Three Christian principles call for Americans to give Barack Obama four more years.
1. Principle: spirit over technology.
This election presents a clear choice. It's the choice between technology and spirit.
The technocratic candidate is Mitt Romney. He’s the candidate of managerial competence. He proved his managerial competence by making his fortune at Bain Capital, and he promises to bring that same skill-set to the White House. He sloughs off demands for detail and explanation. His answer is: trust me; I know how to do this.
Romney’s history illustrates the triumph of technocratic solutions over spiritual solutions. Here’s a technocratic solution: when you travel to Canada with the family dog, put the dog in a cage on the roof of your station wagon. If distress gives the dog diarrhea, drive into a service station, hose off the dog, and put him back on the roof, still in the wind but now wet.
Barack Obama is the candidate of compassion. Compassion is spiritual. Compassion is passing a law so that sick people don’t die because they are poor, and so that sickness doesn’t send middle-class people to bankruptcy because they couldn’t get insurance because of a pre-existing condition. Compassion is pushing to extend unemployment insurance for the out-of-work. Compassion is making sure that women get equal pay for equal work. Compassion is spending money to educate Americans for high-skill, high-pay jobs. Compassion is risking money to save the American auto industry, to save the livelihoods of many.
2. Truth over lies.
All campaigns step on the truth. But one of the presidential campaigns builds upon a core of falsehood.
The Republican National Convention dedicated a day of its three-day convention to the exploitation of Obama’s statement "If you have a business – you didn’t build that."
I’ve listened to Obama's speech. I’ve read transcripts of that comment and the words that surround it. And so has the Romney campaign. I know and they know that the "that" in that statement was infrastructure and other benefits that businesses get from government. These benefits permit businesses to thrive. These benefits include roads to make shipping easy and efficient. They include public schools that make an educated workforce.
Anyone who listens to any significant chunk of Obama’s speech instead of the famous sliver of it knows what the president really said. The Romney campaign trusted that most people had heard only the exacto-knifed sliver of that speech. The Romney campaign showed the emptiness at its core when it built a day of the RNC convention upon a lie.
3. Principle: the last shall be first, and the first shall be last.
Everyone should want a president who has known hardship. Everyone should be suspicious of a candidate who has led a gilded life. With a candidate who has known hardship, we know that when we go through hard times, he will understand. We can trust that from that understanding action will come.
So it’s a plus that Barack Obama’s father abandoned his family when Obama was a toddler. It’s a plus that his mother was on food stamps for a time. It’s a plus that he made his own way through college. It makes his climb to heights more impressive, but it also gives us reassurance that he knows not only the view from the top down, but the view from the bottom up.
To Barack Obama, hardship is not something he grudgingly studied in an assigned Charles Dickens novel, which he then put back on the shelf.
If you haven’t known hardship, you don’t see problems the same way as someone who has known hardship. If masses of people are losing their homes, that might be alright with you, as it was to Romney. His "solution": let the market bottom out, and have investors buy up homes at a bargain. The people who used to have the dignity of their own homes could pay rent to the investors who raked in their homes at bargain prices.
If you haven’t known hardship, you don’t risk taxpayer money to save the auto industry and to save jobs, as Obama did.
If you haven’t known hardship, you don’t commit money to making educational opportunities for people so that Americans can take the high-skill, high-pay jobs of the future, like Obama did. Your education model is Texas, where the guiding principle is thrift, and the result is a population prepared for low-skill labor.
4. Christians: vote your values!
If you believe in the spiritual over the technocratic, this election should be easy for you. If you believe in truth over lies, your decision is made. If you believe that a leader is stronger for having lived through both good times and bad, you have a candidate.
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