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As I listened to John McCain and the other Republican hopefuls supplicate themselves before the Religious Right, it occurred to me that each of them was trying extremely hard to show they had been “born again.” But of course none of them had the chutzpah to pull what the man the want to replace did when he courted Jerry Falwell and company–to actually claim he had been born again and that none other than Billy Graham himself had convinced him of the error of his ways.
How George W. Bush became president is certainly THE greatest make over story of our times and you must understand, as I think most Americans do, that the make over is the key. Make overs have been the stock-in-trade of television reality shows, women’s and men’s magazines and innumerable local newspaper contests.
Its antecedents lie in yellowing old comic strip ads of 98 pound weaklings having sand kicked in their face and faded black-and-white video tapes of you-can-look-like-a-movie-star hair permanent commercials. The contemporary make over artist is a modern necromancer who mutters some psychobabble mixed with just enough common sense and pseudo science that a wave of the magic product exacts a miraculous transformation worthy of the most venerated medieval saint.
What makes the script sizzle is the object of the make over. This cannot just be some ordinary citizen any more than a saint bother himself or herself with healing some victim of the common cold. The object must be truly abject, someone deformed by humpbacked irregularities and sporting the equivalent of odiferous, leprosy-like sores that turn away everyone’s gaze.
The object must undergo an ordeal, a trial by fire to portray the make over as truly miraculous. You don’t lose 50 pounds just by being a couch potato and taking a little yellow pill. A pitch that shallow ends up on the back of matchbook covers or cheap magazines buried at the bottom of the rack by the supermarket checkout counter. The audience knows you can’t get something for nothing, although enough of them figure that for a few bucks, what the heck, it’s like a lottery ticket and just maybe it will work.
This is what the Religious Right is truly looking for. They know that every candidate begging for their votes will say all the right things about abortion and gay marriage and the other social causes they have thrust on Americans who would just as soon the government stay out of their bedrooms, thank you. But what will matter in the end is the conversion.
Were John McCain to reveal he had been born again in that North Vietnamese prison cell he might just as well walk on water. Were Sam Brownback to admit he had personally talked with God somewhere on the Kansas prairies, the way the Lord talks regularly with Pat Robertson the faithful would anoint him as George W. Bush’s heir apparent.
Yet so far, the candidates have stuck with policy when the Religious Right craves the personal. McCain can deliver speech after speech saying that even though he called Falwell one of America’s “agents of intolerance” in 2000, he had changed. A true Falwell voter has to hear that somehow God played a role in that change. Otherwise, McCain is just another politician.
Right now the GOP likes to believe that what it sees as the relatively similar ideologies of its candidates will give it a leg up on the Democrats who are already undergoing their annual rite of who is a “real” Democrat and who is “electable.” Yet the Republican contest could promise to become just as nasty.
You can bet things will get as dirty as they did when McCain ran in 2000 and conservative groups circulated literature in South Carolina accusing him of having an African American child. Brownback or someone else will trot out the Falwell quote. McCain will respond in kind.
For the Democrats this contest to see who can kiss the ring of Jerry Falwell the hardest holds out the hope that the GOP will move even further to the right. Contrary to some pundits who have given them a premature burial, the Religious Right, which felt slighted this past fall and still thinks Dubya neglected them for Iraq, itches to show its strength again. People who believe Armageddon lies just around the corner do not fade away quietly.
Crossposts: My Left Wing, All Things Democrat,
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