There’s always been something faintly comical in the messianic media coverage of Barack Obama, but with the arrival of Pope Benedict XVI in Washington this week, the treatment of the junior senator from Illinois looks sillier than ever.
Both men come bearing a message of hope. Yet only one of them has any real prospect of imparting it, because the Hope he brings is real and true and eternal (and comes from the actual Messiah).
The other fellow, for all his cool plausibility, is just an ambitious politician doling out soothing ladlefuls of platitudinous oratory in the hopes that we’ll swallow it and elect him president.
Not to say that there isn’t plenty of audacious hope in the Obama campaign. Sure there is: He hopes you’ll donate money — and he hopes you’ll vote for him.
Still, Obama is only the latest in a long string of politicians who dress their own ambition with language intended to uplift and persuade; it doesn’t mean he or any man has the power to deliver anyone into a New Jerusalem.
“In the end, that’s what this election is about: Do we participate in a politics of cynicism, or do we participate in a politics of hope?” Obama asks, as if it’s a fresh question.
Now, cynicism as the basis of a campaign really would be something new — and rather exciting. Imagine the scandal! But hope from the mouth of a politician is as old as politics.
Contrast Obama’s hope hokum with the serious and glorious message of hope that Benedict XVI brings to America this week – not just to Catholics and other Christians, but also to everyone.
This pope has thought deeply about what constitutes true hope, as he’s laid out in his encyclical letter, Spe Salvi.
“We need the greater and lesser hopes that keep us going day by day. But these are not enough without the great hope, which must surpass everything else. This great hope can only be God, who encompasses the whole of reality and who can bestow upon us what we, by ourselves, cannot attain,” Benedict writes. “God is the foundation of hope: Not any god, but the God who has a human face and who has loved us to the end, each one of us and humanity in its entirety.”
It’s reasonable to hope — with a small “h” — that a political candidate will do a good job in elected office. You might hope that he’ll veto gun legislation, or support Tibetan independence, or, minimally, that he won’t be caught stuffing unlaundered cash into his freezer. These are small-scale hopes, and appropriate ones. Politics is temporal, and politicians are (mercifully) temporary.
But hope with a capital “H”? Seeking what only God can supply in any ambitious public official seems an act of perversity that is destined to disappoint every time — and every four years, I suppose, it does.
As Pope Benedict writes: “Anyone who does not know God, even though he may entertain all kinds of hopes, is ultimately without hope, without the great hope that sustains the whole of life.”
Barack Obama may be a clever, capable and honorable person. He clearly radiates so much hope-filled charisma that chicks swoon and thrills run up the legs of anchormen. But it’s worth remembering that there’s nothing transcendental about him; he’s a politician who wants your vote so that he can gain power.
Examiner Columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of the Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
