The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Bad Moment To Be a Democrat

This "cling" flap just keeps getting worse. I was expecting some Obama redemption at the Christian school forum last night in Grantham, where each of the candidates had the chance to talk about their faith. Maybe not as moving as the Jeremiah Wright speech but something that felt at least a little real and helped us recalibrate what he'd said in San Francisco. Instead, we got just a lot of faith babble, mindless clichés that could have come from John McCain or Howard Dean or the president of Georgetown or anyone who's evading uncomfortable stares from true believers: "Religion is a bulwark, a foundation"; "trials and tribulations"; "I was in no way demeaning a faith." Blah, blah, blah. Answers like these suggest either great guilt or great arrogance. He either recognizes that he insulted wide swaths of people and feels badly about it, or he doesn't even see it yet, in which case we're in real trouble.

Hillary, meanwhile, is unbelievable. Her whole strategy at the moment seems to be Message: I Care, and a particularly cold, impatient form of it. "I went to church on Easter. I mean, so?" I mean, so? Is she high? Even Miss Jew here recognizes that so? and the resurrection of Jesus don't belong in the same sentence. And just to dissect further: “We have been working very hard to make it clear that we have millions of Democrats who are church-going and gun-owning,” she said. “And we are tired of having Republicans, or frankly our own Democrats, give any ammunition to Republicans because what happens then is Republicans take advantage of the situation.”

Note the: "We have been working very hard." In other words, none of this is natural. All this stuff I've said about my father taking me hunting and going to church is a political strategy, intended to keep ammunition away from the Republicans, and has nothing to do with what I actually care about or believe.

After Tim Kaine won the Virginia governor's race. I really thought the Democrats were starting to get their act together. Not that they were pretending to be religious, the way Howard Dean did, but that they were finding a way to integrate sincere religious narratives with what they actually believe. Obama has more potential to make this real than almost anyone. My true hope was that if he pulled it off, religion would sort of fade away as an election issue. It would no longer be an absolute requirement for candidates to bludgeon each other with the sincerity of their testimonies. And how they worshipped would no longer be a proxy for anything else. It would be possible to be devoutly Catholic and pro-choice, or an environmentalist evangelical. This is the way religion is headed anyway. And this might have the added benefit of making both San Francisco and Grantham, Pa., feel included. Let's hope Obama figures that out—quickly.