Could Obama-mania Backlash Save Hillary?
By Colleen Carroll Campbell
Posted: Friday, February 22, 2008


ARTICLE
St. Louis Post-Dispatch  
Publication Date: February 21, 2008

Maybe Hillary is not so bad.

Sure, she's shrill. She's partisan. And she touts as her main presidential qualification the fact that she has been married to a president. Not exactly the ideal feminist biography for our first woman president.

But as Sen. Barack Obama accrues delegates and Obama-mania reaches fever pitch, I've realized that there is something I fear more than President Hillary. It's Messiah Barack.

Call me part of the "chorus of cynics," as Obama describes his critics, but I get uneasy when I see the fainting audience members who are a regular feature at Obama rallies. Or when I hear Michelle Obama say that "for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country" when discussing her husband's success and the clamor for change among his supporters. Or when I watch the "Yes We Can" video on YouTube that features young Hollywood stars reverently reciting Obama's vacuous stump speech as if intoning a prayer, while black-and-white images of Obama not-so-subtly evoke comparisons to John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

Obama is no longer a candidate. He is the Secular Savior.

His vague but stirring speeches about "hope" and "change" have made Obama the blank slate upon which millions of Americans project their dreams of peace, harmony and heaven on earth. In preaching a postmodern version of the secular liberal gospel, Obama assures audiences that our thorniest policy disputes and moral debates are mere squabbles fueled by ill-tempered troublemakers. We can resolve them if only we unite -- under, of course, the banner of Obama '08.

As a member of the younger generation that reportedly swoons over Obama, I understand the attraction. The young senator's biography makes him a potential bridge across America's racial and generational divides. His calls to transcend partisanship charm young voters soured on Beltway bickering. And the prospect of a president who will make our divisions disappear is alluring -- even though, as "uniter-not-divider" George W. Bush can testify, that's easier said than done.

The fact is that America is divided not because partisans and pundits stoke our disagreements, although they often do. We are divided because we are a nation of 300 million citizens struggling to order our lives together amid unprecedented pluralism. We hold some starkly divergent views about how to interpret America's founding ideals and apply them to contemporary issues. Those conflicting views generate divisions.

We can heal some divisions with more civility and compromise. But our most fundamental debates about the worth of human life, meaning of marriage, role of government and source of our shared values cannot be resolved by splitting the difference.

Although our postmodern minds might recoil from such categories as true and false and right and wrong, the first rule of rational discourse -- that is, the law of non-contradiction -- reminds us that some things really are that simple. A self-governing nation must make choices. Not every dispute can end in a draw.

Even Obama, prophet of the mythical Third Way, knows this. As a senator, he has hewed to Democratic Party orthodoxy on everything from partial-birth abortion to judges to tax cuts. His votes were so consistently left-leaning that the non-partisan National Journal named him America's most liberal senator in 2007. Obama does not tout this on the trail. Such predictability would deflate his adoring fans. They want an enigmatic redeemer, not another clay-footed, party-line politician.

Which explains why Hillary -- congenitally partisan, heavy-on-the-details Hillary -- is struggling to survive. And why she's getting belated, grudging support from an unlikely source: Americans who think that the only thing worse than big government is big government with a messianic mandate.

-- Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television host and St. Louis-based fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is www.colleen-campbell.com.