Sentences like this should be kept in mind when Time's top editor Rick Stengel declares "No one personifies TIME more than Nancy Gibbs...As a journalist, Nancy is timely and timeless."
He invited his exhausted audience to take a holiday from Lewinsky and spend a refreshing hour and 12 minutes feeling like a country again. For once the talk on the screen was not of oral sex, but of our lives and fortunes and sacred happiness. He had become all human nature, the best and the worst, standing there naked in a sharp, dark suit, behind the TelePrompTer. That which does not kill him only makes him stronger, and his poll numbers went through the roof....That may have been a miracle, but it was no accident: Americans are less puritanical and more forgiving than the cartoon version suggests, and this President is never better than in his worst moments." — Time magazine Senior Editor Nancy Gibbs, February 9, 1998 issue.
Gibbs clearly doesn't like her presidents to be overtly religious. She declared "We've seen what happens when it serves a president's interest to flaunt his faith -- which is almost inevitably does, since every poll affirms that Americans want their leader to submit to some higher power." So what happens? She never elaborated. She lamented "Religious tests, a constitutional taboo, are a political tradition."
Her liberal hero, naturally, is John F. Kennedy, who declared in 1960 that he came to Protestant pastors to talk about "now what kind of church I believe in , for that should be important only to me -- but what kind of America I believe in." She insisted "That was an America where church and state were absolutely separate and priests and preachers did not tell parishioners how to vote."
Clearly, Gibbs doesn't really mean that progressive Reverends like Jesse Jackson (or even Reverend Wright) can't tell their parishioners how to vote. She simply doesn't like it when priests and preachers tell parishioners not to vote straight-ticket Democrat, like most well-coached Time magazine staffers.