harikari.com

During the drive in to work this morning I listened to a story on NPR about how polls in rural Lincoln County Missouri show that the presidential race there is a toss-up.  NPR reported that the outcome of the Lincoln County vote has mirrored the national vote in the past twelve presidential elections. 

The reporter interviewed several voters for the story, but the two that really got my attention were Thomas Burkemper, a lawyer in the Lincoln County seat of Troy and chairman of the county’s Democratic Central Committee; and Carol Wessel, a real estate agent who serves as chairwoman of the Lincoln County Republican Central Committee.

“Locally, people were afraid to run as a Republican. But nationally they would vote Republican,” says Carol Wessel. …  “They would come up to me and say, ‘Carol, I’m really a Republican. But … because I want this position, I’ve got to run as a Democrat.’”

Wessel says local Democrats and Republicans share strong conservative beliefs opposing abortion, gay marriage and gun control.  They also share values based on religion.  They’re Catholics and Baptists, and they go to church.

And the newcomers “increased substantially the church attendance,” according to Burkemper, who asks and answers this question:

“How hard will the churches come out and swear that we either vote for McCain or go to hell? I don’t think that the churches are going to cut the same swath in this election as they did in 2004 and 2000.  Because the people are hurting. … The people are angry about the economy.”

…

Wessel has confronted conservatives who cite the economy when they tell her they won’t vote for Republican John McCain.

“I tell them ‘I’m a Christian first,’” Wessel recalls. ” ‘And if you vote your true Christian values and vote for the candidate that you think is ethically right and has the [right] values, that will take care of the economy.”

Aren’t these conservative Christians the same people that voted for George W. Bush because he professes to be a born-again Christian and supposedly shares their values?  Hasn’t the Bush Administration been in charge for the past eight years?  Aren’t we now facing the worst financial crisis since The Great Depression?  Does Carol Wessel even hear herself when she speaks? 

Howard Berkes, the NPR correspondent, didn’t bother to ask her these questions or if she shared some of the same values of Barack Obama, also a Christian.

I’ve never met President Bush and I hope I never do, so I can’t judge if he is sincere about his religious beliefs.  All I can go by is what he says and how he governs, and he governs like a man with the morals of a laughing hyena.

He pushed through tax cuts for his extremely wealthy base.  He started an unnecessary war and lied about why he started it.  He hasn’t raised one tax to pay for the trillion dollars it has cost so far.  He authorized the use of torture.  He suspended habeus corpus for anyone he used his unitary executive power to label an “enemy combatant,” and he authorized secret renditions of innocent people to foreign countries where they were secretly tortured.

This is a man who shares the values of conservative Christians in Lincoln County?  I don’t really think so, so I hope they vote their economic interests this time, because their morality based votes haven’t worked out so well for them.

Oh, and shortly after hearing that story, I read today’s Progress Report that was centered on the story of Joe the Plumber.  The article reports on how the Right jumped on the story to promote the myth that average people do better under Republican economic policies than Democratic policies.  The article then points out:

President Bill Clinton decided early in his term in office that expanding the middle class — not tax cuts for the rich — would be the engine of economic growth, while his successor, President George W. Bush, argued the opposite. But the as the results have shown, a progressive tax policy enacted by President Clinton achieved far superior results for the economy. By the end of Clinton’s second term, unemployment stood at very low 3.9 percent while today it has risen over 6 percent. The poverty rate was lower in 2000 than it is today. The median household income (adjusted for inflation) was over $3,000 higher eight years ago. Bush inherited a $237 billion federal budget surplus, which he has turned into a $482 billion deficit (and growing fast).