by Frank James
More Top Picks Woder 10k Gen3
There’s a noteworthy theme in a lot of the political reporting and opinionating recently that goes something like: Sen. Barack Obama has almost been deified by many of his supporters who have taken on the aspect of cult members.
Writing on the op-ed page of today’s Los Angeles Times, Joel Stein says:
You are embarrassing yourselves. With your “Yes We Can” music video, your “Fired Up, Ready to Go” song, your endless chatter about how he’s the first one to inspire you, to make you really feel something — it’s as if you’re tacking photos of Barack Obama to your locker, secretly slipping him little notes that read, “Do you like me? Check yes or no.” Some of you even cry at his speeches. If I were Obama, and you voted for me, I would so never call you again.
Obamaphilia has gotten creepy. I couldn’t figure out if the two canvassers who came to my door Sunday had taken Ecstasy or were just fantasizing about an Obama presidency, but I feared they were going to hug me. Scarlett Johansson called me twice, asking me to vote for him. She’d never even called me once about anything else. Not even to see “The Island.”
And yesterday, Jake Tapper of ABC News had a posting that highlighted commentary similar to Stein’s, that called for Obama follows to get real.
Obama supporter Kathleen Geier writes that she’s “getting increasingly weirded out by some of Obama’s supporters. On listservs I’m on, some people who should know better – hard-bitten, not-so-young cynics, even – are gushing about Barack…
Describing various encounters with Obama supporters, she writes, “Excuse me, but this sounds more like a cult than a political campaign. The language used here is the language of evangelical Christianity – the Obama volunteers speak of ‘coming to Obama’ in the same way born-again Christians talk about ‘coming to Jesus.’…So I say, we should all get a grip, stop all this unseemly mooning over Barack, see him and the political landscape he is a part of in a cooler, clearer, and more realistic light, and get to work.”
Hate to say this, but this is a prairie fire that will have to burn itself out. Talking reason to it is not going to stop Obama mania.
When you speak to a hard-bitten, 60-plus, seen-it-all politician from Chicago and even he tells you Obama excites him in a way no other politician has, this is something you just can’t easily talk people down from.To some extent it may just be that the newness hasn’t worn off with Obama yet for many of his supporters, that it’s still a new relationship in the infatuation stage and that it’s just a matter of time before the sobering up happens.
It also may say more about the divided times and the widespread yearning for someone who can unite the country across partisan and race lines, than it says about Obama himself, that his candidacy has engendered such enthusiam.
Clearly, Obama is charismatic. It’s hard even for a reporter not to wonder when he stands in a scrum of reporters as the senator answers their questions if the sense of cool and ease coming off Obama isn’t similar to what other reporters experienced more than a generation ago in the presence of presidential candidate John F. Kennedy.
But Obama’s dealings with indicted businessman Tony Rezko and the way Obama navigated through Springfield during his days as a state senator indicate that he is a very real Chicago politician, capable of “boneheaded” (his word) misjudgment and compromise to the point of disappointing his natural progressive allies.
Furthermore, time, has a way of taking the luster off any candidate. The loyal opposition, now Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Republican Party and, should he get the nomination, the GOP alone, are and will continue to make every effort to pluck the flight feathers off Obama’s angel wings.
More Top Picks Fujitsu Ix500 Scansnap
Obama told “60 Minutes” in an interview to be aired on Sunday that he will be able to withstand the “Swiftboating” to come. Anyone who watched close up how the GOP strategists took wjat was supposed to be Sen. John Kerry’s asset in 2004–his Vietnam war record–and turned it into a liability can be forgiven for remaining skeptical on Obama’s claim.
So while Obamaphiles may currently have their man on a pedestal, it’s almost a certaintly they will be seeing less of a messiah and more a pol a year hence, or if he becomes president, a few years on, than they do presently.