Kristof gets it wrong

OK, it's really time for the NYTimes to get rid of Nick Kristof. 

If the Democratic Party wants to figure out how to win national elections again, it has an unexpected guide: Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Senator Clinton, much more than most in her party, understands how the national Democratic Party needs to rebrand itself. She gets it - perhaps that's what 17 years in socially conservative Arkansas does to you.

The first lesson Mrs. Clinton is demonstrating is the need to talk much more openly about God and prayer. That resonates in a country where a Pew poll found that 60 percent of Americans pray at least once a day.

"I've always been a praying person," Mrs. Clinton declared recently. Of course, this approach works in her case only because her religious faith is longstanding.

Please, please don't tell me that Nick Kristof thinks that Kansas is suddenly going to turn into a blue state if Hillary Clinton mentions the word "God" enough.  In fact, the "phony" tagline is already being tested on her, as it was yesterday in the National Review.  Nick continues:

Democrats are usually more comfortable talking about sex than God. But that doesn't work in a country where 70 percent say that "presidents should have strong religious beliefs."

Thanks Nick.  You're really keeping me interested.  I didn't think it was possible to get so much wrong in so little space.  Not only do you reinforce a vague and unsubstaniated impression of the Democratic party, but you forget that the only successful Democratic presidential candidates in the last 25 years have been comfortable talking about God.  Nor can you remember far enough back to remember which party wanted to impeach a president over a sex scandal.  I'll give you a hint.  It wasn't the party of Hillary Clinton's husband.

So Mrs. Clinton may not be able to get there from here, and in any case it's way too early to speculate meaningfully about 2008. But it's just the right time for Democrats to be fretting about how to reconnect to the heartland, and they can't find a better model for how to do that than Mrs. Clinton.

Yeah, Nick, it is too early, but that won't stop you from doing it, will it?  Nor will it stop you from repeating the same old tired lines about "reconnecting to the heartland," and reinforcing half the country's mistaken impression that anyone left of Bill Frist is a free-loving baby-killing militant atheist. 

-- Michael

Comments

[Musing Michael]

If Kristof is right and liberals are more comfortable talking about sex than they are talking about God (and I admit, that's a big "if"), at least we'd be talking about the subject that most Americans care the most about, although most of them would never admit that to a pollster. As Robert Heinlein famously observed, sex is the one subject everybody lies about.