Greenwald on Warren etc.

I agree with Glenn Greenwald that showcasing Rick Warren at the Inauguration is in itself not that big of a deal. I agree with him also that we shouldn't kid ourselves: that past efforts at "statesmanship" by Democrats have usually ended in disaster and disappointment--with an added soupçon of contempt from right-wingers at the very idea that their opponents would be so foolish as to try to be "reasonable."

Greenwald asks: How New is Obama's New Politics? The question is rhetorical, I assume, and his answer, I take to be: "not very." My natural pessimistic skepticism tells me he's probably right. My sometimes delusional optimiism whispers "maybe this time it's different."

Just maybe. Politics is, after all, always a question of who is using whom. Evidently Obama things he can massage Warren into support for at least some Obama hobbyhorses (climate control, third-world poverty). Warren believes he can use Obama for--what, exactly? Okay, maybe for stuff like suppressing gays and destroying abortion rights. But I suspect these particulars for Warren are mere incidents to the more general goal of becoming Billy Graham's successor as the evangelical Pope. And recall that Graham himself was oddly non-ideological, much less ideological than Falwell or Robertson or Dobson, etc.--much more interested in being seen with the President than in actually accomplishing anything.

I recognize that this is a rough game and that Warren, in a spirit of Christian love, will be happy to help in trying to devour and destroy Obama if and when he smells blood in the water. I recognize that we are dealing with a president who has managed nothing more fracttious than the Harvard Law Review. There's little to suggest that he's got the blood instinct of a Lyndon Johnson, to say nothing of the lion-and-fox wiliness of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Still, as theatre, it's fun to watch. At least the first act.