Preaching Against the Choir

Justin Frank's blog post on The Huffington Post this morning was one of the better moves in what has become the WWE Friday Night Smackdown! approach to political debate. Those moves are all there in his first two paragraphs:

Senator Clinton is not preaching to the choir, celestial or not. Her attempt Sunday to mock Senator Obama was not only ineffective; it was profoundly unpresidential. I doubt that her pseudo prayer meeting hurt Obama, certainly not the way President Bush's mocking antics hurt those who voted for, and those in the media who cheered, his invasion of Iraq. The video in which he laughingly pretended to look for WMDs under his desk degraded our own American soldiers who are sacrificing their lives and souls overseas. In pretending to laugh at himself he was really dismissing the devastation caused by his lies.

When Senator Clinton said the "celestial choirs will be singing" she did more than make fun of Obama's optimistic rhetoric; she mocked the millions of Americans who experience Obama as a fresh and compelling leader. She essentially said that Obama supporters are dupes who are stupidly taken in by what she feels is his magical approach to genuine political conflict. She is really mocking herself - the candidate with 'experience' duped by President Bush into rubber-stamping his war.

However, as is almost always the case, there is a "story behind the story" that Frank chose to tell. Hillary Clinton has run afoul of a truth that "men prefer not to hear," as Herbert Agar put it. That truth is our proclivity for messianic thinking. Even if we dispense with the celestial metaphors, we are still addicted to a "Secular Messianism," which assumes that any problem can be solved by the right person on a white horse riding to our rescue. Yes, when you are running for office, it does no good to call your audience dupes; but we cannot escape the problem that messianic thinking is fundamentally infantile in nature, since it presumes that all problems will be solved by some "higher-level adult" rather than our own commitment to effort. The JFK inaugural address was based on inspiring us all to such commitment. The fact that Clinton cannot do the same may be her greatest weakness as a candidate.