In a NY Times op-ed today, William Kristol decides that John McCain came out on top in this weekend’s Saddleback Forum, moderated by Rick Warren. Obama’s responses, he claims, were too general and metaphorical compared to McCain’s crisp and colorful statements (nevermind that McCain might have heard the questions beforehand).
The question that Kristol details specifically is this: “Does evil exist?”
As I heard a humorist wonder on NPR this afternoon, are we electing a president here, or a superhero?
Kristol praises McCain for responding immediately with one specific example of evil: “radical Islamic extremism.” And, embodying the forces of good, McCain is ready to don his cape:
[I]f I’m president of the United States, my friends, if I have to follow him to the gates of hell, I will get bin Laden and bring him to justice. . . . My friends, we must face this challenge. We can face this challenge. And we must totally defeat it, and we’re in a long struggle.
Obama, meanwhile, sees evil more broadly: in Darfur, sure, but also here our own city streets, or in abusive parents. I’m interpreting here, but I think he is talking about a more personal evil, an evil within all of us–not some dark comic book force but something much more real: evil as a dark underside of human nature. This, of course, is not an evil you can chase down and defeat:
I strongly believe is that, now, we are not going to, as individuals, be able to erase evil from the world. That is God’s task, but we can be soldiers in that process, and we can confront it when we see it.
These responses, according to Kristol, reveal two different “worldviews.” I agree. But what’s so great about a worldview that sees a complex world in shades of white and black, an America that embodies good and an enemy that is nothing but evil?
Even The Dark Knight had a more nuanced morality than that.
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