Posted on 02/18/2008 6:43:20 AM PST by processing please hold
The Cult of Obama
Excitement over the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is reaching unparalleled heights, as he has won all eight caucuses and primaries since Super Tuesday. His campaign is raising a million dollars a day—double the rate of Hillary Clinton’s. The Economist is calling him “a political phenomenon.”
But an increasing number of commentators—including some on the liberal side—are discussing a worrisome undercurrent in the trend: the fact that it is all about Obama the personality rather than Obama the potential president. Ignoring substance, an almost religious fervor is building in support of this untested politician.
The National Post quoted one woman at a rally saying,
“Are you kidding me? I’d walk over hot coals to vote for this man. I mean, oh, he’s just … he’s a man that can change not our country, but the world.”
In his weekly column, Charles Krauthammer assembled some disturbing tidbits:
[T]he Obama campaign has the feel of a religious revival with, as writer James Wolcott observed, a “salvational fervor” and “idealistic zeal divorced from any particular policy or cause and chariot-driven by pure euphoria.”
“We are the hope of the future,” sayeth Obama. We can “remake this world as it should be.” Believe in me and I shall redeem not just you but your country — nay, we can become “a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, and make this time different than all the rest.” …
ABC’s Jake Tapper notes the “Helter-Skelter cult-ish qualities” of “Obama worshipers,” what Joel Stein of the Los Angeles Times calls “the Cult of Obama.” Obama’s Super Tuesday victory speech was a classic of the genre. Its effect was electric, eliciting a rhythmic fervor in the audience—to such rhetorical nonsense as “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. (Cheers, applause.) We are the change that we seek.”
That was too much for Time’s Joe Klein. “There was something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism,” he wrote. “The message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is.”
You might dismiss as hyperbole the complaint by the New York Times’s Paul Krugman that “the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality.” Until you hear Chris Matthews, who no longer has the excuse of youth, react to Obama’s Potomac primary victory speech with “… I felt this thrill going up my leg.” When his MSNBC co-hosts tried to bail him out, he refused to recant. Not surprising for an acolyte who said that Obama “comes along, and he seems to have the answers. This is the New Testament.” …
Obama has an astonishingly empty paper trail. He’s going around issuing promissory notes on the future that he can’t possibly redeem. Promises to heal the world with negotiations with the likes of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Promises to transcend the conundrums of entitlement reform that require real and painful trade-offs and that have eluded solution for a generation. Promises to fund his other promises by a rapid withdrawal from an unpopular war — with the hope, I suppose, that the (presumed) resulting increase in American prestige would compensate for the chaos to follow.
The Weekly Standard calls Mr. Obama “The Magical Democrat”:
It makes one feel like a killjoy to point out that Barack Obama is merely a man, and a politician at that. At the risk of being even more of a sourpuss, one can note that, in spite of the meaning he’s already giving to so many people’s lives, Obama is a thoroughly conventional liberal.
As an aside, James Taranto printed this collection of news items about people fainting at Obama’s campaign rallies, and Breitbart tv has this clip telling the same story.
“Are you kidding me? I’d walk over hot coals to vote for this man. I mean, oh, he’s just … he’s a man that can change not our country, but the world.”
The guy's never demonstrated any talent other than talking, yet this lady buys that he's the Second Coming. This is just another reason why we need a current events test in order to vote.
You’re correct, they seem to see him as the second coming. Also to me, it’s scarily similar to Hitler’s rise.
He is a post-Christian theocratic authoritarian leftist. Perhaps Krugman and a few other liberals will look upon the Obama campaign with concern, but the majority of liberal commentators will say nothing as Obama makes the Democratic convention look like a profane charismatic revival meeting.
Sort of what we read in the Bible about how the anti-Christ will be.
“Sort of what we read in the Bible about how the anti-Christ will be.”
In the absence of believing in God, the left is looking for its Messiah.
That was Jim Jones. Jones’ church also was noted for transcending racial boundaries, for being “post racial”. When he lived in Indianapolis, then-Mayor Dick Lugar recognized him for his contributions to advancing civil rights in the city. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it also didn’t stop him from being a mass murderer.
My Bad, Jones not Johnson....
I don’t follow the appeal. I suppose I wouldn’t though in that I will invariably choose substance over style. I think everyone in their fervor to see Hillary lose, is overlooking how dangerous this guy really is and will be to the US.
Be careful what you wish for, you may just get it. Remember what we have to stop this rock-star, cult-like support is what the GOP electorate in its infinite stupidity has given us. And that is exactly one John McCain.
All his campaign stumps look like revival meetings.
"I felt this thrill going up my leg.”"
It has been surreal watching this.
He never actually says anything in his speeches. His speeches are so vapid, so empty that the listener is allowed to simply project what ever meaning they want to believe onto Obama’s words. So what ever any listener fantasizes about is what they hear Obama promising to do for them. It positively sickening to watch. We really have become this stupid a society.
Never thought I would see a politician that could out slick Slick Willie
Obama and Ahminijad may just get along fine. In his campaign for president, Ahmadenijad took a populist approach, using the catchy slogan, “It’s possible, and we can do it.” Perhaps they can do business as fellow messianic leaders. Either that or they’ll try to nuke each other as rivals.
Thats been my train of thought for quiet sometime.
If others are starting to see this as some sort of worrisome event, his rise to the top of the heap I mean by worshipers instead of voters, it's dangerous territory this country is now passing through. I'm glad others are finally starting to view him as I do.
What will we have to do next, start a stop God campaign against him?
Obama's Jesus juice is more dangerous than Jim Jones', obama has millions of followers.
That was Barney Frank, trying to see how far you'd let him go.
You said it. That's exactly what they're doing.
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