There’s been a lot of writing about the “cult-like” nature of the support for Barack Obama.
I stumbled across this Washington Post blogger who writes exclusively for them about religion and the presidential campaign, and his observation that you could easily mistake Barack Obama for Mike Huckabee if you read the transcripts of his speeches without knowing which candidate it was. Here’s an example:
Admit it, Secular America. If Mike Huckabee had said something like this on the campaign trail you’d be locking and loading faster than you could hum John Lennon’s lyric “Imagine all the people, Living life in peace”:
“And during the course of that sermon, I was introduced to someone named Jesus Christ. I learned that my sins could be redeemed and that if I placed my trust in Christ, He could set me on the path to eternal life.”
And you’d probably be thinking again of applying for Canadian citizenship — just ‘fess up: you were scouting properties in northern Manitoba back around Thanksgiving 2004 — if the former governor of Arkansas declaimed:
“And whenever I hear stories about Americans who feel like no one’s looking out for them, like they’ve been left behind, I’m reminded that God has a plan for his people. . . . But it’s a plan He’s left to us to fulfill.”
But these are not Huck’s words. They were, in fact, pronounced by Sen. Barack Obama. He delivered these remarks this past Friday to about 150 Latino Evangelical and Catholic clerics at the University of Texas at Brownsville.
The blogger, Jacques Berlinerblau, makes the argument that liberal Democrats, in particular secular liberal Democrats, are giving Obama a free pass on this stuff because they’re a bit too caught up in the cult-of-personality that the Obama campaign has built. That secular Democrats are too intent on winning the prize than they are on supporting a candidate who represents the goal of a faith-blind, secular, progressive society. In his follow-up post a couple of days later, he even has a counter-argument for the inevitable comments that there is somehow some qualitative difference between a Republican playing the religion card and a Democrat doing the exact same thing, reminding said secular liberal Democrats about their enraged response whenever a Republican does it. And he has them dead to rights.
I have a couple of my own observations to add. First, the mini-scandal about the Obama advisor who told some Canadian politicians not to worry about Obama’s anti-NAFTA speeches because they were “just for the campaign” (my quotes) reveals a side of Obama that doesn’t get a lot of play in the fawning press coverage: that in many ways Barack Obama is just as calculated and just as facile as Hillary Clinton, willing to say one thing and do another to achieve his objective. Indeed, this particular quality is almost universal among politicians, and Obama is just better at hiding it than Clinton. So, it might be a reasonable assumption that he is just saying things that religious Democrats and moderate Republicans want to hear, and really isn’t a Jesus freak. Also, because the Republicans (and, to some extent, the Clinton campaign) have already started with the whispering campaigns about him secretly being Muslim, it seems to me that perhaps Obama is “preaching it up” to fight off that particular smear.
Next observation: even though Obama is half-African, he doesn’t identify squarely with the traditional African-American political experience. A lot of black politicians complain that Obama isn’t “black enough” to suit them or their constituencies. But his own constituency as an Illinois state senator was from a district in the South Side of Chicago, and there’s no doubt he learned from the traditional black politicians there how to play to the black voters by emulating the preachers. So it’s also reasonable to believe that this is less about courting middle-class white voters than it is about making sure the black voters are comfortable with him by presenting himself as the next in line after Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson, even though he’s really a buppie (or a bougie, as black urban professionals are sometimes called).
Thirdly: if this is all just for show, then you’d better watch out for this guy as yet another “Slick Willie”, able to turn the charm off and on as needed to get what he wants. If it isn’t for show, then you’d better watch out for this guy as “Huckobama”, as Berlinerblau calls him.
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