The Joshua Generation

A source close to the Obama campaign tells The Brody File the following:

"The Joshua Generation project will be the Obama campaign's outreach to young people of faith. There's unprecedented energy and excitement for Obama among young evangelicals and Catholics. The Joshua Generation project will tap into that excitement and provide young people of faith opportunities to stand up for their values and move the campaign forward."

The Brody File said awhile back that the Obama campaign would be making a concerted effort to attrack Evangelicals and Catholics to their campaign.

Yes, the Obama campaign understands that the issue of abortion is a problem for some voters of faith. They respect that and understand if some just simply can't come on board because of that. However, they look at this project as a way of broadening the values discussion. Poverty, Darfur, Climate Change and yes, even the war are issues younger Evangelicals may be able to see eye to eye on with the Obama campaign.

Whatever you think of the "Joshua Generation Project," you have to give the campaign their due because they are making concerted efforts to NOT ignore faith voters. In my reporting, I can tell you this is not a contrived effort.

The folks behind this believe in not only the mission of winning over faith voters to Obama but the larger mission of not ignoring faith voters when it comes to politics.

Obama spoke about the "Joshua Generation" in a speech he gave in Selma, Alabama in March of 2007. It will give you an good idea of where the Obama campaign is heading with this effort....

Barack Obama: The winner

I wonder if Americans have yet fully absorbed what they have just done. This past week - 41 years after the Supreme Court struck down the last bans on interracial marriage and only 40 years after black America exploded in riots after Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated - a black man became the favourite to be the next president of the United States.

His convention acceptance speech, a date scheduled long before Barack Obama became the Democratic nominee, will occur by exquisite timing 45 years to the day after King’s “I have a dream” speech. The states that were critical to his nomination were Illinois, Lincoln’s home state, and the four southern states most associated with slavery: South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina.

Much has been made, and rightly so, of how Obama’s rise changes America’s relationship to the rest of the world. What has been less appreciated is how deeply Obama’s victory alters America’s relationship to itself.

There is no deeper division in America than race. Slavery was America’s original sin. Even after its abolition, America was effectively in large swathes an apartheid society until the 1970s. It was race that bloodily tore the country apart a century and a half ago in the civil war, killing nearly 2% of the population (only 0.3% of Americans died in the second world war). It was race that convulsed America in the last deep internal crisis in the 1960s. And last Tuesday night, Obama’s first words were a tribute to his grandmother, a white woman who had effectively raised him.

Obama is not just potentially America’s first black president. He would be America’s first bi-racial president, in many ways a more integrative event. The cynics demand that we cease this kind of historical hyper-ventilation. It is deemed a function of drinking the Obama Kool-Aid, of insufficient scepticism, of Obamania.

But you have to have a heart of stone not to see what this has already done to race relations in America. Finish the reading after the Bounce 2 Times Online

Bipartisanship and Obama

The notion that Barack Obama has no bipartisan achievements in the Congress is untrue and unfair, as Hilzoy has definitively demonstrated. Senators Lugar and Obama witness the process of munitions elimination at the Donetsk State Chemical Product Plant(2006).