The economy is sinking, an incumbent Republican president has abysmally low ratings, and the Democrats outpoll the GOP on virtually every issue. A Republican should have no chance at all to win the presidency. Yet the two-week political convention season has come and gone, and the polls still show John McCain well within striking distance of victory. How can it be?
To understand it, says McCain's campaign manager Rick Davis, you have to start with one basic fact: "This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates."
As a historian of religions I'd put it a just bit differently: This election is not a choice between two competing policy positions. It's a choice between two clusters of symbols. Each candidate tries to create a believable mythic drama, with himself as the hero. So the election as a whole becomes a mythic contest between two sets of symbolic images. Elections have probably always been like that. But today the question is what each candidate symbolizes, and which symbolic message will win the most votes in 2008.
What does McCain symbolize? Since the selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate, the most popular answer among the pundits is "anti- elitism." "Ordinary people," they say, hate the Democrats for looking down on them. They "may be struggling economically, detest President Bush and oppose the Iraq war," as an LA Times post-convention analysis put it, "but still may vote based on a visceral sense of which candidate respects their way of life."
But these "ordinary people" who feel alienated from the "elitist" Obama are largely creatures of imagination. When pollsters ask "Which candidate has values most like yours?" or "Which candidate best understands and cares about your needs?", Obama consistently comes out ahead. The McCain campaign's strenuous effort to make the biracial son of a single mom from Kansas a symbol of "elitism" isn't working very well.
What is working is McCain's focus on "experience" and on the realm of war, the military, and national security. That's the one area where McCain consistently bests his opponent in the polls. It's only his claim to experience on these issues that are keeping him competitive.
That does not mean the voters prefer McCain's war policies. Since last February, when it became clear that the Arizona senator would be the GOP's nominee, the pattern has not changed: Even when a comfortable majority of those polled support Obama's policy — withdrawing troops on a fixed timetable — more say they trust McCain than Obama to "do the right thing" in Iraq. Why? In June, a Pew Center for the People and the Press poll found that nearly 40% of the public didn't know McCain's position on troop withdrawal. Perhaps many voters don't care to know his stand on that issue, or any other. They care about the symbolic meaning of his experience in the realm of war.
Of course everyone — even if they know nothing else of McCain's experience — knows what his experience in war was: years of captivity and torture. In case they might have forgotten, McCain offered a detailed retelling of his horrific experience as the emotional centerpiece of his acceptance speech. From that spellbinding tale he launched into a rousing conclusion, whipping the audience into a frenzy as he shouted: "Fight with me. Fight with me. ... Stand up and fight."
What McCain symbolizes, above all, is patriotic toughness. He is the mythic hero who always puts "country first" and will "never surrender" to the nation's enemies and their evildoing. To millions of Americans — a minority, to be sure, but perhaps enough to tip the election — that image outweighs every other consideration as they decide how to cast their vote for president. Why should it be so? It's a huge puzzle, too complicated to settle for any simple answers. Let's try to put together some of the pieces.
One valuable piece comes from a recent column by the New York Times' (neo?)conservative pundit David Brooks. The root of Obama's problem with the voters, he suggests, is that Obama "has been a sojourner." His life journey has taken him to many places and many political positions. But he has never settled down in one place. And "voters seem to be slow to trust a sojourner they cannot place."
Brooks goes on to contrast the two candidates by their differing autobiographies: "McCain's 'Faith of My Fathers' is a story of a prodigal son. It is about an immature boy who suffers and discovers his place in the long line of warriors that produced him." He becomes a man by returning home. Obama, on the other hand, seems to have no home: "'Dreams From My Father' is a journey forward, about a man who took the disparate parts of his past and constructed an identity of his own. If you grew up in the 1950s," Brooks adds, "you were inclined to regard your identity as something you were born with. If you grew up in the 1970s, you were more likely to regard your identity as something you created." Hence the age gap, with older voters inclining to the Republican while the youngest voters eagerly rush to the Democrat.
OK. McCain is experienced as a tough, patriotic, self-sacrificing warrior hero and as a man of the '50s, with a fixed identity, defined by a home that he knows and eventually embraces. Obama is seen as a man of the '70s on an endless journey, always seeking new ways to construct his ever-changing identity. But why should this symbolism of life as journey lead many voters to accept the Republicans' pejorative image of Obama as a self-seeking young dandy, too weak to stand up against the evil enemy, too selfish to sacrifice all for country?
The missing link comes from another consistent finding in the polls. The best indicator of how someone is likely to vote is church attendance: The more often non-Hispanic whites go to church, the more likely they are to vote for the Republican. And the percentages, which have held steady all summer, are almost exactly what they were in the 2004 election.
Of course going to church means different things to different people, as the eminent sociologist of religion Robert Wuthnow discovered when he set out to trace the history of recent American spirituality. In his book After Heaven he lays out the pattern he found, and it's strikingly similar to Brooks' take on this year's election.
The 1950s was an era dominated by "the spirituality of dwelling," Wuthnow contends. Churchgoers were likely to feel very much at home in their houses of worship. A church was an emotionally comforting dwelling place, Wuthnow wrote, because it offered "a sheltering canopy that protects people from chaos. ... The Soul was deemed to reside in a sacred space that required geographic fortification. ... Spiritual sanctuaries were fortresses whose walls needed to be protected."
By the 1970s, a new mode of spirituality had grown up alongside the old — a "spirituality of seeking" that offered endless new possibilities for spiritual growth, as long as the seeker never settled down in one church, which meant never feeling (or wanting to feel) at home in any one. The seedbed of the spirituality of seeking was, of course, the era we call "the sixties," the time when so many young people asked passionately: "How does it feel to be without a home, like a rolling stone?" Many commentators have noted that forty years later our presidential elections are still ways to refight the continuing culture battles that began in that tumultuous time. The Republicans keep it that way because they reap such huge political benefit from attacking cultural symbols of "the sixties."
Every new round brings new symbolic issues, however. In 2004, much media attention was focused on social issues like abortion and gay rights. In fact, though, more careful post-election studies found that the key to Bush's success was the voters' fear of terrorism. Yet for the many churchgoers who voted Republican because they were still seeking the spirituality of dwelling, the difference between the social issues and the national security issues may not have been very important. Those were merely two different ways to symbolize the ongoing battle waged by those inside the sanctuary walls to fend off those outside.
For most of that time his research has dealt with issues of war, peace, and national security in the United States, past and present, with a special focus on the influence of religious traditions and religious discourse on policy and public attitudes. He has published eight books and numerous articles in that field. He is a frequent contributor to Common Dreams and Tomdispatch.
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