IDOLS AND PRESIDENTS

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THE COUNTRY badly needs a decent president but Iowa voters went to their
caucuses and selected instead two preachers, one ordained, the other
self-anointed and both successful manipulators of cheap cliches
purportedly leading us, in one case, to Christ and, in the other, to
hope and change.

How Huckabee, a cruel purveyor of Christian heresies about women and
gays, would bring us closer to the Lord is anyone's guess. As for Obama,
we noted some time back that "he's taken the easy way out and applied
the marketing principles of Tony Robbins and Marianne Williamson to a
political campaign. Having gone through eight years of EST with Bill
Clinton and almost that much of AA with George Bush, we should be burned
out on psycho-therapeutics as opposed to physical reality but sadly many
are taken in by Obama's covert message that if you trust in hope you
don't have to worry about the details like pensions and healthcare."

Obama might turn out to be a decent president - he certainly would be
better than Huckabee - but at the moment the evidence provides little
support beyond factors that matter inordinately these days, such as that
he is young, good looking and half black. This is the sort of thing
music producers seek in boy bands. Choosing a president is supposed to
involve some deeper concerns.

Besides, there is nothing about Obama that gives him a copyright on hope
and, if you really want change, then logic would point you to John
Edwards. But our politics have been subsumed by the values of television
and so we continue to look for an American Idol instead of an American
President.

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