Almost Like a Spirit
Lee on Jan 18 2008 at 12:03 am | Filed under: Domestic Politics, Election 2008, Lee's Page, Uncategorized
Hotair has video of Chris Matthews talking about Barack Obama on the Tonight Show, in which he tosses objectivity to the wind and replaces it with a kind of turbid political idolatry. He suggests to us that he wouldn’t be an honest reporter if he failed to tell us about the “spiritual experience” one supposedly must have at an Obama rally. Toward that he argues that if one does not cry at said rallies, they are not American.
Charles Feldman has a quote from Democratic media strategist Dan Payne on the same themes:
“We don’t know much about him. He’s almost like a spirit. People like the feeling they get when they’re in his presence.”
(The Feldman Blog)
Between Matthews and Payne, there you have the tripartite ideology of the Obama movement: an unfocused yet visceral emotional reaction, a transcendent supernatural magnetism, and an essential enigmatic vagueness.
Looking at this as a campaign, I’m inclined to agree with the others on ASHC who have suggested that there is something subterraneously unhealthy about these characteristics in Barack’s accelerating personality cult. It’s both too easy too much to compare this combination of emotion, spirituality and ambiguity with the authoritarian personality cults. But it’s also difficult to think of leaders who predicated their entire political purposes on such animating properties, and then delivered sound leadership for their countries.
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