Finn dAbuzz wrote:Vert interesting take on the Obama mythos (from National Review)
Obama's Messianic Politics
Why his healer-redeemer rhetoric has a limited appeal.
<snip>
The difficulty with his I-am-the-Adonis-who-changes-winter-into-spring version of the redemption myth is that it , or so church-attendance rates suggest. In a blue state like Connecticut, income and church attendance are negatively correlated; in blue-land, it is the poorer folk who are more likely to be conventionally pious. They aren't looking for a messiah; they've already found one in church.
The rich, churchless, blue-state elites, by contrast, are hungry for the kind of secular nirvana Obama is serving up.
Heh. Funny, how this author goes on derisively about the vapid, new age-y psychological yearnings of the Obama electorate -- when his own piece is an uncommon length of psycho-babble, based on lots of soundbite speculation, and little to no actual data or evidence to substantiate it.
Come to think of it, his widely sweeping social sketch, all intuition and common wisdom and no actual data, is exactly the kind that you'd find in those trendy magazines, the kind that appeal to those flighty readers who yearn for overarching theories but shirk back from anything systematic. So he's mirroring the kind of vague, lazy mindset he ridicules.
But anyway. Let's go straight to the heart of the argument in these woolly paragraphs above. Obama appeals most to the kind of high-income, high-education blue-state liberals who have long lost their ties with the traditional Savior (Jesus Christ and the Church), and yet long for a savior-type figure. They've found that vibe that they miss in Obama, the ersatz messias for the blue-state liberal elites.
Right? It's a nice enough try: after all, Obama does do better among high-education/high-income voters -- and it is those groups who, in "blue state" America, are more likely to have lost most of their ties to the Church.
But here's flaw number one: Obama's base is not the "blue-state elites"; it is not "in a blue state like Connecticut". He barely eeked out a primary victory in that state, and
a quick look at the map shows that blue states are not his forte. He won Washington state, his home states Illinois and Hawaii, and the blue mini states Vermont, Maryland and Delaware; but he lost in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, California and New Jersey. Meanwhile, he's ratcheted up big wins throughout the Mountains and Plains states and in the Deep South - hardly yer typical "blue-state elites" stomping grounds.
But smart people will remark on something else, too. You cant base a reliable argument on just adding up correlations and assuming they neatly stack up. For example: secularity may be more prevalent among higher-educated Democrats than less-educated Democrats, but that doesn mean that when Obama appeals relatively strongly to higher-educated Dems, it's those secular higher-educated ones he must be appealing to. Basic fallacy, really. I'm hopeless with analogies, but lemme try: "I know you eat a lot of meat; a much-sold kind of meat is pork; ergo, you must love pork." It's possible, but hardly necessarily so.
The funny thing is that all the author would have needed to do to double-check the assumption he's based his whole article on is take a quick look at the exit poll data.
Here's a good overview.
What turns out to be the case? Obama's message does NOT "resonate most strongly with [those] who are less likely [..] to have faith in the West's traditional healer-redeemer figure (Jesus)". It is NOT particularly the "churchless" who show themselves most "hungry for the kind of .. nirvana Obama is serving up".
In reality, Obama's support has been pretty evenly spread among those who go to church weekly, occasionally, or never - even if you leave out the states where African Americans made up a major share of the electorate. In some states he did a little better in one category; in other states he did a little better in another category.
Nothing like the kind of surge in Obama support the more secular the voter is that you'd have seen if the article had been remotely right.
Here's the numbers. Since both African-Americans and blacks are significantly more likely to be regular churchgoers than whites, I'm not including any states in which either (predominantly Obama-voting) African-Americans or (predominantly Hillary-voting) Hispanics constituted a major share of the electorate - which leaves these states.
The take-away? Another bloviating National Review writer elaborately constructs theories that pigeonhole the opponent's camp as the kind of caricature a conservative loves to hate - while being too lazy to do even the smallest fact-check of his assumptions. They write with a flourish, but their intellectual laziness equals that of any new age guru.
give credit where its due
