People of faith and hope are flexing their political muscle these days…and the nation is better for it. Wouldn’t you agree?
I am surprised, impressed, and pleased with what has been happening in the campaign of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee.
Now please don’t take this as an endorsement of Mr. Huckabee. It is not intended as that — and, in fact, to be truthful, I do not agree with many of his political positions. But that is not the point I hope to make here, and it is not the reason I am so pleased with what is happening at the ballot box.

I am pleased that Mike Huckabee is winning state after state, and is becoming a real force to be reckoned with in Republican politics, because it says something to me about People of Faith, and the powerful role that they can play (are are playing) in our political process.
Faith has an important part to play in politics. Perhaps the most important part. For if our politics is not a statement of what we believe in (about everything, including God), then what is it? As I said here yesterday (and have said before audiences all over America for years), a politics that is not based on our most sacred beliefs is bankrupt.
Read that, bankrupt.
That is, empty, worthless, without any coin or value.
I do not believe in a political process that about beauty contests. This should not be about personal popularity. This should be about individual convictions. This is not beauty, this is about beautiful ideas.
On the Democratic side, Senator Barack Obama talks a lot these days about “changing the mindset” that led this country into war in Iraq; “changing the mindset” that allows this nation to ask more, as a proportion of income, of its middle class than it does of its rich; “changing the mindset” that produces a national debt in the trillions while paying scarce attention to the challenges and problems of health care costs or global warming.
What Obama is talking about, of course, is changing the beliefs of Americans. Author of the book The Audacity of Hope, Obama wants voters to rise to the level of their highest thought, rather than what they think we can get away with, or reasonably accomplish, politically.
This is a refreshing energy shift in the political scene, the likes of which we haven’t observed since the stirring speeches of John F. Kennedy.
Mike Huckabee, likewise, is inviting voters all over America to vote their conscience and their beliefs, to rise to their highest idea, rather than accepting what they think is most practical or workable politically. In his view, the GOP is moving toward nominating a candidate not because he holds the highest ideas, but because he is said by some to have the best chance of winning in November. That would be, in Huckabee’s thinking, the entirely wrong reason to vote for anyone.
I agree. A vote for John McCain should be a vote for John McCain because one thinks he is the best person for the job, not because one thinks he is the person mostly likely to win.
Both Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama are underdogs in this presidential candidate nominating process. Yet both have unbroken spirits. As Huckabee said the other day, “I believe in miracles.” And as Obama said over the weekend, “I have to have hope. Look where I came from to be here.”
I like that. I like that attitude from both of these men. The two are miles apart politically and philosophically, but they are touch my heart with the power of their hope and faith.
I, for one, yearn for an American electorate that votes its beliefs, its hopes, and its conscience, not political practicality. Not its best idea of what will “work,” but its best idea of what is “right.”
Wouldn’t that be just wonderful?
Do you think it is possible?
We will know more when we see the results of today’s primary elections in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia.
next presidential election watch him