A Second Hand Conjecture

Whilst most elected Republicans are still preoccupied in pledging to work with (or for) the Obama administration, Sarah Palin isn’t having any of it.

This is significant criticism, because it is vitally important that a Republican leader emerges who can command a media platform, and will articulate regular opposition to the Obama administration on national policy. Naturally, whoever does emerge to shoulder this burden will be perfectly placed to continue that opposition in the next presidential election.

There’s certainly no point in looking to the decimated and newly submissive ranks of congress for this leadership. As in 1976, political reality mandates that it must come from outside Washington. Interestingly, Palin possesses an advantage over Reagan when he sought to become this kind of external leader of the opposition: she holds political office and can reinforce her criticism with independent action, as the new pipeline with Canada demonstrates.

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Caroline Glick via Ace of Spades
Caroline Glick is an astute observer of our political situation. She is based in Jerusalem.
“McCain’s strategic grasp of the requirements for a successful
presidential race provide an important lesson for policy-makers and
political leaders.”

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(Photo: Alice E. Backer | blog)

Andrew Galasetti at Lyved is an extremely devoted admirer of Obama. While fanatical devotion can blind — Galasetti thinks for instance that the McCain celebrity charge backfired, when the polls suggest a different picture (last week Ras had +6 Obama, now it’s +1 McCain) — it can also be a benefit when you’re looking for someone to find hidden advantages in faults. Often there are adantages, particularly foreign policy advantages, wrapped up inside domestic political vulnerabilities.

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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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