During the run-up to the 2008 election all kinds of biblical imagery surrounded Barack Obama's candidacy. Writer Ezra Klein said "He is not the Word made flesh but the triumph of the word over flesh." Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan called his neighbor the Messiah. A Danish newspaper pronounced Obama "greater than Jesus."

Well, it's starting again folks.

Yesterday, the First Lady told a Nashville audience, "I am going to be working so hard. We have an amazing story to tell. This president has brought us out of the dark and into the light." 

If her words sound familiar it's because they are.

The darkness/light trope was used a lot in the last election.

After reviewing stump speeches from 2008 it doesn't take William Faulkner to figure out what the Obamas are up to. The dark/light thing is rich in symbolism; the perfect device to deal the race card under the table.

It's also a safe bet Mrs. Obama's "us" does not refer to white Americans. More like she and Eric "my people" Holder are on the same page.

Mr. Obama's speech after he lost to Clinton in the New Hampshire primary in 2008 illustrates what's really at play here. The narrative never changes with the radicals: America's a downright mean country -- a real western heart of darkness.

You, all of you who are here tonight, all who put so much heart and soul and work into this campaign, you can be the new majority who can lead this nation out of a long political darkness.

It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: Yes, we can.

In another speech he gave in Lebanon, New Hampshire on the day of the primary, January 7, 2008 Obama suggested his followers will be struck by a luminous force guiding them to the polls.

...a light will shine down from somewhere. It will light upon you. You will experience an epiphany. And you will say to yourself, I have to vote for Barack. I have to do it.

It gets worse. In his 2010 book The Promise: President Obama , Year One, Jonathan Alter recounts a kind of transfiguration that occurred on Inauguration Day. St. John's Church on Lafayette Square was filled with dignitaries as well as the newly elected President and his family. When Bishop Vashti McKenzie, an advocate of black liberation theology, told everyone to rise, a rabbi in attendance described what he saw when he glanced over at Mr. Obama:

A beam of morning light shown [sic] through the stained-glass windows and illuminated the president-elect's face. Several of the clergy and choir on the altar who also saw it marveled afterward about the presence of the Divine.

What looks like illusion and madness to us ordinary folk, like reviving talk of Obama as Messiah after he's proven himself to be anything but, is the hallmark of the Marxist mind.

Never mess with the fundamental formula. If delusions of grandeur were good enough for Marx in 1848 they're good enough for Obama in 2012.

Read more M. Catharine Evans at Potter Williams Report