An invocation and an injunction...

The progressive left and the gay and lesbian community have risen in outrage at President-elect Obama's choice of the evangelical preacher Rick Warren to give the invocation at the inauguration next month, noting that Warren is against abortion and also supported the California referendum prohibiting gay and lesbian marriage. As one example of this outrage, on the much-respected blog Hullabaloo, its creator digby claimed that Obama's choice of Warren was "validating the views of the Christian Right" and suggested sarcastically that Obama was now happy to dispose of support from liberals and to replace it with what he could get from social conservatives. This misinterprets the nature of a presidential inauguration and misreads Obama's mind.

A presidential inauguration is the one official ceremony of American government that traditionally has been conducted so as to unite, if only briefly, the entire nation in a moment of respect for our democracy and our shared civic life. If those who've denounced Rick Warren for his stands on social issues are raising a new standard for inaugurations -- that only individuals who agree with the policies of the new president should be allowed a visible role on the historic day -- then they might also need to exclude the outgoing president as well as congressional leaders of the other party. Inaugurations have traditionally been used to try to heal partisan and ideological divisions, not cement them.

Rick Warren has, apparently, treated Barack Obama with great respect, listened to his views, refrained from endorsing his opponent (though he appeared to agree with McCain on more issues), and permitted Obama to address his congregation on more than one occasion. The full number of Warren's followers isn't limited to those who share his religious views. They also include the 20 million purchasers of Warren's spiritual self-help book, "The Purpose-Driven Life." Warren's constituency is vast, and it's not limited to social conservatives, much less opponents of abortion or gay and lesbian rights. Unless Warren is to be branded as representing only two of his positions on social issues, giving him an inaugural role would seem to fit easily within the typically ecumenical, inclusive frame of the occasion.

But let's also look at what are likely to be the broader political reasons for such a choice by Obama, which may ultimately benefit and not harm progressive policies as well as the interests of the gay and lesbian community.

In most of the Western democracies, conservative parties and their allied media have controlled mainstream political discourse for more of the post-war period than their competitors. This includes Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.S. and Australia -- while Canada, New Zealand and the Nordic countries have had a more equal alternation between left and right, and the discourse has not been driven primarily by the right. There has been one main strategy for the left to attain power in the first group of countries: Make rhetorical feints to the right while capturing power in a crisis or recession, and then hold onto power in a centrist disguise while governing as progressively as seems possible. Clinton and Blair were the last two practitioners of this strategy, which did lead to partial re-regulation of markets and more resources for education, health and the environment.

Impatient with this kind of moderate-left governance, the progressive left in the U.S. has frequently marginalized itself, by chasing after fringe Don Quixotes like Ralph Nader or divisive internal challengers like Ted Kennedy in '80. This has always contributed to conservative election victories. In interviews and speeches, Obama has said repeatedly that he wants to terminate both partisan and ideological rancor. Why has he said this? Because the right's discourse is always ready to be more excessive than that of the left, since its victories depend on fear of the left -- they purvey and benefit from the rancor. Obama could not hope to deprive the right of its historical advantage in co-opting the media and political discourse by quickly pushing the most socially contentious progressive-left policies (or by embracing the opposite policies) upon taking power after an election decided on other grounds. The political media would obstruct every other initiative or urgent matter he wished to advance, in their obsession with social issues focused on sex and gender. Just look at how anxious they've been to change the subject of his presidential transition from new people and new policies to the sideshow of a corrupt governor from Obama's state.

This new president will be the first since Franklin Roosevelt to have both the latter's self-confidence and inspirational power and the inheritance of a national crisis so profound as to endanger the very viability of our economy, offering him enormous leverage for change. I think he is going to use this opportunity to try to move the country's discourse -- and with it, the way we even define the nation's purpose -- decisively away from the self-absorbed, intellectually bankrupt frame of reference given to us by an exhausted, frightened and increasingly frightening American right. If you were determined to transform the nation's default political assumptions, which have been largely conservative, would you begin by instantly gratifying everyone to your left and risking being labeled as a social revolutionary, thus reigniting the same kind of intemperate debates which spur the media to inflame political discord even further? Or would you begin by calming and reassuring all those who are alarmed that a highly intelligent, African-American former community organizer was about to assume the White House at a time of supreme presidential power (courtesy of his overreaching predecessor)? The left underestimates the undercurrent of apprehension focused on a man who embodies and doesn't merely articulate the need for dramatic change. Better to lower the temperature of precipitous critics by showing that you're going to govern on behalf of everyone, even those who might be afraid of who you are and what you may do.

Thus far the common traits of Obama's Cabinet appointees have been their competence, political skills and prodigious intelligence, which have impressed the gatekeepers of mainstream thinking. Apart from stagecraft, that is all that's been happening so far in this transition. The new president hasn't been sworn in yet, but those who stand the most to benefit from a new political discourse in America are swearing about who's giving the invocation at the swearing-in. They seem happy to echo unwittingly the acrimony of the old discourse, instead of permitting this unprecedented figure with a great gift of persuasion to fashion a gentler way of introducing the nation to a different way of governing, and a different way of talking about it. One thing certainly to be enjoined now, after a period of extraordinary intolerance by the right, is a little tolerance from the left. That's what the President-elect is offering.