Why Amy Sullivan is a Complete Idiot

Amy Sullivan has always been a one note pundit: The Democratic party must reach out to religious voters, and protect them from those evil radical secularists who would make fun of them.

The problem there is very basic: there are no radical secularists in the leadership of the Democratic party.

For that matter, I believe that there has been one atheist who has ever served as a member of Congress, so she is talking about people who do not exist.

Now, she is prattling on about how Obama is making overt evangelical religiosity work for him.

First, she claims that Obama has "pivoted to announce that an Obama administration would fix, expand and elevate the faith-based initiative".

Except, of course, if these organizations take federal money, Obama won't allow them to discriminate on the basis of religion, and they will be subject to federal accounting and auditing standards, which has always been the case until Bush set up his own "faith based initiative."

The purpose of Bush's program was to ensure that there was neither fiscal accountability nor discrimination protection, so Obama's program is a complete refutation of Bush's program.

In fact, what is implied is that he will sweep up massive numbers of white evangelicals in so doing, even though the religious right demand that they be subject to no fiscal accountability and be given the right to discriminate.

The core message of the politicized right wing evangelical is hostility to integration and to minorities.

Similarly, when she lauds Bush's "Compassionate Conservativism", she does not understand, or more likely refuses to understand that this is a dog whistle to the religious right, referring to Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion, which says that "true compassion" is not giving charity, because, "Compassion means tough love in which those who give must demand self-help from those who receive," which means let "black babies starve".

The religious Evangelical does not begin with Roe v. Wade and abortion, but rather with Green v. Connally, which revoked the tax exempt status of discriminatory private religious schools.

So we can run a poll on religious affiliation vs. candidate support, and you can see that Obama is polling lower than either Kerry in 2004 or Gore in 2000. (h/t Talkleft on the poll)

Barack Obama has no chance of picking up white right wing Evangelical voters, and the votes he picks up from black Evangelicals and Hispanic Catholics are because the Republican party is implacably hostile to them.

Amy Sullivan is a one trick pony, but her pony is a dog, and I'll call her my "Wanker of the Day".