Messiah or Antichrist?

Last Friday I attended a performance of my sister’s rock band at what I can only describe as an “alternative artspace” in Venice Beach, Calif., where the walls in the lobby were covered exclusively with posters and paintings of Barack Obama. In a place like Venice Beach where hardly a car drives by that doesn’t have a Yes We Can bumper sticker, the Obama motif is nothing new, but these depictions of the President-elect had an unmistakable messianic quality to them.

To be sure, Obama as Messiah is not a new idea. His biggest champions as well as his fiercest critics have been encouraging the comparison since the early days of the primaries. The sentiment even reached beyond America’s borders—he was deemed “Der Weltpräsident” (the world president) by Der Spiegel, the German weekly news magazine—and if anything the Obama as Messiah image has only become more prevalent in the months since his election. He now enjoys an 83 percent approval rating, 22 and 15 percentage points higher than his two immediate predecessors, George Bush and Bill Clinton, respectively. As throngs of supporters estimated at 1.8 million descended upon Washington, D.C. for the Second Coming (I count myself among their ranks), Obama as Messiah has reached a fever pitch.

Yet, even while I am wholeheartedly caught up in Obamania, I nonetheless can’t help but think back to this fall, which I spent in Ashtabula County, Ohio, campaigning for Obama. I was a field organizer in the mostly rural townships in the southern part of the county where I spent my days knocking on the doors and calling the homes of undecided voters. My experience in the rural stretches of Ashtabula Country was that people weren’t seeing Obama in messianic terms.

Ashtabula is in the northeastern corner of the state, between Cleveland and Erie, Penn., and it is perhaps Ohio’s most economically depressed county. The passing of a couple of months means another plant closing, families losing jobs and healthcare coverage. Homes everywhere are being foreclosed. The mall has almost as many empty storefronts as occupied ones. There is no Starbucks in Ashtabula. The home I lived in the first month I was there didn’t have cell phone reception, and many people in the southern half of the county—everything south of the 90 freeway—can’t get access to high speed Internet.

The vast number of people I spoke to while canvassing the small towns, farms, and Amish communities of southern Ashtabula County just wanted answers to questions like, “How will I provide my family with healthcare if I lose my job?” and “Which of these candidates is going to bring jobs back to where I live?” The 100,000 or so residents were in a sense primed for Obama’s economic message, and this reflected in the fact that 56% voted him in. Still, at no point was messianic fervor in evidence in Ashtabula County. The voters in my county were more in a “show me the money” than a “the Second Coming is upon us” mode.

Race didn’t figure into the calculus very significantly. There was of course the occasional yahoo who chased me off his lawn accusing me of being a traitor to my race. (And I was once asked by an older couple who nevertheless assured me they were voting Democrat whether I was the “right color for that job” when I announced myself as an Obama campaign worker.) But for most people, questions about religion or race were largely overshadowed by economic considerations.

Many Ashtabula voters were confirmed Clintonites who didn’t ask themselves whether the Black candidate was going to represent their interests as a white person. The question on their minds was whether the big city, Harvard educated lawyer shared and was willing to protect the values of a rural Ohioan. To them, Obama’s election wasn’t about members of the elite trying to chase the cowboys out of the White House. It was about what the Democrats can do for “me,” to restore security and maybe a little optimism to their sometimes hopeless lives. In exchange, they were willing to look past what many sensed was a values divide. The main appeal to the people of Ashtabula County was that electing Barack Obama would have a direct impact on their own lives.

In short, Obama as messiah wasn’t in the air in Ashtabula. Indeed, for some, it was to the contrary. In the course of a Saturday afternoon spent canvassing Roaming Shores, a planned lakeside community, one of my volunteers came across a voter who, when prompted to for her preference among the candidates for President said, “Oh, don’t worry, I’m voting for Obama,” and enigmatically added, “but, you know…right?” Know what? “Well, that he’s the antichrist!” My dutiful volunteer, a regular churchgoer, had to ask: “How do you reconcile yourself to voting in the man you believe is Lucifer?” “Well, I’ve got to tell you that it was one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever had to make, but when I saw McCain’s tax plan…”


Clay A. Dumas ’10, a Crimson editor, is a social studies concentrator in Lowell House.