HE'S NOT THEIR PRESIDENT, HE IS OURS:

Remember the Neediest! (Laura Miller, Jul 16, 2009, Newsweek)

Last week, as President Obama was announcing his pick for surgeon general—a Roman Catholic African-American and MacArthur "genius" award winner who has spent her career caring for the poor on Alabama's Gulf Coast—I was on the phone with the Princeton professor and public intellectual Cornel West. He was reiterating his complaint, which he had aired weeks earlier to Bill Moyers, that Obama is too much in the thrall of what he calls the "neoliberal elites" (by which he means primarily Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner) and, as such, his economic reforms have not gone far enough to help the poor. This is a disappointment to West, who campaigned avidly for the president. "The moment of euphoria is over," West told me. "We need intense pressure on [Obama]. Poor people are suffering. Working people are suffering."

One moment, two religious realities. During his campaign, Obama said he would set a new tone in the American conversation about values, and as he's governed he has artfully tapped religious leaders and believers of all persuasions to help him do that. He is nothing if not methodical and purposeful in this regard: his selection of Francis Collins, a geneticist who is also an evangelical Christian, to run the National Institutes of Health reflects an insistence that belief in God and in science are not mutually exclusive. His more recent choice of Regina Benjamin as surgeon general makes good on his pledge to support altruistic work on behalf of those the Bible calls "the least of these." In general, though, these moves appear designed—as did the selection of Rick Warren as inaugural invocator—to placate those on the right who continue to fear an insidious liberalism on the part of the president. At a recent meeting of Catholic reporters, the president addressed those fears. When asked whether he would protect health workers' rights not to perform abortions in a "conscience clause," he said he would. "I think that there have been some who keep on anticipating the worst from us, and it's not based on anything I've said or done, but is rather just a perception somehow that we have some hardline agenda that we're seeking to push."