L’il Bro Kinda Likes Brownback

My L’il Bro Thom sent me this interesting piece in the WaPo about Sen. Sam Brownback with these observations: I kinda like this guy, he bears watching. He sounds kind of Deacon-y to me. Seems promising.”

As you know, L’il Bro Thom is rather left of center, so I was a little surprised to see him liking Brownback, but then again, Thom is very faithful, so perhaps I should not be surprised.

From the article:

Everything has its season, and now is the time when presidential aspirants sprout like stalks of tall Kansas wheat. Brownback thinks 2008 might be his moment, though in interviews he emphasizes his humility. He calls himself a “flawed man,” and says the longer he pursues his faith, the more he finds his own sin. It seems contradictory — all that ego and all that modesty.

“I could be the right person with the right message at the right moment. And I could be completely wrong and I’ll still be happy about it,” he says, sounding way too mellow for a wannabe president.

In the meantime, amid the fundraising and the visits to Iowa and New Hampshire, Brownback is focused on spreading light when he enters a room. He has said he tries to see Jesus in his fellow senators.

Three years ago he gave a speech at the Archdiocese of Denver. He spoke of the need to “convert the culture” by spreading God’s love. He posed a question: “When we walk up to the McDonald’s counter, what if we looked at that person in the eye . . . and we said, ‘God bless you for that Big Mac?!’ ”

Then Brownback quoted Burt Bacharach.

“What the world needs now,” the senator said, “is love, sweet love.”

I – being much more cynical than Thom – can see all sorts of problems with a Brownback candidacy. He was brought into Catholicism via Sen. Rick Santorum and Rev. John McCloskey, so there is a very, very vague Opus Dei connection that some will want to go nuts over. Then there is the fact that Brownback is now Catholic. A year ago, looking at the many ways Catholics and Evangelicals have come together, I would not have considered a Catholic presidential candidacy problematic, but lately my email is running very hot re the illegal immigrants situation and I get a lot of “you Catholics just carry on about the humanity of these Mexicans because they mean asses in the seats and money in the collection plate, so you have an agenda, blah, blah, blah…” it usually descends into tiresome rants about our thousands of pederast priests and lesbian nuns, and then I have to shoot back an email asking the writer if they judge ALL soldiers by the actions of the few at Abu Ghraib. Like I said, tiresome. It shouldn’t be necessary these days to do that, but there you go.

Yes, Brownback does support the President’s immigration plan, so he’s actually in the majority, but the far-right folks who vote in primaries will not like that. They won’t much like his “love, sweet love” talk either, although I kinda do. I don’t know if the moderate Dems will like it, either, though.

Other Brownback weaknesses include his medical history. Melanoma is a particularly vicious cancer and John McCain is also going to have to deal with questions about his health and the possibility of that problem re-occuring.

More from the piece:

He invoked his adopted daughter recently during the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in Memphis, where potential ’08 candidates gathered to speechify.

“Tomorrow, because a woman in China saw that abortion was killing a child, Jenna Joy Brownback, my daughter, will have an eighth birthday party,” he told the crowd, prompting applause.

Brownback has a folksy, reassuring presence: He might be lamenting Roe v. Wade or he might be tucking you in and reading “The Berenstain Bears.” He grew up on a farm and uses agricultural analogies and words like “skedaddle.” He keeps a Mother Teresa quote about not judging people on the back door of his home in Topeka.

“So easy to judge people,” he says. “I see you coming in the hallway and my mind just automatically goes, ‘Okay, reporter, Washington Post, that’s a primarily liberal publication, be careful.’ Well, now I’ve automatically judged you. So I’ve spent my time judging you instead of thinking, ‘Oh, here’s a great person that I can interact with. I pray to love ’em.’ ”

Love, sweet love. Brownback examines his soul for hate and tries to excise any malignancies. Some years back, he says, he apologized to Hillary Clinton at a prayer breakfast for having despised her and her husband.

“I’m ashamed to say it but I did. And I felt — justified in my hate,” he says, his tone bitter, as if reliving an ancient betrayal. “I disagree politically but there is no call to hate. And it was wrong, it’s a sin, and I went to her and I apologized.”

He practices prayer when he finds himself in heated situations, as he did recently during a meeting on a constitutional amendment he supports, which would ban same-sex marriage. (Marriage, he says, is “a man and a woman bonded together for life and grandparents surrounding ’em.”)

“Instead of getting angry at somebody for opposing you on something, you’re just praying for them,” he says. “You just pray blessings on them, blessings on their family.”

[…]It would, in fact, be a grave error to characterize Brownback as squishy.

When he entered the House as part of the Republican sweep of 1994, Brownback argued for dismantling the departments of Commerce, Education, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development as part of an effort to downsize the federal government. Some years later he put forward the theory that part of the problem with the Social Security system was abortion, because too few children were growing up to become workers who could pay into the system.

During the 2004 Republican convention, Brownback told a closed-door rally, “We must win this culture war,” according to the New York Times. “I say we fight.”

“He has this kind of soft physical presence,” says Burdett Loomis, a political scientist at the University of Kansas. “I think Sam Brownback is a very tough customer.”

Hmmm…strongly pro-life and pro-family, against gay marriage, pro-small government. There is a lot to like, here. But…but… I doubt he’s ideologically pure enough for some on the right. He’s not willing to round up all those damned illegals, is he? And he – gasp – decided it was sinful to hate Hillary Clinton and apologized to her for his hate.

Well, then..he mustn’t be any good at all. Read the whole article and decide for yourself.

Reader JJ sent in a few links to another alternative, that being Mike Huckabee. More here.