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The Daily Dish - 2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan

One Last Word

By The Daily Dish
Feb 6 2010, 10:13 AM ET

If you are one of those people who think this person cannot become president of the United States, think again.

Two lines stood out for me. The first is a sign that she believes and her followers believe that she has a divine destiny. She is Esther, with a touch of martyrdom:

"I will live, I will die for the people of America."

The second was the Dolchstoss attack on the duly elected president of the United States:



"We need a commander-in-chief not a professor of law."

These two potent messages - delegitimizing Obama as "the other" and as a weak-kneed traitor to the troops, and casting herself as the avatar of the real America, ready to die for its survival - are political gold. Most politicians in liberal democracies she somewhat from stating them so obviously, because they clearly invoke certain, shall we say, non-democratic forms. Not she.

The media, too scared be tarred as elitists, will never demand policy specifics from her; there is a huge constituency out there (rightly) outraged by Washington corruption and she now has the critical mantle of the rogue outsider; she can channel Christianism and fuse it with the slogans of phony "fiscal conservatism"; she will blame every lost job on Obama; and she will accuse him of betraying the troops and befriending America's enemies. Behind her are the Cheneyites.

Above all, she is capable of generating a personality cult - much, much more so than Obama, because she can harness Christianism to her divine destiny. The power of this kind of appeal - of a charismatic, beautiful woman, an icon of the pro-life cause, persecuted by the evil elites, demonized by libruls, and commanding the biggest military on earth - should not in my view be under-estimated.

Know fear.

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