A Classless Act

Class and grace are widely admired attributes related to reasonableness,  strong,  unstressed self-control and self-confidence, a sense of proportion and awareness of context, and an appropriate consideration and respect for other people.  While they are seldom encountered among politicians,  it is generally accepted that there are occasions such as the transfer of power from one president to another when even a faked display of them is useful and expected. Most presidents  and their wives seem to have understood this and behaved accordingly.  The Obamas have been an exception.

We cannot know if Barack Obama is the most arrogant and narcissistic president of the last seventy years since we cannot know his predecessors’ private thoughts. However we can observe that he has consistently behaved more arrogantly and narcissistically in public  than any of the others. He often has seemed quite unable to hide an apparent  belief that  the cosmos revolves  around him.  He has rated himself publicly as among the  greatest president of all time (always probably a smidgen behind Lincoln and sometimes maybe nosed out by Washington or  FDR but right up there) despite his many failures and his small and now likely mainly ephemeral set of accomplishments.  His penchant  for commemorating  everything and everyone with photos of himself has become a recurring joke on the internet as  has his characteristic jaw-jutting pose which to many is more than a little reminiscent of the Duce’s.  A thing circulating recently shows official  Christmas cards from presidents going back to FDR displaying views of the White House in winter together with the official card from Obama displaying a view of Obama.

So it is no surprise he is behaving as he is during the period of transition to the next administration after an election in which his policies were rejected, and his chosen successor was defeated by a crude political amateur who was opposed by many of the leaders of his own party. He has blamed  the voters, blamed  conspiracies by shifty foreigners, blamed the few outfits in the media not staffed by his sycophants  and done nothing  to oppose  efforts by  those in his party to attack the validity and even overturn the results of the election. He and those in  his  administration have gone on a pointless binge of issuing decrees and regulations when he knows most or all of them will be cancelled by the new president and his people.  One can see reasons some people see his behavior as a petulant desire to insult the Americans he so despises a few more times before leaving office.

 The prize for a single act of gracelessness though must go to his wife.  This woman who said she never cared for the country until it elevated her and her husband toward the presidency and who continually and absurdly  posed as a poor victim while occupying the White House and living remarkably opulently  has chosen to leave giving  the nation her variation of après nous le deluge  - explaining on national TV that hope for the country will end with the departure of  her and her husband.  

For many observers the appropriate response to these two comes from the old saying: don’t go away mad, just go away.   

Trump and Evangelical Protestants

There is a claim  going around in the traditional media that so-called evangelical Christians – i.e. Protestants who do not belong to the traditional, long established denominations familiar to people in the Northeast – sold out their principles by voting for Donald Trump. The argument is that since Trump is  a crude, arrogant, not particularly religious man with an unrepented history as a skirt chasing bon vivant,  evangelical people had  to abandon or ignore their beliefs to support him. 

The assertions  are easily refuted (as was done pithily by  a well known minister when he noted the election was for a commander-in-chief, not a preacher-in-chief) and display a good deal  of hypocrisy. One would think anyone who believes in the separation of church and state would be pleased when evangelical Christians or anyone else refrains from  imposing  a religious test on candidates seeking public office.  For those of us with liberal sentiments, that is a good thing, not  a lapse into immorality.  One also should remember there  was no such criticism made of any of the millions of evangelical Christians who voted to elect Bill Clinton twice. The double standard and the phoniness of the claims are fairly clear.

However there is an interesting question –  about the primaries rather than about the general election. I would have guessed that in choosing among candidates who generally agreed on most issues, most evangelical Christians would have preferred a candidate whose behavior seemed more in line with their norms than Trump’s did.  Yet even in the early primaries when there were several conservative candidates who made a point of their Christian beliefs, Trump did well among evangelical Christians.  I  think the answer may be similar to the likely reason why many others supported Trump for  the nomination. They were fed up and tired of being ridiculed and pushed around and ready for someone who would tell them fervidly and unambiguously he felt the same way and would do something about the situation unconditionally.

Many evangelical Christians did not like the constant, contemptuous ridicule they received from members of the ruling class and their associates in the traditional media. After all, most people would  not be fond of routinely being labelled and treated as backward, ignorant throwbacks. Some decided  they and their ways of living were in the crosshairs of the present administration, and  Republican politicians  in Washington weren’t  offering much help or cover. They might have objected when officials punished Christian bakers, florists,  and photographers for declining to work on  weddings of homosexuals  while the government required  trucking companies to  make special accommodations  for Muslim drivers who did not want to deliver beer. They might have noticed when the president responded to concerns about jihadist terrorists by hectoring Christians to feel guilty about the crusades.  Demands from officials to open up women’s public restrooms and locker rooms in their communities to men pretending to be women could have annoyed some of them. Some could have wondered why Christians in the Middle East were both among the most likely to be persecuted and among the least likely to be accepted as refugees.  They might have decided they saw a theme and  pattern in such things.

 So a lot of them went for Trump from the first, as did a lot of other angry and fed up Americans who felt they were threatened and abused by their rulers.   One can question people’s judgment in making that choice. I wish the Republicans had nominated and elected someone else.  However the threats and abuse from the government were real enough and by no means only for Christians