Campaign Commercials

Yesterday one of my friends sent me this video - a long-form campaign commercial for Rick Perry, the first I've seen in a campaign season that is already making me want to vote for Jimmy McMillan. (Not really - don't actually vote for him, please. It makes it harder for legitimate third party candidates to get taken seriously.)

There are a lot of things I could write about related to this, not the least of which being that it looks like a trailer to a Michael Bay movie (if I ever become a Hollywood director, I'd definitely hire whoever made this as my DP). What I want to talk about is a line at 0:58 in the video, a quote from Gov. Perry: "The United States of America really is the last great hope of mankind."

As a jaded voter, I'm largely unfazed by meaningless rhetoric like this. However, my first reaction was to suppose this statement will not play well with his base. One of the top 3 things I consistently heard from the "religious right" people I know personally during the 2008 campaign about Obama was a visceral negative reaction to his "Hope" campaign. "Christ is our hope!" they protested. (The other two things I heard were abortion and that he was The Antichrist, the latter from a depressing number of people.) If Obama's hope campaign was heretical, surely Perry's statement here is as well, even though both men are non-denominational Christians?

However, this doesn't seem to have been the case. A cursory search of the internet and a detailed read of an assault rifle owner's forum discussion thread about the video (doesn't get more right-wing than that, right?) showed nothing but support for the line, including from several people who use Bible verses in their online signatures.

Why is this? Is it that the perception was that Obama was claiming he personally was hope, while Perry is claiming hope on the part of the whole country? I suppose that's possible, though odd, since both men were focusing on what they would do in office rather than who they are. Is it just that Obama emphasized it more, so it was more out there for discussion (and you saw his face on posters that said "hope")? Again, possible, but many of the comments I read picked this line in particular out of that two-minute video, suggesting not just a neutral feeling but a positive resonance. Maybe it's just a poor sample size, and the people who were upset about Obama will also be upset at Perry over this. This seems more likely, though again, I heard the Obama complaint from a large majority of Christian Republicans I know, and I haven't come across one single negative reaction yet about Perry.

I want to think well of people, so I'm trying not to come to the conclusion that the answer is that the religious right contains many hypocrites who just used their faith to try and justify their political disagreement with Obama. If anyone has a more plausible explanation, I really would like to hear it.