Hope Is Not A “Cult of Personality”
SUSAN JACOBY Author and reporter
Apart from obligatory allusions to the God who has blessed America (mazel tov, Irving Berlin, your royalties are still rolling in) and a general tendency to be photographed making speeches in churches whenever possible, I do not think that faith has played a large and explicit role in the Democratic primary, which has now boiled down to a contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. That will probably change in the general election, because John McCain, in order to propitiate the angry Republican religious right, will probably have to start engaging in the politics of making the Democratic Party sound like the Party of Satan.
The Democrats will, no doubt, respond in kind by talking more about what Jesus would want us to do about health care. Personally, I think Jesus would want everyone to have health insurance, since he doesn’t seem to be in the business of reducing health care costs by performing large-scale miracles.
I would like to see the Democrats make an explicit issue out of George W. Bush’s appointments of right-wing religious extremists to the federal courts, but I’ll bet we’ll hear that when pigs fly. (Oh wait. Of course pigs can fly, if God wants them to.)
Apropos of Obama’s values, one of the quirkier and smarmier accusations leveled at him by the Clintons is that his ability to deliver an inspirational speech is somehow at odds with the ability to offer specific solutions to problems. It seems that it’s all right to talk about faith in political campaigns if you’re talking about faith in some supreme being (who is not running for the presidency) but it’s not all right to talk about faith in ourselves and in the future of our country, as Obama often does. The idea that there is some sort of natural antipathy between thought and action is a powerful one in the history of American anti-intellectualism, and Bill and Hillary have, with their characteristic instinct for the jugular, repackaged it in new form. Obama, it seems, is unsuitable for the presidency because he “talks too good.” He might even be–horrors!–an “elitist.”
Although being an inspirational orator does not guarantee greatness in a president, it is impossible to sell specific solutions to voters if you cannot first sell them hope. Franklin D. Roosevelt offered very few specific solutions for the Depression during the 1932 presidential campaign, but what he did offer was hope. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” is the classic example of a non-specific statement of hope that made specific solutions possible. [more]