Charles Krauthammer succinctly explains what many have been saying recently about Barack Obama and his campaign: It's a national swoon.
As Obama seems poised to score yet another primary victory, this one in Wisconsin on February 19, the C-word continues to rear its head in connection with the Obama phenomenon -- CULT.
He writes:
There's no better path to success than getting people to buy a free commodity.
...[A] silver-tongued freshman senator has found a way to sell hope. To get it, you need only give him your vote. Barack Obama is getting millions.
This kind of sale is hardly new. Organized religion has been offering a similar commodity -- salvation -- for millennia. Which is why the 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 "My, 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.
Democrats are worried that the Obama spell will break between the time of his nomination and the time of the election, and deny them the White House. My guess is that he can maintain the spell just past Inauguration Day. After which will come the awakening. It will be rude.
I agree with Joe Klein when he says Obama's "message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is."
Unlike Krauthammer, I have the audacity to hope that the Obama spell will break before Election Day rather than just after January 20, 2009.
For the sake of the country, I hope the awakening comes in time.
It will be quite a test for John McCain to convince the voters to buy truth when the hope that Obama is selling is so much more appealing.
4 comments:
Spot on. I'll tell you what, though: that poison sells. And I think America will buy it by the truckload in the generals. I'm here in Wisconsin, and I'm trying to recruit as many conservatives as I can to getting out the vote for Hilldog. I can't believe I'm actually doing this, but we have to win in November, and she'll be crushed my McCain. The cult of Obama, I'm afraid, would do the same to McCain.
The Obama Cult is a force to be reckoned with, no doubt about it.
Today, during Obama's appearance in Milwaukee at the Midwest Airlines Center, the blind support of his followers was evident.
I'll be posting some photos from the event later.
I get a chuckle out of who's threatened by this so called *wave* or *cult*.
When Krauthammer or Klein worries the Obama campaign is becoming all to *referential*, they are of course hearing the third person Obama speaks in as he referring to his campaign collectively.
That is wrong.
The *we* is we the people.
In order to forward a social change such as the civil rights movement, the womens movement, the ending of fruitless wars (Vietnam like conflicts), a mass move of the people is what it takes.
People got off their couches and marched for all those movements...the Moratorium was one of the finest displays of civil participation I have ever seen. People got engaged, en masse, and stayed engaged until their goals saw fruition.
It's not something I have seen in a very long time, but I do think people are sick enough of all the party politics, insider game playing, isolation of Washington, that they will actually get up off of and stay up off of the couch to change the way we govern ourselves.
All movements require a titular head. Obama struck the right chord at the right time, gave permission for folks to express their deep rage at how our government is working (or not) today.
Those comfortable with how things are will be threatened and probably see it as a cult. That's fine...there are other candidates in these races to get behind.
But to dismiss what we are seeing with Obama, to shrug off those backing him as inane sheep being pied pipered is insultingly the epitome of arrogance or ignorance as the case may be.
There are obviously an awful lot of people that see hope for a return to sanity in how we govern ourselves as a good thing.
Those that don't have perfectly good candidates to get behind.
If I understand you correctly, Murphy, your "We the people" movement is about changing the way we govern ourselves.
So what does that mean? How will Obama transform the government?
In what ways will it change and how will that change come about?
Let's not be abstract. Let's be concrete.
I think nearly every person in this country wants it to be better. Everyone wants change.
I need to know Obama's vision of better.
What IS his "mission accomplished"?
HOW do we get there?
I'd like to know how many of the thousands swooning over Obama can explain.
I don't find the movement to be threatening. It's just woefully lacking substance.
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