God and the Election

If God didn’t mean for Barack Obama to win the 2012 presidential contest, how do you explain Clint Eastwood?

1. Unsought benefit: Clint Eastwood and the empty chair.

That question is meant only half in jest. Nominating conventions typically boost a presidential candidate. But Eastwood’s performance sucked the energy from Mitt Romney’s would-be momentum.

Not that things were going placidly at the Republican nominating convention up till then. Hurricane Isaac caused the Republicans to bail on the first day of their Tampa-based convention. Some wonder that the Republicans chose as their venue Florida in the hurricane season.

Hurricane Isaac at the beginning of the general-election season was seconded by Hurricane Sandy at the end of the general-election season. I don’t make claims about the intention of God in these two hurricanes at the beginning and at the end of the short general-election season. I look at that and I wonder, but I draw no conclusions. Too many people claim to know the intention of God in natural disasters; and it always happens to match their own personal religious agenda. That kind of theology, without pretty clear and plain communication from the Almighty, is in the domain of douches.

Instead, I’ll talk more about Clint Eastwood and his last-minute choice to do the unexpected. His empty-chair speech energized Democrats. It gave them the perfect metaphor for all of the attacks that they had heard and would hear against their candidate. Eastwood’s speech illustrated the disconnect between the Obama of reality and the Obama of Republican scorn. "See?" we could say after Tampa. "Another attack on empty-chair Obama."

So it’s possible to see a divine hand pushing Clint Eastwood to the front of the convention stage with the subliminal prompt, "Son, let’r rip!"

2. Unlikely outcome: A boon from the Supreme Court.

But God had other means, if he had a say in this election. The Supreme Court that handed victory to Bush in 2000 had a hand Obama’s victory twelve years later.

Months before the general election, the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare. After that, public opinion shifted in Obamacare’s favor.

Victory in the Supreme Court made Obama look like a winner. Victory kept Obama’s most high-profile legislative victory from becoming smoke. It kept Obama and all of his effort to pass that law from looking like a dog chasing its tail.

And in hindsight, the victory looks unlikely. This is true for a couple of reasons. First, Obama had voted against John Robert’s nomination to the Supreme Court. (Though he later voted to confirm Robert’s rise to Chief Justice.) In the Obamacare decision, Roberts provided the crucial fifth vote for a majority of the justices.

And experts look at Robert’s published Obamacare opinion and say that it looks like it started out as an opinion against Obamacare. Its center of gravity is its argument that the constitutional commerce clause cannot bear the weight of Obamacare. The section upholding Obamacare under the taxing power of the federal government might have been an afterthought. Experts surmise that the taxing-power section flipped the opinion from a vote against Obamacare to a vote for it.

And Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's concurring opinion has sharp language common in a dissent rather than the typical language of a concurrence. This leads some experts to suppose that it might have begun as a dissent, meaning that the justices initially voted to reject Obamacare.

Maybe God directed Robert’s conscience and shifted his position, changing him from the leader of the justices against Obamacare to the writer of the lead opinion that upheld it.

3. Unexpected ally: Governor Chris Christie.

Let me say a second time: I’m not making pronouncements about God’s will, this election, and hurricanes. That said, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie helped Obama by changing from a high-profile sneering critic of Obama’s leadership to a high-profile enthusiastic extoller of Obama’s leadership.

That transformation, that praise was not a foregone conclusion. After Hurricane Isaac, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal did what many Republicans wanted Governor Christie to do. Jindal took disaster aid from the federal government but publically carped about it.

4. Obstacle: the first debate.

Then there was Obama’s catastrophic first-debate performance. That might seem to cover up God’s footprints in this election. But it’s possible to see otherwise.

In the Old Testament Book of Judges, the tribes of Israel turned on one of their own. The tribe of Benjamin committed a notorious crime. Then the other tribes battled against Benjamin. They almost extinguished it.

God sent Israel into battle against Benjamin twice before giving Israel victory over Benjamin. Both of those times, Benjamin inflicted slaughter on Israel.

So sometimes God hands out failure before victory. Like Obama’s first debate performance. Maybe such failures supply needed humility before a blessing.

Conservative Christians might take this idea of God-in-failure as an explanation for the 2012 outcome contrary to mine. They are welcome to. I claim no special oracular powers.

4. What this exercise is and is not.

My friends who are un-believers will argue that I am foolish to find proof of God in the 2012 election. They are exactly right. This is no proof. This essay is instead a way of looking at the world. It is an interpretation of events. It is no more than that.

5. Aftermath: the hand of God.

I interpret events after the election with the hand of God in mind.

Nobody was more eager to defeat Obama than the Christian right. Some conservative Christians literally fasted and prayed for the triumph of Mitt Romney.

Maybe God transformed their curses into blessings. Something like that happened when Balak king of Moab summoned the prophet Balaam to curse the Israelites. The story is told in the Book of Numbers.

But here’s the point. Franklin Graham is a prominent conservative evangelist. He’s the son of Billy Graham. He is no Obama enthusiast. In the 2012 election cycle, he fanned speculation that Barack Obama is a Muslim. He did this even though Obama professes Christianity and was a long-time member of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ.

But Graham has now called for Evangelical Christians to support the president with their daily prayers.

Surely God is in this.