Obama and the Cult of Personality

Last updated on: August 26, 2008 at 11:24 am by Morning's Minion

Obama and the Cult of Personality 2008-08-26T11:24:41-05:00 Morning's Minion

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The right has latched onto the notion that Obama sees himself in messianic terms, and that his followers worship him as a cult leader. We see this kind of mockery all the time, even on the Catholic blogosphere. This tactic, however, is nothing other than a tried-and-trusted Rovian tactic of taking a public figure’s greatest strength (in this case, inspiring rhetoric) and turning it into a negative. It represents the inability to make one’s case on substantive policy grounds.

Those who claim to respect Christianity are the first to mock Obama with pseudo-Christian imagery. Again, this should not be a surprise– these are the same people who claim to honor military service and yet exactly four years ago paraded around a convention wearing purple-heart band aids to mock John Kerry’s war injuries. We need to recognize that this a mere political tactic. Republicans have not been able to hold their own in a policy debate since at least the mid-1990s and so need to tear into the character of their opponent, turning him into a figure of fun, destroying his credibility. In service of this goal, there is no attack that is too low, too vicious. This kind of politics is gravely sinful. And yet, sadly, many Catholic bloggers, who really should know better, are buying into this method of “defining” Obama(making inappropriate references to the second person of the Trinity in the process).

Of course, this line of attack is not grounded in reality. The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait has come out with a timely essay debunking the “Obama as messiah” storyline. He goes through the various quotes that are pulled out of context by the attack dogs, and shows that they have rather innocent meanings. He shows partisans like Charles Krauthammer arguing that Obama is saying the opposite of what he is really saying. But there’s something else going on, Chait notes, something deeper. Many Republicans feel perturbed because it is Republicans who are supposed to embrace the cult of character and personality, while Democrats are content to put forward a sequence of dry policy wonks that do not connect well with the public (Dukakis, Gore, Kerry). Here’s Chait:

“Now, it’s certainly true that some enthusiastic Obama fans have displayed unusual zeal for their candidate. Yet it was only a few years ago–before President Bush’s approval ratings tanked and conservatives decided that he wasn’t actually a conservative at all–that the right had its own personality cult. There was DC 9/11, the Stalinist-style propaganda film reimagining Bush as an action hero boldly defying the terrorists on September 11. National Review, which has published innumerable articles in recent weeks decrying Obama’s personality cult, was running advertisements for bronze busts depicting Bush in his “Mission Accomplished” fighter-pilot getup.

After September 11, James Merritt, then-president of the Southern Baptist Convention, told Bush that he had been chosen by God. Bush nodded. (Fred Barnes reported this encounter in The Weekly Standard, concluding, “The stage was set for Bush to be God’s agent of wrath.”) As Time reported, “Privately, Bush even talked of being chosen by the grace of God to lead at that moment.” Claiming you’ve been chosen by God to lead the world in a titanic clash of good versus evil is pretty much the definition of messianic.

The short-lived cult of Bush, in fact, merely reprised the cult of Reagan that lives on to this day. Reagan kitsch has never gone out of style among Republicans. Numerous conservative pundits have suggested that any public policy question can be solved simply by asking “What would Reagan do?” The Heritage Foundation has a dedicated wwrd website. If, say, Brookings had inserted Obama’s name into a phrase usually reserved for Jesus, you can only imagine what conservatives would make of it.”

Can you imagine supporters of Obama talking about him in the terms that Republicans today refer to Reagan? The man has practically been deified! Even worse, Catholics have not proved immune to this treatment. In possibly the most egregious example, a blogger known as the Anchoress once sought the prayers of “that great cloud of witnesses within the Communion of Saints”, and included the name of Ronald Reagan!

Less provocatively, Catholic bloggers have written about Reagan along the following lines: “Having suffered through economic hard times and a morale deficit in the late 70’s and early 80’s, the country needed to have hope again. By 1984 most of the country felt as if they had weathered the storm and that day light was finally breaking.” There is that theme of hope again! And yet, if somebody used the exact same language about Obama, I can fully predict the mocking and derisive response. But was Reagan attacked in these terms? I think not, and nor should be have been.

This quote is especially apt in today’s environment, for the rise of Obama represents a genuinely yearning for a break with the awful Bush administration, in circumstance similar to those that inspired many people to rally behind Reagan in 1980. Whether Obama can deliver is a different story (Reagan did not), but that can only be ascertained by looking at his policies, and not falling in line behind the typical Rovian distortion. Let’s expose the hypocrisy for what it is.

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