so are you

I’ve got the Rick Warren sessions to fully explore this week, I’ve only seen a bit of Obama’s session, so I shouldn’t be too hard on William Kristol. The main thrust of his opinion this morning comes to this – and ‘this’ is the main problem with the lack of understanding many have of Obama’s position:

Warren asked whether evil exists and if it does, “do we ignore it? Do we negotiate with it? Do we contain it? Do we defeat it?”

Obama and McCain agreed evil exists and couldn’t be ignored. But then their answers diverged.

Obama said that “we see evil all the time” — in Darfur, on the streets of our cities, in child abusers. Such evils, he continued, need to be “confronted squarely.” And while we can’t “erase evil from the world,” we can be “soldiers” in the task of confronting it when we see it.

But, Obama added, “Now, the one thing that I think is very important is for us to have some humility” as we confront evil. Why? Because “a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil.” After all, “just because we think our intentions are good doesn’t always mean that we’re going to be doing good.”

It’s nice to see a liberal aware of the limits of good intentions — indeed, that the road to hell is paved with them. But here as elsewhere, Obama stayed at a high level of abstraction. It would have been interesting if Warren had asked a follow-up question: Where in particular has the United States in recent years — at home or especially abroad — perpetrated evil in the name of confronting evil? Hasn’t the overwhelming problem been, rather, a reluctance to effectively confront evil — in Darfur, or Rwanda, or pre-9/11 Afghanistan?

John McCain appears to think so. Unlike Obama, he took the question about evil to be in the first instance about 9/11. McCain asserted that “of course evil must be defeated,” and he put “radical Islamic extremism,” Al Qaeda in particular, at the top of his to-defeat list. In this context, McCain discussed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and concluded by mentioning “the young men and women who are serving this nation in uniform.”

So it appears to me, using Kristol’s chosen extracts, that Obama believes very strongly that our determination of evil is almost always seen through American optics. Those optics are oftentimes right but just as often wrong or misguided. Instead of assuming we’re reading the tea leaves correctly at every fork in the road we might want to measure our actions against a larger canvass of World events. In response to Kristol’s desired follow-up question, I’d say this: Abu Gharib and Guantanamo Bay. As for his bit on our reluctance to confront evil as the greatest problem, wasn’t Sen. McCain present in Senate leadership throughout the Rwanda, Darfur and pre-9/11 Afghanistan? Is Kristol actually using that statement to posit the evils that Sen. McCain didn’t deal with over the last 15 years is somehow a measure of his abilities?

Sen. McCain’s response, again selected by Kristol, is like a checklist of what’s so wrong with those who blindly campaign and spew the three pillars of fear. I’ll break down McCain’s response…let me know if I miss anything in the paraphrase:

1. Defeat evil
2. Radical Islamic extremism
3. Men and women in uniform

If that is considered a nuanced response to what was a very good question, and if that is an answer that Kristol and his ilk find winning or in-depth, then there’s little hope in reaching into the conservative movement or McCain supporters come November.

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