A couple of days ago I mentioned that Senator Obama seems to hold to a postmodern view of truth, i.e. there are no fixed meanings in the text of his words. They mean whatever the listener wants them to mean, whatever has "purchase" with the listener. They're not to be taken literally - they're too broad and contradictory for that. Rather their vagueness and ambiguities invite us, like poetry, to bask in their resonances and read into them our own hopes and desires. For the postmodern, style trumps content and rhetorical power trumps logic. People in a postmodern world tend to think with their hearts rather than their minds, and come to know by intuition and emotion rather than through reason. This is perhaps why so many find Obama such an appealling candidate even though they can't point to a single accomplishment that would qualify him to be the leader of the United States.
Jonah Goldberg amplifies the idea of Barack as a postmodern in an essay at USAToday. Here's an excerpt:
Asked to define sin, Barack Obama replied that sin is "being out of alignment with my values." Statements such as this have caused many people to wonder whether Obama has a God complex or is hopelessly arrogant. For the record, sin isn't being out of alignment with your own values (if it were, Hannibal Lecter wouldn't be a sinner because his values hold that it's OK to eat people) nor is it being out of alignment with Obama's - unless he really is our Savior.
I encourage you to read the whole thing, but with the caveat that the column tends to make postmodernism seem arrantly bad. It's not, but lots of it is, and the idea that truth is whatever harmonizes with your own experience is particularly corrosive. Unfortunately, that's the aspect of postmodernism most frequently on display in Senator Obama's speeches and pronouncements.
RLC