Guest post by Scan
One of my first family conversations about the 2008 election turned out to be one of the most memorable. This dinner table discussion, which occurred early last year, proceeded about as I expected…until the conversation turned to Barack Obama. A very close member of my family, a deeply religious, good-hearted and level-headed man, after saying some surprisingly complementary things him, leaned in and said “I know you haven’t read the Left Behind series, but Obama kinda reminds me of the Antichrist character in them.” As he went on to explain why, the political conversation ended as I sat stunned in my seat that such a strange and disturbing comparison could be made so openly and so casually. It was not the only time he would say such a thing.
Recently, another very close family member told me that Obama “scared her to death” and implored me not to vote for a man “with Muslim blood in his veins”. She was deadly serious, and it was clear that she was not the only one who was thinking along these lines in her town.
This stuff is out there. The emails continue to circulate. It’s a real concern and dismissing it as pure fringe would be a mistake. There are millions of people in our country today who would not be surprised if the literal Antichrist emerged in their lifetimes. The McCain camp is apparently aware of this, and have released a web-only ad called “The One” which appears to capitalize on it. It currently has over a million views.
It was enough for Time to ask
“An Antichrist Obama in McCain Ad?”:
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.
Just some good political fun along the lines of the satirical Obama Messiah site? Hardly, when you consider the source:
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, 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.”
Here’s the problem: Even if it is dismissed as “humorous” by political advisers, such suggestive imagery is definitely not a joke to a sizable portion of the population. You might expect a clip like this to be made by a third party purely for the sake of comedy, but the McCain campaign produced this video for a reason and simply having a chuckle is not it. They know full well that if a sizable chunk of their evangelical base goes for Obama, there won’t be any hope of winning in November.
Still not convinced that this ad might be suggesting the worst?
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’?”
This might be written off as a typical Republican tactic, except for the fact that it subtly suggests that Barack Obama isn’t simply the wrong man for the job, but quite possibly evil in the Biblical sense. Is this the path that McCain wants to go down? Does he really want to help embed this terrifying idea into the minds of millions for the sake of holding together the evangelical base? Apparently so, and it just might be working.
As for my family member who originally made the comparison between Barack Obama and the Antichrist figure from Left Behind, he ended up voting for Obama in the Texas primary. Reason topped hysteria in this case, but not everyone is so sure that he’s simply a talented Democratic politician from Chicago and not a sinister force from hell bent on destroying the world as we know it.
For that reason, expect to see these bumper stickers soon: “Vote McCain – He’s Not the Antichrist!”
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