Its that heart thing!

Adam Frankl quit his graduate studies and went to work for the Kerry Campaign in 2004.  He writes of the lessons he learned in that campaign:
Back in the primaries, I was drawn to John Kerry for the same reason lots of other people were. I thought he was the electable candidate. He was a veteran, and that was important, I thought, during a wartime election. He was a moderate and that was important, I thought, for a centrist country. Howard Dean was true to his heart, and I admired him for it, but I still thought he just wasn't "electable." Well, the 2004 election proved that maybe I'm not as good at judging a candidate's electability as I thought I was.

In fact, if you go back a few years, some of our best presidents didn't seem all that electable when they were candidates. Not long before he became president, no one thought Bill Clinton was electable. When John F. Kennedy set out for the presidency, all the party leaders and influential democrats were against him. The lesson I learned is this: you should pay just as much attention to your heart as to your head when it comes to selecting a candidate.
This is the link to the other lessons he learned.

Mobilizing people to the kind of make change that Unitarian Universalists aspire to in our principles and purposes, in our hymns and poetry, and yes in our resolves at Assembly requires leaders with a vision, who can make passionate connection to the suffering that people are experiencing, and who can speak about those concerns with conviction.  The calculation that the United States is "a centrist country" and we must compromise our values if we are to be effective in politics is a statement that we don't have faith that our values are transformative, and constitute good news for a suffering world.  Wasn't it Tolstoy who responded to the objection that Christianity had failed, with the observation that it had never been tried.  And if we were arrested for being a Unitarian Universalist, would there be enough evidence to convict us?