Why Did It Take You 40 Years to Figure Out That the Special Interests Control Congress?
Nov. 12, 2010
Jim Wallis wrote yesterday:
I have learned in the last two years that changes in Washington, Wall Street, and the country, are indeed much harder to accomplish than anyone expects. The combination of entrenched politics (on both sides); hugely influential special interests; the growing power of money in politics; the 24/7 assault of ideologically driven media machines; and a still-passive electorate that believes voting is the only requirement of citizenship --- all have contributed to where we now find ourselves.
He learned all this only in the last two years? He is a slow learner!
With an overwhelming majority in the House, a numerical majority in the Senate, and the most far Left President in the White House since LBJ, hardly any of his Social Gospel agenda got into law. There are still 50,000 troops in Iraq and 100,000 Iraqi mercenaries on the American payroll. There will soon be over 100,000 American troops in Afghanistan, and Obama has now pledged permanent support. Obama sent in the surge troops. Now, another surge is coming. George W. Bush praised Obama's Afghanistan policy in his autobiography, released this week. And why not? Obama's Afghanistan policy is an extension of Bush's.
Wallis is an anti-war activist. His dreams of a new foreign policy are dust.
This man has spent his entire adult life as a Left-wing political activist. He has been pitching the Social Gospel to evangelicals ever since the late 1960s. Yet he just found out that nothing changes in Washington.
How can anyone in his life's calling be this slow a learner? He is 62.
It's too late for Wallis to see his agenda get passed into law. It's all over. The electorate resoundingly threw out the Democrats. His agenda has been tabled . . . permanently.
At 62, he is facing the end of his career, and all he has to show for it is a Tea Party.
Consider his career of political activism. He graduated from seminary in 1971. Nixon was President. Then came Ford. Jimmy Carter was Wallis's kind of Christian. He accomplished little. He was soundly defeated by Reagan. The public did not want Wallis's form of Christian activism. Then came eight years of Reagan and four years of Bush I. Clinton got eight years, and all he did was to "end the welfare system as we know it," to quote him. Then came eight years of Bush II. Finally, having waited his entuire life, he got Obama and a Democraric Congress. The hope! Result: hope deferred. About all he got was the health insurance law, which the Republicans are unlikely to fund and which the voters despise.
So, what has he got to show for 40 years of political activism? A country involved in two wars in Asia, plus a trillion-dollar-a-year deficit. Anything else? No.
What's a political junkie to do? Go utopian!
Instead of just sitting back and watching how things go, an empowered new electorate must push the country deeper into our best shared values, understand the need for social movements in making social change, and act to hold both political sides accountable to trying to actually solve the country's greatest challenges, instead of just winning and keeping power.
What best-shared values? What legislative agenda? If he thinks he will persuade Republicans in Congress to pass any of his agenda, he is having a "senior moment."
There is an empowered new electorate, all right, and it is hopping mad about anything resembling his agenda.
This man has been living in a fantasy world, where Southern Baptists and Pentecostals were almost ready to become Social Gospel liberals, where Congressional Democrats were committed reformers who are ready to pass new welfare programs for the poor, where voters were closet supporters of Federal subsidies to the poor, and where the "faith-based community" is more than a tiny group of neo-evangelical Democrats.
This is all that is left of the New Social Gospel. It is the old Social Gospel in burial sheets. R.I.P.