>Hug<

Many do not actually like the party they have become, and want to move forward into a less nasty, cramped and vicious direction. That's why Huckabee is rising too.

What do they have in common? Huckabee is a conservative whose character appeals to liberals; Obama is a liberal whose temperament appeals to conservatives. Both represent a deep desire to get past the hideous, nasty polarization of the last few years. Obama doesn't despise conservatives the way Clinton does. Huckabee doesn't repell Democrats the way Giuliani and Romney do. -- Andrew Sullivan

What they have in common is the therapeutic embrace of Jerusalem and Washington, Caesar and God, heaven and earth, the sacred and the profane, within a single warm hug. It's never easy to square faith and politics in everyday life -- especially at the national level. But this latest innovation, like all I can think of, ends up doing so by subjugating both to a higher calling. I think that calling is some kind of strange universal love that ultimately considers the love of Christ to be, well, in need of supplementing. The state must perfect divine love. Though such a concept horrifies me, it's a lot easier to swallow when the imperfection is mass race slavery and the statist in question is the reluctant, humble, and agonized Abraham Lincoln. The state is not a vehicle for spreading love around the world, and no faith I can think of fails to turn to heresy when it replaces its whole God with partial Eros.

We should remember that Hillary is a cultural aberration, not one of its main characters but one of its little hobgoblins who has been carbo-loaded and steroid-injected by the externalities of the age. Huckabee is the more perfect avatar of George W. Bush, Obama is the more perfect avatar of Bill Clinton, and these two offer an 'escape' from politics as usual while really representing our continuing efforts to make ourselves feel great about it. The first thing that must go, of course, is meanness. After that, everything looks so radically transformed that everyone will comfortably agree to ignore that nearly everything else remains unchanged.

Comments

[Joules]

I bought two Philip Rieff books via your "phrontisaurus": The Gift of Grace [etc.] and The Triumph of the Therapeutic. GOG is sitting in my parents' living room, waiting for my father the minister to peruse it and TOT is on my bedside table. I had to put it aside because it's too thought-provoking during the Christmas season, when I must choose how much to breathe of what Robert Redford, in the preface to his Sundance Christmas gift catalog, dubs "the materialistic ether" that has taken over Christmas.

[John Tabin]

Obama is a liberal whose temperament appeals to conservatives Andrew Sullivan.

Fixed.

[John Tabin]

Dang, the strike tag is disabled? That completely ruins my joke. And it worked in preview mode!

[zombyboy]

You know, I stared at Tabin's first comment for a few moments trying to figure out what the hell he meant--going up and down to the quoted text, hoping to understand what he was trying to say.

I feel so stupid now...