Did Obama Publish Prayer On Purpose?

John Hinderaker at Powerline ponders the fact that the prayer that Barack Obama inserted into the Western Wall was removed from the wall and published — an apparently sacrilegious act that has caused quite a kerfuffle.

Based on the content of the prayer, he figures, Obama might have somehow arranged to have it removed and published: The prayer "seemed to touch all the right bases", in Hinderaker's words.

Here is what I think: Barack Obama is quite aware that anything he leaves lying around, no matter how off-limits it is supposed to be, no matter how trivial, is going to be picked up and examined by somebody. I'm willing to bet that everything he carries around in his pockets is some token to burnish his image or bolster his campaign, just in case something should fall out when he gets up out of a chair.

Barack Obama didn't arrange to have his Western Wall prayer published. He was just well-aware that it probably would be, and he played it safe: No requests for God to help him overcome his attraction to Katie Couric's shoe collection, or begging forgiveness for sacrificing a goat to Satan as oblation for winning his Senate seat.

Whether or not the hopes, sentiments and deprecations he expressed in his prayer were genuine or politically motivated is of course another question. I'll just say that a person hoping to become President of the United States certainly has so many hopes, sentiments and deprecations that dovetail themselves quite nicely with the politics he is practicing that there would be no need to embellish them or come up with ones that are not genuine.

So, did Obama write that prayer knowing that people would read it? Absolutely. Did he arrange to have people read it. Nope. That simply took care of itself.

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UPDATE:

Israel Insider has on their front page the claim that

What initially seemed to be a journalistic scoop of dubious moral propriety now seems to be a case of an Israeli paper being played by the Barack Obama campaign. Maariv, the second most popular newspaper in Israel, was roundly criticized for publishing the note Obama left in the Kotel. But now a Maariv spokesperson says that publication of the note was pre-approved by the Obama campaign.

(As of this moment, the article that the lede links to seems to have been taken down.)

So, maybe Obama's campaign doesn't leave anything to chance like I assumed it would. That would be typical of modern political image management, albeit in this situation a bit tacky: When it was "My secret prayer is probably going to be published no matter what I do, so I'll be careful what I say," it was just common sense. If instead, it is "Let's make sure that my secret prayer gets published so people can get a look at my supposedly private conversation with God," it's a bit vainglorious. Breaking some Jewish canon in the process wasn't very smart either, though I'm not personally bothered by it; I can't imagine that that particular detail of this affair would be beneficial to political image management.