Gary Hart Preaches
The prophetic voice of the moment comes from… Gary Hart? Who wouldda thunk? And yet here he is, talking some serious God and history on the op-ed page of the NYT, no less. “To participate in a discussion of ‘faith’ one must qualify oneself,” and he goes on to do just that with a specifity that should shame all those — Bush and Kerry alike — who use the term “faith” to signal something as deep as a kiddie pool. “Declarations of ‘faith,'” writes Hart, a man who — did you know? — has spent a good deal of his life considering them — “are abstractions that permit both voters and candidates to fill in the blanks with their own religious beliefs.” At last — if this wisdom isn’t common ground, we don’t know what is.