Charles Krauthammer:
Obama was the ultimate celebrity candidate. For no presidential nominee in living memory had the gap between adulation and achievement been so great.
Obama's meteoric rise was based not on issues -- there was not a dime's worth of difference between him and Hillary on issues -- but on narrative, on eloquence, on charisma.
It was inevitable. Obama had managed to stay aloft for four full years. But no one can levitate forever.
The problem is that Obama began believing in his own magical powers -- the chants, the swoons, the "we are the ones" self-infatuation.
Reagan's revolution was rooted in concrete political ideas (supply-side economics, welfare-state deregulation, national strength) that transcended one man. For Obama's movement, the man is the transcendence.
Which gave the Obama campaign a cult-like tinge.
... his triumphal declaration that history would note that night, his victory, his ascension, as "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."
That grandiloquent proclamation of universalist puffery popped the bubble. The grandiosity had become bizarre.
...One star fades, another is born.
Nailed It!
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