An Open Letter to Sarah Palin

October 13th, 2008

Dear Mrs. Palin,

The Gospels tell the story of a man who reached out to the com­mon peo­ple of his time. Instead of appeal­ing to their fears, he appealed to their hopes, their mercy, and their sense of jus­tice. His pur­pose was not to divide them, to goad them into see­ing one another as ene­mies. Instead, he attempted to unite them, so that they could all pur­sue a com­mon good.

Jesus Christ was a grass roots com­mu­nity orga­nizer before the term was invented. He and his fol­low­ers were drawn together by faith — his faith in them and theirs in him.

But as Jesus stub­bornly and unflinch­ingly pointed out the cor­rup­tion of the old sys­tem to any­one who would lis­ten, he began to anger the rul­ing elite. Every­one knows the story. He was turned over to the author­i­ties by one of his own dis­ci­ples and sen­tenced to death for sedi­tion. When given a final chance to avoid the death of God’s only son, the masses, incited by their reli­gious lead­ers, cried, “Kill him!” Sound familiar?

Now, I am not sug­gest­ing that Barack Obama is Jesus Christ. Beyond the lack of any solid evi­dence that Jesus indeed existed and that the “eye wit­ness” accounts of his life were accu­rate, the char­ac­ter of Jesus rep­re­sents an integrity that no mor­tal being could ever pre­sume to pos­sess. As with the myths of every cul­ture, the real­ity of the Gospels is not found by his­tor­i­cal fact check­ing. It is found within. Jesus Christ rep­re­sents an ideal that, on some level, we all strive towards. If that wasn’t the case, the story would never have been so compelling.

But this story also points out a darker real­ity: we are apt to do what­ever is nec­es­sary to keep our beliefs intact, even if that means destroy­ing some­thing good. And the story of Jesus’ cru­ci­fix­ion, if any­thing, should be a warn­ing against going down that road.

I know it might be more fun to look for “evi­dence” that debunks evo­lu­tion, to weave coin­ci­den­tal streams of prophecy with ran­dom verses, to quote pas­sages as “proof” that God hates homo­sex­u­als and is against abor­tion, or to pre­tend that The Book of Rev­e­la­tion was more than the rav­ings of a mad man. But to those of us on the out­side, such expres­sions of belief sug­gest that the life and death of Jesus, fic­tional or not, mean very lit­tle to you.

Mrs. Palin, you know that your state­ments about Barack Obama’s asso­ci­a­tion with Bill Ayers have noth­ing to do with mean­ing­ful debate. At their source is a cyn­i­cism that has almost com­pletely cor­rupted your party. You must believe that if you can fill your sup­port­ers’ minds with fear and hate, they will remain bliss­fully igno­rant of any of your own fail­ings — or those of John McCain. And I have to admit that after see­ing some of the videos float­ing around of your sup­port­ers, your tac­tics seem to be work­ing. The rest of us might look on in hor­ror, won­der­ing how any­one could let their minds be so lazy as to not do the sim­ple math in cal­cu­lat­ing Obama’s age (eight years old) at the time the Weather Under­ground was active. We might be flab­ber­gasted as to why your most vicious sup­port­ers can’t seem to under­stand that by your stan­dards of “palling around with ter­ror­ists”, you indict most of your fel­low Repub­li­cans — your­self and your hus­band included. But it seems to be work­ing at your rallies.

Here’s the thing. You’re most likely going to lose this elec­tion. And you know that this is what should hap­pen to any­one who has a plat­form that is incon­sis­tent with real­ity and who has run a cam­paign lack­ing sub­stance and tact, such as the one you’re run­ning. The prob­lem is, you’re ril­ing up a bunch of really stu­pid peo­ple right now. The ones who are mak­ing the “Obama Bin Lyin” signs and the “Barack Hus­sein Obama” ref­er­ences and who yell “Ter­ror­ist!” and “Kill him!” at your ral­lies are peo­ple who need to be han­dled very care­fully. These are the kind of blind patri­ots who per­pe­trated the atroc­i­ties at Abu Ghraib — and Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001 was a bless­ing to them because it gave them a small cor­ner of real­ity to pin all their vicious intol­er­ance to.

I don’t fear that your tac­tics will work before elec­tion day. I fear that they will work after.

I think your run­ning mate has since rec­og­nized the dan­ger­ous pos­si­bil­ity that one of his sup­port­ers might vote with a bul­let. John McCain may be out of touch and let­ting his ambi­tions get the bet­ter of him, but he still has a con­science. He also knows that it is within his power to pro­voke or dis­cour­age such behavior.

To change course now — to waiver and rebuke his own sup­port­ers for mak­ing spu­ri­ous asso­ci­a­tions about Barack Obama’s mid­dle name, his Mus­lim father (as if that faith is any worse or any bet­ter than yours), or work­ing on a char­ity board with a reformed for­mer mil­i­tant — might be to pre­cip­i­tate the final nail in the cof­fin of John McCain’s pres­i­den­tial race. But it is the clos­est he’s come in the last few months to that sto­ry­book char­ac­ter in a POW camp in Viet­nam who wouldn’t leave until his fel­low pris­on­ers were released. It is doing what he said he would do — putting coun­try before party. And I would even say it’s heroic — if you weren’t doing his dirty work for him.

I don’t know if it is truly what John McCain wants, or if you are being pushed to be his attack dog by the Repub­li­can party, but now is your chance to be a true mav­er­ick. With less than a month to go until the elec­tion, you can use your voice at your ral­lies to pre­pare your sup­port­ers for what you have been teach­ing them to hate and fear: Pres­i­dent Obama. You can use that hockey mom, small town style to admit that you got caught up in some­thing you really weren’t pre­pared for, said a few things you regret­ted, and now want to set the record straight. Because of your roots, you have a cer­tain charisma that appeals to the Amer­i­can psy­che. Stop let­ting it be used by the Repub­li­can party to wage a not only dirty, but dan­ger­ous, last few days of an elec­tion cam­paign. If you and John McCain spend even a few moments of every speech repair­ing the dam­age that has been done, you will still lose the elec­tion, but you will lose it with dig­nity. And I can’t imag­ine a sin­gle, decent Amer­i­can who wouldn’t respect you for that.

I don’t ques­tion that any can­di­date in this elec­tion is not doing what he or she thinks is right — only, at times, his or her wis­dom. I hope you will come around before it’s too late. I look for­ward to see­ing Amer­ica turn once again into that shin­ing exam­ple of free­dom that it used to be.

Yours sin­cerely,

David Scott