Oh, the indignities a politician must suffer! Our own Bill Kristol devotes his New York Times column today to discussing the messages that the three presidential campaigns released to celebrate Passover with their potential Jewish voters. Chances are, all three would let Passover come and go without a thought if they weren’t office-seekers, much akin to the way Ramadan doesn’t provoke any deep thoughts in me that I simply must express publicly. Nevertheless, they are politicians, and like kissing babies, there are certain things a politician must do. Hillary Clinton’s claim to “have always been inspired by the enduring words of the Haggadah” struck a rich comedic note, reminding me of her claim to have always loved the New York Yankees. Still, I found the Obama statement particularly interesting. Here’s the entire thing, lifted from his website:
A few things leap out. What actually happened to occasion the holiday hardly merits a mention. Instead, the statement focuses on how we celebrate Passover today. This is characteristic Obama campaign narcissism, right out of the “We Are the Change We’ve Been Waiting For” school. Meanwhile, the salute to the “vital role” that American Jews “have always played in our national conversation” verges on self parody. In the Obama worldview, everything including Passover is seemingly an invitation “to continue to engage in dialogue.” In truth, Passover is a challenging holiday. As Jews, we celebrate our liberation but we mourn the suffering of the Egyptians that accompanied it. What’s more, Passover has no happy endings. The generation of Jews that got liberated from Pharaoh didn’t get to enter the Holy Land, God having deemed them too debased by their decades of enslavement to be worthy of such an honor. And the Passover Seder still ends with the table praying, “Next Year in Jerusalem,” an acknowledgement of the millennia that the Jewish people spent exiled from Israel. As a man of faith, Obama probably could have offered some interesting thoughts on Passover and the mixed feelings the holiday engenders. Also, the pining for a Jewish homeland in the Holy Land remains a relevant issue today. Instead, the candidate jammed even Passover into the Obama canon of meaningless tripe. Whether it involves chatting up foreign despots or a national conversation on race, Obama habitually elevates the act of talking to a level of meaning it doesn’t deserve. And yet for all of Obama’s talk, he avoids the significant issues and concrete action like, well, a plague.
