[lit-ideas] oh dear lord....
- From: "Julie Krueger" <juliereneb@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 8 Aug 2008 11:11:28 -0500
<http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1830590,00.html?cnn=yes>
From TIME Magazine --
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1830590,00.html?cnn=yes
The various interpretations (of the ad, of the Evangelicals, you name it)
are as hilarious as anything else about this. If I'd switched on the tv and
happened upon this article being read aloud, I would have wondered what SNL
or MAD TV were doing on at that time of day....
<<It's not easy to make the infamous Willie Horton ad from the 1988
presidential campaign seem benign. But suggesting that Barack Obama is the
Antichrist might just do it.
That's just what some outraged Christian supporters of the Democratic
nominee are claiming John McCain's campaign did in an ad called "The
One"<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mopkn0lPzM8>that was recently
released online. The Republican nominee's advisers brush
off the charges, arguing that the spot was meant to be a "creative" and
"humorous" way of poking fun at Obama's
popularity<http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1830400,00.html>by
painting him as a self-appointed messiah. But even this innocuous
interpretation of the ad — which includes images of Charlton Heston as Moses
and culled clips that make Obama sound truly egomaniacal — taps into a
conversation that has been gaining urgency on Christian radio, political
blogs, and in widely-circulated email messages that accuse Obama of being
the Antichrist.
The ad was the creation of Fred Davis, one of McCain's top media gurus, as
well as a close friend of former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed and the
nephew of conservative Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe. It first caught the
attention of Democrats familiar with the *Left Behind*
series<http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1002759,00.html>,
a fictionalized account of the end time that debuted in the 1990s and has
sold nearly 70 million books worldwide. "The language in there is so similar
to the language in the *Left Behind* books," says Tony Campolo, a leading
progressive evangelical speaker and author.
As the ad begins, the words "It should be known that in 2008 the world shall
be blessed. They will call him The One" flash across the screen. The
Antichrist of the Left Behind books is a charismatic young political leader
named Nicolae Carpathia who founds The One World religion (slogan: "We are
God") and promises to heal the world after a time of deep division. One of
several Obama clips in the ad features the senator saying, "A nation healed,
a world repaired. We are the ones that we've been waiting for."
The visual images in the ad, which Davis says has been viewed even more than
the McCain's "Celeb" ad linking Obama to the likes of Paris Hilton and
Britney Spears, also seem to evoke the cover art of several *Left
Behind*books. But they're not the cartoonish images of clouds parting
and shining
light upon Obama that might be expected in an ad spoofing him as a messiah.
Instead, the screen displays a sinister orange light surrounded by darkness
and later the faint image of a staircase leading up to heaven.
Perhaps the most puzzling scene in the ad is an altered segment from *The 10
Commandments* that appears near the end. A Moses-playing Charlton Heston
parts the animated waters of the Red Sea, out of which rises the
quasi-presidential seal the Obama campaign used for a brief time earlier
this summer before being mocked into retiring it. The seal, which features
an eagle with wings spread, is not recognizable like the campaign's
red-white-and-blue "O" logo. That confused Democratic consultant Eric Sapp
until he went to his Bible and remembered that in the apocalyptic Book of
Daniel, the Antichrist is described as rising from the sea as a creature
with wings like an eagle.
Sapp knows that the phrasing and images could just be dismissed as a
peculiar coincidence. After all, it was Oprah Winfrey who told an Iowa crowd
that Obama was "the one!" But, he insists, "the frequency of these images
and references don't make any sense unless you're trying to send the message
that Obama could be the Antichrist." Mara Vanderslice, another Democratic
consultant who handled religious outreach for the 2004 Kerry campaign,
agrees. "If they wanted to be funny, if they really wanted to play up the
idea that Obama thinks he's the Second Coming, there were better ways to do
it," she says. "Why use these awkward lines like, 'And the world will
receive his blessings'?"
Two months ago, Vanderslice founded a Democratic PAC called the Matthew 25
Network and soon noticed that the negative emails she received from
conservative Christians fell into two general categories: abortion, and the
assertion that Obama is the Antichrist. The cataloguing of similarities
Obama shares with the Antichrist began nearly two years ago. But they picked
up steam in February 2008 after he racked up a string of impressive primary
victories. A Google search for "Obama" and "Antichrist" turns up more than
700,000 hits, including at least one blog dedicated solely to the topic. A
more obscure search for "Obama" and "Nicolae Carpathia" yields a surprising
200,000 references.
It's not hard to see how some Obama-haters might be tempted to make the
comparison. In the Left Behind books, Carpathia is a junior senator who
speaks several languages, is beloved by people around the world and fawned
over by a press corps that cannot see his evil nature, and rises to absurd
prominence after delivering just one major speech. Hmmh. But serious
Antichrist theorists don't stop there. Everything from Obama's
left-handedness to his positive rhetoric to his appearance on the cover of
this magazine has been cited as evidence of his true identity. One chain
email claims that the Antichrist was prophesied to be "A man in his 40s of
MUSLIM descent," which would indeed sound ominous if not for the fact that
the Book of Revelation was written at least 400 years before the birth of
Islam.
The speculation reached a fever pitch after Obama's European trip and the
Berlin speech in which he called for global unity. Conservative Christian
author Hal Lindsey declared in an essay on World Net Daily, "Obama is
correct in saying that the world is ready for someone like him-a
messiah-like figure, charismatic and glib...The Bible calls that leader the
Antichrist. And it seems apparent that the world is now ready to make his
acquaintance." The conservative website RedState.com now sells mugs and
t-shirts that sport a large "O" with horns and the words "The Anti-Christ"
underneath.
Even if a fraction of the Internet-using public engages in outrageous
Antichrist speculation, feeding those extreme beliefs wouldn't seem to be an
obvious political strategy. But McCain advisers are aware that one of the
goals of Democratic outreach to
evangelicals<http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1814206,00.html>has
been to simply neutralize their opposition. "You just have to take the
edge off," says Michigan Democratic Party chair Mark Brewer, explaining why
he spent much of a 2006 meeting with conservative pastors around his state.
"Now that they've met me, they can see I don't have two horns and a tail."
A new TIME poll finds that the most conservative evangelicals are the least
enthusiastic about McCain's candidacy. Convincing them that Obama does have
two horns and a tail might be the best way of getting them to vote. That's
what worries Campolo, who also sits on the Democratic party's platform
committee. "Those books have created a subliminal language and I think
judgments will be made unconsciously about Barack Obama," he says. "It
scares the daylights out of me.">>
- Buzz up!on
Yahoo!<http://buzz.yahoo.com/article/time/http%253A%252F%252Fwww.time.com%252Ftime%252Fpolitics%252Farticle%252F0%252C8599%252C1830590%252C00.html>
<http://www.quantcast.com/p-5dyPa639IrgIw>
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