For Barack Obama to Win the Election: Time to Transcend

With a month to go, what do you hope to see from Senator Obama in the two remaining debates and on the campaign trail?

A colleague of mine at Union Theological Seminary, Heather Wise, wrote the following open letter to Brack Obama’s campaign a couple of weeks ago.  I share it here as a means to open discussion:  with a month to go, what do you hope to see from Senator Obama in the two remaining debates and on the campaign trail?

For Barack Obama to Win the Election: Time to Transcend

I write because I see a missing piece in the strategy for Barack Obama to win the election.  As a student of theology and American politics, I think he needs to publicly reconnect with his transcendent message of hope that garnered so much support across the country and secured the votes of my Republican relatives in Ohio.

Recent polls and common sense say people do not vote based on whose policies are better, but on personality traits and intangible, irrational factors.  Obama has excelled at this and can again, but I believe he must take his well-articulated positions (particularly on the economy) and add back his message of hope, which may not be missing for him, but is missing in the coverage that he is receiving.

The change message has already worked (the competition has adopted it) and so it is time now to allow that message to be taken up into a greater message of a “vision for America.”  Obama can say, as he did in Denver, “Enough!” to what has been wrong, but he must also then follow with a vision, like the vision of America as a “city on a hill,” as Ronald Regan once intoned.

Sarah Palin is competitive with this vision because she is being herself and has articulated a belief in God that appeals to many in America-and her candidacy makes a lot of regular people and people of faith hopeful.  Obama excels on both these points when people get out of his way and allow him to go where he naturally seems to go.  He does not need to concede any of this territory.

Theologian Christopher Morse has said that hope is not in what is possible, nor what is probable, but what is Promised.  This is the message of hope that Obama began with on the national stage and the one that is no longer front and center.  Hope is not something that should be secondary to policy talk-it is something that is at the heart of and part of the fabric of the American people, the American dream, and is a link between the unconscious and the consciousness of voters.  If you want to reach the hearts and minds of the American people, past the divisions and pettiness, with policies that can change the world, please remember to hope and to articulate its substance, and in transcending politics as usual, give us the chance to build the future.

And get the rest of those Republican votes in Ohio!

Heather Wise

MDiv Candidate, Union Theological Seminary, New York