"We'll hold a big tent revival in Manchester..."

The narrative that I'm still waiting to see out of the primaries: no, really, Americans just want a president who talks like a preacher.

It's a logical continuation of the Third (or Fourth, or Fifth) Great Awakening that the press seems to discover whenever it needs a cover story or an exit poll, and forget the rest of the time. It's not just a matter of burgeoning religiosity in America--it's a matter of Americans relating to each other, socially, in spiritual terms. Obama and Huckabee are "inspirational," and while a lot of it may have to do with their messages (if you go in for the whole "content" thing) it seems to me that the church-sprung oratory couldn't hurt either.

Which is really what bugs me about the fact (or at least increasingly conventional wisdom) that Hillary's ability to break down and cry won her New Hampshire. Anyone who's studied camp meetings knows that it works like this: you're alternately inspired and threatened by the preachers, until finally, ecstatically, crying with relief, you collapse liberated into the hands of the Lord. Hillary was responding to a charge Obama (and John Edwards) had made! The force of that charge to her system is what liberated her true self and her emotions! She's a textbook convert!

Not that there's anything wrong with converts--they often make the best preachers, from St. Augustine to Peter Cartwright--but not all converts can take it upon themselves to preach. Conversion isn't contagious in the way that inspiration is. If anything, Obama's victory to turn the heart of his rival should be enough to win him the nomination--or at least another year on the tent-revival circuit.