Interview with a Candidate

This is what all the interviews with political candidates sound like to me these days.

Hello, and tell us a bit about yourself.

I'm a Christian in a Christian nation and my deep faith informs everything I do.

That's nice. Now, what you do think about health care reform?

I'm a Christian in a Christian nation and my deep faith informs everything I do.

Um, so do you favor some sort of single-payer system, or something more market-oriented?

I'm a Christian in a Christian nation and my deep faith informs everything I do.

Well, let's move on. What about the future of nuclear energy?

I'm a Christian in a Christian nation and my deep faith informs everything I do.

The Bible doesn't really talk about nuclear energy, so what do you think? Do you see it is as a clean carbon-free alternative to fossil fuels, or as an unacceptable accident risk?

I'm a Christian in a Christian nation and my deep faith informs everything I do.

Please, sir, at least try to answer the question. If you were President, would you support or oppose nuclear energy?

I'm a Christian in a Christian nation and my deep faith informs everything I do.

Sir! Do you, or do you not, favor building more nuclear power plants???

I'm a Christian in a Christian nation and my deep faith informs everything I do.


I remember a time when one's religion was a private matter and it wasn't anyone's damn business where one went to church, or if one went to church. Now one's religion is apparently the only thing that matters in elections. Some part of the electorate apparently cares about nothing other than a candidate's confessional habits. Positions on things like energy policy, globalization, the slow nationalist drift in Russian politics, health care reform, war and peace in the Middle East, these things don't matter any more. All that matters is whether a candidate appears to be sufficiently religious to suit the evangelicals, and where they come down on the cultural wars beloved by the evangelicals. We could for all they know be destroying America with a distastrous combination of faulty health care policy, misguided globalization, and steady erosion of the Constitution, but none of that matters - they only care if Spongebob Squarepants is gay or not, and they force politicians to dance to that tune in order to be elected. Well, at least Republican politicians.

I think if I were a mainstream old-line Republican, I'd be pretty unhappy with what's become of my party - once your super-religious party faithful start deciding what can and cannot be taught in school on religious grounds, you're on the road to the Talibanization of America, and does anyone really want that? (Well, sure, some people want that - but everyone else hopes that they're just a tiny but overly vocal minority.)

Not that Democratic candidates are any better. They don't usually have to hew quite so closely to the evangelical line, but that just leaves them with plenty of spare time to do really stupid and annoying things.