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.
I kinda wanted to say that myself, but I know that people would react with "elitist!" screams. Maybe Boortz has a better idea: If you pay $0-10,000 in federal taxes, you get one vote. $10,001-20,000, two votes and so on up to $50,000 and five votes. After that, no more votes. That way, only those with a vested interest in the country and who productively contribute to it have a voice in the way it's run.
I believe it should be open for discussions, sans peur et sans reproche.
There's been a bit of reproaching here on FR, I suspect some obama supporters are here.
That may be kool aid in chrissy’s cup, and he’s feeling all tingly inside.
His loins are tingling!
*snicker*
But they support these guys because they are for tax cuts and pro life (less so for McCain), both the right thing to do. And let’s not be disingenuous here...many “Christian Orthodox” would rather party and do business than take moral stands the way Evangelicals do.
His reply, 'why does he have to accomplish anything?'
UGH. And he's a lawyer to boot (hence Edwards). The world is really headed to Idiocracy. If you haven't seen that movie, its pretty stupid, but 100% right in its underlying message... we are getting dumber.
Unbelievable that anyone let alone a lawyer would say something so stupid.
I have seen Idiocracy, several times, it's a movie to laugh at, how stupid and dumb down the world had become. His name, 'Not Sure' and how he came by it was a hoot.
Nothing is showing up in your post. I’m on dial up so I’ve had to blocked may pictures or I couldn’t read a thread, it would be too slow.
It appears that the Dems have found a better demagogue than Bill Clinton. Obama puts Bill Clinton in the shade. Don’t even mention Hillary whose speeches couldn’t excite anyone even her most rabid supporters. But naturally what would one expect of Democrats but to support a pol with as thin as resume as Obama simply on his “vision” of the future. His socialist vision I mean. I’ve never seen a pol promise so much with as little chance to actually deliver.
His socialist vision I mean. I’ve never seen a pol promise so much with as little chance to actually deliver.
Maybe he'll discover the theory of everything. Giving everybody everything they want. Doesn't matter if he delivers, only if he promises too to get elected. And millions of dumba$$es will fall for it.
Of course the Dems do this socialist thing every election cycle, but I've never seen anyone peddle this stuff better than Obama. And the reason he gets away with it is because nobody (inside his party) has asked him about it, and he doesn't talk about it in his public speeches. It's all "hope" and "change" for the Obama public appearances. His actual social policy is right out of Marx.
We know the hildabeast is a marxist. Which marxist will win out?
Of course the Dems do this socialist thing every election cycle, but I've never seen anyone peddle this stuff better than Obama. And the reason he gets away with it is because nobody (inside his party) has asked him about it, and he doesn't talk about it in his public speeches.
I believe they don't ask because they already know the answer.
Obama appears to be a great stage hypnotist,
or he fits H.L. Menchen’s definition of a Demagogue to a tee, “one who will preach doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.”
Probably a mixture of both.
Good post Phil
I see that now he has the Muslims supporting him,
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