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.
obama admits to doing drugs, we’ll have to wait to see if Sinclair’s accusation on the other pans out.
“Polite my ass, you’re telling me to stop doing what I’m doing.”
Is English your first language? I didn’t TELL you to do a GD thing.
And Clean
That has been my ideal scenario from the beginning and I totally agree. Some of that may be countered if she were to name him V.P. I think one of them is going to have too great an ego for this to be a reality. Let's hope Her Highness can pull this off. lol
He is not only clean and articulate, but generously auriculated and a platitude dispensing savant. :)
Ummm, that isn't your leg, Matthews.
So shoot me or jail me.
There are too many on FR who are coming to the defense of obama, that doesn't sit right with me.
obama isn't just a new comer on the scene, he has worshipers following him around and putting on shows of fainting from rally to rally. That's very different from the hildabeast, she's reviled by people in her own party.
If you don't want to hear anything negative about obama, stay off threads about him.
And Clean! LOL
Just what I always wanted in a Commander in Chief!
That translates to don't say anything negative about obama until he beats the hildabeast.
LOL! Totally! He is tabula rasa, write on him whatever you “want” him to be.
I guess time will tell. I remember how the Lewinsky thing was played up to a vast right wing conspiracy until her blue dress turned up.
You’re right. He never says anything in his speeches. Some people are confusing merely having a good speaking voice with being a good speaker.
I have been following this election very closely and don’t have a clue what Obama stands for.
“”Accusing someone of being a troll is pretty serious.””
“So shoot me or jail me. There are too many on FR who are coming to the defense of obama, that doesn’t sit right with me. “
Let me just say that paranoid and hysterical is no way to go though life, PPH. Communication ended.
Promise?
We need a current events test as well as an IQ test in order to vote.
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