ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Thursday, Feb. 21 2008

Could Obama-mania backlash save Hillary?
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

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.