Divine Speech (Michael Sean Winters in TNR on Obama/Religion)

[struggle4progress]

by Michael Sean Winters
If Obama learns how to speak about the economy in Catholic terms--stressing the common good and human dignity--he'll win a lot more than just Catholic voters.
Post Date Friday, July 18, 2008

... In articulating his economic views in ways that are especially accessible to Catholics, Obama would do much more than just increase his chances with that constituency. He'd discover that Catholic social thought provides Democrats with the kind of moral vision and linguistic clarity that their economic positions have lacked for decades now ...

He could start by borrowing from Catholic social thought, which rests on two foundations: the inalienable dignity of the human person and the common good. Human dignity, though recently derided in TNR, has both a religious and a liberal pedigree. For Christians, Jews, and Muslims, it is rooted in the belief that man is created in the image and likeness of God. Modern liberals embrace the notion in different ways, but particularly espouse Kant's argument that a human being is never a means but always an end. In the American context, Lincoln said it best: "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy."

Human dignity's necessary social corollary is the common good. Not only are we all essentially equal; we are all in this together. The common good embraces the idea that property rights are not absolute and that the good of everyone in a society has a claim on each of us within that society. In the 2004 convention keynote that first catapulted Obama to national attention, he referenced a biblical injunction that speaks to the same core idea: "Alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga, a belief that we're all connected as one people. ... I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper" ...

Another long-standing principle of Catholic social thought--combining both the dignity and social good arguments--is that the government must intervene whenever the private sector fails to protect and provide for a specific group of people. The seminal papal encyclical on social justice, Rerum Novarum, issued in 1891, was clear: "Whenever the general interest or any particular class suffers, or it is threatened with evils which can in no other way be met, the public authority must step in to meet them." Whatever you think of Republican policies in economic terms, they are repugnant in moral terms, and it would behoove Obama to make that case. He hasn't done a good enough job of convincing Americans that John McCain's health care proposal does little or nothing to help the poor; that his flip-flop on the Bush tax cuts has robbed him of both his most courageous vote and a principled stand against the unlimited acquisition of gross wealth; and that time and again, the GOP has stood for the rights of property above the well-being of the whole society ...

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=f1c95dd6-6569-461e-a372-4b4e7f960dd3

[NattPang]

1. Obama talks about dignity and the common good all of the time

He mentioned that seniors should be able to retire
in Dignity and score of other mentions
throughout his stump speech.

[struggle4progress]

2. "Whatever you think of Republican policies in economic terms, they are repugnant in moral terms, and

it would behoove Obama to make that case"