David Brooks, writing on the Op-Ed page of this morning’s New York Times, thinks that John Kerry is in trouble on religious grounds. Or, rather, on not-openly-wearing-his-religion-on-his sleeve grounds.
Supplying neither footnote nor evidence, as is his wont, Brooks asserts that “Religious involvement is a much, much more powerful predictor of how someone will vote than income, education, gender or any other social and demographic category save race.” He further notes that a recent survey commissioned by Time magazine found that only 7 percent of Americans feel that Kerry is a deeply religious person.
Brooks opines that if Democrats are not seen as religious, “they will be seen as secular Ivy League liberals, and they will lose.” Bill Clinton knew this, Brooks says, and went out of his way time and again to make it clear to a God-fearing middle America that he was perfectly at home in churches and at prayer. This has nothing to do with where a candidate stands on political issues, Brooks writes. “Many people just want to know that their leader, like them, is in the fellowship of believers. … Their president doesn’t have to be a saint, but he does have to be a pilgrim.”
Kerry is more reticent about his faith than either Clinton or President Bush, and Brooks thinks he will pay dearly for that: “If you want to know why Kerry is still roughly even with Bush in the polls, even though Bush has had the worst year of any president since Nixon in 1973 … this is one big reason.”
In his books and columns, Brooks is famously a master of the breathtakingly blithe, sweeping statement offered up with no convincing evidence (often not even anecdotal evidence) to prop up the structure of his thesis of the moment.
That’s apparently not a bad gimmick when it comes to selling pop sociology books. But it’s not enough for us — not when it comes from someone trying to make a serious point about a dead-serious fight for the White House.
–Steve Lovelady
Steve Lovelady was editor of CJR Daily.