This post was first published ten years ago (without the photograph).
Ukrainian soldiers at rest New York Times Getty Images
Each Sunday on the way to church I listen to an NPR program called “On Being.” This program used to focus on religion but it has expanded to include philosophy and science. Today there was a conversation between the host, Krista Tippet, and two people, a Palestinian man and an Israeli woman, who are part of a peace movement aimed at personal reconciliation. Both lost a loved one in the continuous fighting in the Holy Land, but they have become friends and co-workers in the daunting field of reconciliation.
I had thought that Jesus said in the Beatitudes (Matthew chapter 5) “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall find peace.” However, when I looked it up I found that what he said was, “Blessed be the peacemakers, for they shall be called the ‘children of God.'” So no promise of peace. As I listened I thought about how difficult and hopeless the road these two were walking down. Think of this century and the last one, and how nations rush off to war without considering the cost. At the time everything — nation, pride, revenge, justice, honor, glory — all seem more important than the cost, and perhaps there are conflicts where this is true. But the cost is so much greater than we expect.
I have been reading about Lincoln and the great Civil War that punished this nation. Lincoln was not a believer in an evangelical sense, but he read deeply in the Bible and believed in a God who balanced the scales. Thus he could say of the North and the South in his second inaugural:
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
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With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
So, in this most terrible of wars, one that pitted brother against brother, one that spilled more American blood than any other, one, that I believe, was rooted in justice, and one which took more than a hundred years to fully end, peace was worth less than other things men valued. So blessed be the peacemakers, who may never find peace, but are called the children of God.
Since the election there has been non-stop bloviation as to why Mitt Romney lost. The real question is “Why did Obama win?”. There are many levels to the answer. There is the micro-level. Obama won because he had a better “ground game.” The Obama campaign was much more effective in getting his supporters to the poll, especially considering that there seemed to be a lot less enthusiasm than there was in 2008. The meso-level explanation is that Obama won because he captured those groups which were demographically ascendant — minorities, women, young people. But there is a macro-level as well — the level reflected in all the political science and economic models which were able to predict an Obama victory in the late summer, models dependent on only two or three variables. One of these variables, the rate of GDP growth in the third quarter of 2012 was largely out of the President’s control. Perhaps the most important variable over which he had some control was his approval rating. Despite presiding over the worst post-World War II recession of all time, despite engendering an almost maniacal enmity in those who opposed him, despite stagnating real incomes for those who had jobs, and declining prospects for most American families, despite being an African American (or maybe because he was an African-American), the president’s job approval rating topped 50% by the time Americans started paying attention to the election.
There’s a long list of reasons why Mitt Romney lost: people didn’t like him, conservatives mistrusted him, he was forced by a difficult nomination process to shift to the right and then to the left, the nomination process itself cost him months of energy and effort, Super Storm Sandy, the Democrat’s ground game, the 47% video, his unfortunate suggestion that illegal aliens self-deport themselves, etc. But the real reason the President won despite the fact that under his watch the economy was a shambles, was that people had come to believe that he was not responsible for the economy’s woes, and that he was a good guy, a guy who “gets” them, and it was better to let him try to finish the job then to turn the Presidency over to someone whom they didn’t trust and who didn’t trust them. Mitt Romney didn’t lose the election; Barack Obama won it.
An economist without guile 