When I first saw this video put out by the McCain camp, I thought it was an attempt to create a viral Moses spoof of Obama’s uplifting oratory skills. I hadn’t thought it might be an effort to tag Obama as a guy “with two horns and a tail” as Time‘s Amy Sullivan writes.
But since then, there has been a proliferation of websites on the net pushing Obama as the anti-Christ.
Not my thing — religion. This is all sort of weird for me, and I don’t fully understand the anti-intellectual, anti-Enlightenment trends in our society — but I accept that they are there, growing, and probably a lot more in McCain’s camp than Obama’s.
Amy Sullivan opens:
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” 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 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.
I admit my distance from religious theology, but one question: Wouldn’t evangelicals be excited about the appearance of the anti-Christ (as idiotic as that seems to me) as it would be evidence that their day of judgment and salvation were near? And aren’t most of them supposed to be swept away by how convincing and alluring the anti-Christ is?
Ugh. I hate this discussion. I will never have it again here. . .I hope.
My bottom line is that the ad from the McCain folks was crass and was clearly a play on the low road express, as Obama’s team has labeled his recent moves.
If there are a lot of folks getting swept into Obama as anti-Christ fanaticism, then I hope we work hard to move them to the furthest periphery of American politics.
— Steve Clemons
39 comments on “McCain’s Low Road Antics: Obama as Anti-Christ?”