actually vary from region to region—the amount of money I'd need to be comfortable in my Kansas hometown is probably a lot less than what I'd use here in Philadelphia. Nonetheless, $150,000 isn't a crazy number: It's three times the median household income in America. That's not not rich, at the very least.

Tebowing, revisited

I revise and expand my comments about Tim Tebow for this week's Scripps Howard column:

You know who would love to see Tim Tebow take it down a notch? Jesus.

At least, that's what the Bible seems to suggest in the sixth chapter of Matthew. That's where Jesus talks to his followers about prayer, and warns them against ostentatious displays: "And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you."

Tim Tebow is, by all accounts, a man of great and genuine faith so perhaps he knows better than Jesus how to properly worship Jesus.

That seems unlikely, however.

Taken to its logical end, though, we would ask Christians to shut up about their faith entirely and stick it in a deep, dark hole. That's both unlikely and undesirable. Faith cannot, ultimately, be silenced.

But most of us have learned to live with boundaries -- to avoid thrusting our religion into arenas where it is unexpected or unwelcome. If you make a big sale at work, for example, you're unlikely to bend on knee in front of co-workers and customers to start giving thanks to God.

That would make them uncomfortable, and would be kind of rude as a result. Rudeness, in turn, makes few converts and conversions seem to be the point of Tebow's enterprise. Why be counterproductive? Tim Tebow, then, is the NFL equivalent of the telemarketer calling at dinner. He's free to make the call, but no one should be surprised if many of us are turned off by the salesman and his pitch.

Ben suggests that "Tebowing should be more emulated than scorned" in his take. You'll have to click the link to read the whole thing.

GOP rhetoric doesn't even have to make sense anymore

So the GOP, as expected, is blocking President Obama's nominee to lead the new consumer protection bureau. Republicans want changes to the structure of the bureau, basically to make it toothless. That doesn't sound great, though, so here's how they're playing it:

“We’re not going to let the president put another unelected czar in place, unaccountable to the American people,”said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.).

But the whole point of Senate confirmation is that the appointee is anything but an "unelected czar" operating without accountability: They're accountable to the Senate. McConnell's rhetoric suggests that every cabinet member and every judicial nominee is somehow illegitimate. If that's the case, then McConnell and the Republicans believe we should tear down our form of government and raise something new in its place.

But I don't think that's the case. I think they're just cynical.

Federalist 58: Filibusters suck

It's true that when America adopted its Constitution, the Founders who wrote the Federalist Papers didn't put much—any—effort into defending the filibuster tactic that is so widely used in today's Senate. Why? Well, the Constitution itself didn't mention the filibuster: That's something the Senate decided, on its own, to allow in the rules.

Still, while reading Federalist 58, it's pretty easy to see what the Founders would've thought about the filibuster: They wouldn't have liked it. We can surmise as much when James Madison grapples with whether the Constitution should've required much more than a quorum for the House of Representatives to vote on weighty matters. Madison didn't like the burden that would create. Why? It would enable a minority of Congressmen to block legislation simply by not showing up:

It has been said that more than a majority ought to have been required for a quorum; and in particular cases, if not in all, more than a majority of a quorum for a decision. That some advantages might have resulted from such a precaution, cannot be denied. It might have been an additional shield to some particular interests, and another obstacle generally to hasty and partial measures. But these considerations are outweighed by the inconveniences in the opposite scale. In all cases where justice or the general good might require new laws to be passed, or active measures to be pursued, the fundamental principle of free government would be reversed. It would be no longer the majority that would rule: the power would be transferred to the minority. Were the defensive privilege limited to particular cases, an interested minority might take advantage of it to screen themselves from equitable sacrifices to the general weal, or, in particular emergencies, to extort unreasonable indulgences.

Some of my conservative friends defend the filibuster as a minority legislative defense against the tyranny of the majority. But it's pretty clear the Founders—or at least Madison—weren't interested in giving the minority the power to block legislation, seeing it as a reversal of "the fundamental principle of free government."

Combine this with Federalist 22, in which Alexander Hamilton railed against the idea that two-thirds of Americans would "submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third"—roughly the ratio needed for the Senate to sustain a filibuster—and it's sure seems clear the practice is both undemocratic and a betrayal of the Founders' vision.

A conservative friend says I may modify my position on this when I read further into the Federalists. Right now, though, the filibuster isn't really faring well.

What caused Pearl Harbor? Flappers and jazz.

Victor Davis Hanson, National Review's "classical historian" in residence, idly speculates why Admiral Yammamoto planned the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor:

But it may be just as likely that Yamamoto’s earlier years in the United States, at Harvard in particular, rather than convincing him of the futility of attacking such an industrial colossus had encouraged his prejudices that Western society, especially in its Roaring Twenties excesses, was decadent and lacked the martial steel for an eventual war with the Japanese.

Now, there's no reason to actually produce any evidence in support of this theory, but it's fun to play with. "Of course we can beat the Americans! With General Jay Gatsby misguidedly leading the troops, there's no way we can't win! Twenty-three skidoo indeed! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!"

Of course, it might just be that Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor because the Japanese wanted to expand their control over Pacific island resources, and the American fleet stood in the way. You don't have to have contempt for your rival's character to want what he's keeping from you. It helps, but it's not a requirement. Without offering any evidence to support his argument, it sure appears that Hanson is engaging in an age-old "blame America" argument.

I know: I'm the one who wrote earlier today that we need to let Pearl Harbor not be such an urgent memory. But we're obviously going to remember it still. It would be nice if we didn't mis-remember it in order to make political arguments about our present-day policy.