Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Religion and politics in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign (2nd nomination)


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   no consensus. Any discussion about renaming the article can take place at the talkpage. Black Kite (t) (c) 19:12, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Religion and politics in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign
AfDs for this article: 
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This page's reason for existence is faulty beyond repair. Contrary to what the existence of this article implies, religion was not a significant factor in the 2008 presidential race. Many other factors were much more important, such as youth vs. age, change vs. establishment, gender, media coverage, and biographical life stories, just to name five, and none of those have dedicated articles like this. The article consists of mostly obscure episodes that had little to do with religion per se, but instead follow the time-honored campaign tactic of attacking someone, loosely associated with a candidate, who has said outrageous things. This article was almost deleted during the campaign itself, and the intervening years have made clear that it should have been: None of the book-length accounts since published about the election (Game Change, Notes from the Cracked Ceiling, The Battle for America, "A Long Time Coming" ...) have talked about religion as a factor. Wasted Time R (talk) 02:17, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Rename to Religious controversies in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign since that is what the article is about. On the other hand if deleted not much would be lost. Borock (talk) 05:49, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep.
 * There are 34 sources in the article, versus one person who says religion wasn't a factor. Thought experiment: if you take 10 random Americans, wouldn't at least one of them say that he voted against Mitt Romney because of negative associations regarding the Mormon religion?  And probably three of them would start ranting on about Jeremiah Wright if you got them started.  (That is, if they're not still denouncing Obama as a Muslim...)
 * An article doesn't need a "reason for existence". It just needs to be verifiable, NPOV, etc.  No one can tell an editor that he needs to write another "more important" article first before he can write the article he is interested in.  If religion were truly less important than youth vs. age, etc., why weren't those articles created?
 * The initial deletion was part of a political controversy - some people were going on and on about Obama and Wright, so some others started documenting all the loopy religious connections of the Republicans. The right way to deal with such a controversy, what we chose, was to document all points of view in detail.  The wrong way is to delete all points of view.  Please do not delete an article for solely political reasons. Wnt (talk) 15:19, 15 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Strong keep per Wnt and prior discussion. Note the prior was about a different article, one that was largely fixed during the AFD, including neutral titling and balance for all key candidates (though nobody would mind a little Ron Paul content, would they?). Further, the article developed because of general consensus that controversial associations are notable but often deprecated from bio articles, so it would be of course inappropriate, having shunted them here, to delete them in a later AFD. Further, with thanks to Wasted for notifying WP:08, the nom is not a deletion argument. The idea that religion was not a major factor is wholly unrelated to the question of whether significant independent coverage of religion and politics in the campaign exists. We might as well argue that change you can Xerox or lipstick on a pig were not major factors, and cite whole books that omit these incidents, arguing from their silence. Rename is fine. JJB 17:20, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep per the arguments of Wnt & JJB, and Rename, per Borock. Article is reliably & extensively sourced, and "Religious controversies in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign" would be a more apt title.--JayJasper (talk) 18:26, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep, looks like a little revisionism on Wasted Time's part. Religion actually was a major theme of the election, if we remember correctly. I also support the rename proposal.--William S. Saturn (talk) 19:36, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Religion-related deletion discussions.  -- Jclemens-public (talk) 19:41, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politics-related deletion discussions.  -- Jclemens-public (talk) 19:41, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Strong oppose to renaming. I'll concede the deletion attempt; it's clear others are seeing this differently than I do, and I didn't make my case very well.  But renaming it to explicitly be a controversies list would be a mistake.  Contrary to what JJB says, during 2008 we did not shunt controversies out of BLPs and into separate articles.  In fact we did exactly the reverse:  we tore down all the "Controversies of Person X" articles and sections and merged the non-trivial material back into the BLPs and campaign articles in the proper chronological places.  See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject United States presidential elections/Archive 1 to see for yourself.  The reason for this is that controversies lists are a bad idea as they are invariably devoid of context, devoid of analysis, and devoid of indications of importance.  If this article under consideration is to have any value, it needs to add those things, and thus live up to its current title.  In particular, it needs to demonstrate that Romney lost 10% of the vote due to being Mormon, as claimed above.  It needs to demonstrate that Obama annoyed 30% of the electorate due to Jeremiah Wright, as claimed above.  It needs to state whether the Coe association cost Hillary anything (led to her 11 straight defeats in February 2008, dooming her in the delegate count?), whether the Placa association harmed Giuliani (that wait-till-Florida strategy would have worked out fine if it hadn't been for this?), and whether the McCain associations are why he couldn't catch Obama in the general.  It needs to state whether the lack of criticism during the campaign of Huckabee's association with the son of the father who once wrote a book and who knew Gerald Ford and Jack Kemp decades ago (jeez, how many WP:COATRACKs can there be? did any of you actually read the Huckabee entry? all from one, count it one, opinion source in the Huffington Post? you really think this is legitimate?) caused voters to go back in time and not vote for him. Most importantly, it needs to demonstrate that religion was a major theme of the election, as claimed above.   Because as the article looks right now, there's no clue as to what effect any of these controversies had.  There's no discussion of the positive effects of religion had on the campaigns of Huckabee and Obama, to name two.  It's just a list of random controverso-factoids from the campaign, loosely clumped together because they all involve religion or religious figures.  It's really poor history.  Wasted Time R (talk) 04:14, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree that the article shouldn't be renamed, at least not as a consequence of an AfD discussion. A rose by any other name and so on - it's just not the right process for it.  I wouldn't see it as a big deal if someone did rename the article, but putting "controversies" in the name would probably be a step backward.  I think Wasted Time misreads the section about Francis Schaeffer - the point was that Huckabee himself called his book "one of his favorite books".  Probably the "Jack Kemp" clause could be better summarized and transferred to Schaeffer's article, but the point that Schaeffer had long been closely involved with Republican leadership should not be lost. Wnt (talk) 14:58, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
 * The article itself says that Huckabee's association with Schaeffer was never raised in the campaign. So why is it here?  Put it in the Mike Huckabee article if it's so important.  Of course the source for this is an opinion piece at an opinion website written by his long-estranged son, hardly objective in any sense.  In reality, this material was just added here some editor seeking to bludgeon Huckabee with the guilt-by-association game, just like most of the other entries are guilt-by-association.  In reality, it doesn't belong in any article related to Huckabee.  Wasted Time R (talk) 04:36, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
 * It wasn't raised in the primary campaign but was raised as a counter-argument to the Jeremiah Wright complaints in the general election. Wnt (talk) 15:31, 17 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Delete per Wasted Time R's reasoning above. Also this is really a bad article which is put together of bits and pieces without an assertion that the central theme is notable. It also has problems with WP:Neutral point of view being written by people who were mainly interested in influencing the election (I say with some danger of getting into trouble with WP:Assume good faith but also with confidence that I am correct.)Steve Dufour (talk) 14:31, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
 * If you believe that there are viewpoints not covered by the article, by all means, please add them. Provided that editors behave in an inclusionist way and add information, a mix of partisan editors can readily produce a neutral article.  Note that the problem with your complaint about the editors in general is that it suggests no means of remediation whereby a better article could be made. Wnt (talk) 14:49, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I disagree that the way to write an article is to collect different "viewpoints" and put them together. That sounds more like a debate. Maybe: "Which candidate had more unusual religious friends and supporters?" Steve Dufour (talk) 15:14, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
 * This article has a tangled history. It was created looking like this by a later-banned sock, as a blatant attempt to deflect attention from Obama–Wright onto other supposed religious controversies involving the other candidates.  Stuff like the Huckabee material I'm complaining about above was in there from the beginning, in even larger amounts.  A subsequent editor took it out of the Obama defense context, trimmed it a bit, and made it a Huckabee entry, I guess as part of the "balance for all key candidates" that someone talks about above.  The same was done to the other entries; for instance the Romney text written by the sock (which is a rather poor description of Romney's so-called 'Mormon problem') has survived unchanged to this day.  But junk is still junk, and a much better course of action would have been to send it all to /dev/null.  Wasted Time R (talk) 04:49, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
 * If junk is the best Wikipedia has on a topic, we print junk. Every article starts somewhere.  But in this case the article is not junk, but incorporates many useful sources about political controversies.  It's not up to you to decide that certain political arguments people used during an election were stupid, nor to exclude sources about a political controversy because they are too partisan.  This article, such as we have it, is as good a description of the various arguments and counter-arguments about religion as I've seen in one place, and I can't get over the feeling that it's being proposed for deletion not because of its failings but because of its insights. Wnt (talk) 15:36, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I say, if junk is the best we have to offer on a topic, we print nothing at all. I put this up for AfD because I don't think it offers any insights at all and is poor history.  Wasted Time R (talk) 16:53, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.