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Two reactions to the rally in Washington, DC over the weekend — Arianna Huffington writes today on Glenn Beck, diagnosing his call for religious renewal and civic honor as filling a void left by Obama’s failure to match his rhetoric:
As a senator, Barack Obama spoke eloquently of Americans deciding that “their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness, is not enough.” But the hunger for a larger purpose in public life remains unfulfilled. And the big turnout at Glenn Beck’s rally on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is more evidence of this unmet yearning. Beck delivered a speech noticeably devoid of partisan rhetoric — talking instead about values and morals and God and the power of individuals to change the world. In 2006, Obama warned that if progressives didn’t “reach out to evangelical Christians and other religious Americans and tell them what we stand for,” others would “fill the vacuum.” In 2010, the president’s stepping back from his promise to call us to a higher form of civic engagement means that a vacuum has been left during this historic moment of transition in America.
And over at RealClearWorld, I write on how Beck could alter the right’s views on foreign policy:
Beck won’t determine the direction on any of these matters, mostly because it doesn’t play to his strengths in front of the audience, and because he’s smart enough to know that. This is a policy debate that will play out over the course of the next two years, with the various potential 2012 Republican candidates as proxies for factions within the Tea Party and the right as a whole.
The Tea Party movement will have an impact in the short-term. The nature of that impact? Wait and see.
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