Gary Dorrien, the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, knows his Niebuhr as thoroughly as anyone alive, and yesterday he gave a talk here at Trinity--where he gives a weekly seminar--on his latest book, The Obama Question, which makes a powerful case that Barack Obama is a Niebuhrian progressive who doesn't deserve all the flak he's got from liberals. The particular object of Dorrien's argument is his friend and new colleague Cornel West, who campaigned hard for Obama in 2008 but ended up feeling betrayed politically and personally. Last year, West bitterly vouchsafed to Truthdig's Chris Hedges that Obama was "a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it."
As staunch a liberal--and regular Obama critic--as he is, Dorrien considered such accusations profoundly unwarranted, so he put aside his manuscript on post-Kantian theology and wrote his defense. While it has to be read for itself, here's a taste of what it has to say on the president's foreign policy.
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