So, everyone wants to know what I thought of Barack Obama, who gave a speech on Saturday afternoon. He was asked to speak on the subject of the intersection of faith and public life in his experience as a United States Senator.
The Executive Council invited Obama to speak a year ago, before he announced his run for the presidency, and they tried to bill him as simply a UCC member who is also a politician. Because of the diversity in our church, and the strong emphasis on personal conscious (and probably because of the tax codes), they didn't want this to seem like a presidential campaign stop, and asked attendees not to wear campaign buttons or shirts, or to carry signs to the event.
As a result of all this, I naively expected a speech crafted for our event, with the Executive Council's suggested topic in mind. What we got was a stump speech that could have been given to any religious organization (and has probably been given to many), with some extra UCC stuff thrown in to make it appropriate to our church.
Now, it was a good stump speech, and it was carefully crafted to fit within the parameters of a tax code that serves to restrict free speech -- skimming just on the edge of partisanship without crossing the line. And there was a lot of what Obama said that I could agree with, especially in the beginning of the speech where he was setting up the major problems that face our nation. Where I felt a disconnect was in what he sees as solutions to those problems.
One of Andrew Sullivan's posts kept coming to mind as I listened to this thoughtful and charismatic Senator speak. Andrew Sullivan says, Barack Obama "may, in fact, be the most effective liberal advocate I've heard in my lifetime." As Obama talked about universal values and how those values inform his thinking in the public sphere, I could almost buy his solutions, even though I'm a small-government libertarian (lowercase t).
Sullivan sees Obama as the Reagan of the left -- the person who will be able to take liberal ideas and sell them to the general public. Like Reagan, Obama can do this because he passionately believes his Party's solutions are the best choice, but also because he has a good understanding of how those ideas intersect with universal (as opposed to partisan) values.
After seeing Barack Obama in person, I'm not sure he'll be the next President, and I'm not any closer to knowing whether I'd vote for him (I think it depends on the alternatives). But I'm certain he'll be an important, passionate, and intelligent voice for liberalism in the twenty-first century -- and I'll be glad to tell stories of how I got to see him in person back in the day when he was simply the Junior Senator from Illinois.