PrintJanuary 5, 2008
Obamania! Media in a tizzy over Illinois Senator
Wow.
Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it.Just who are we electing here, a President or God Almighty?
He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I've heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.
"The word over flesh?" Methinks Ezra Klien, the author of this panegyric, needs to take a cold shower or something. His piece is beyond devotional and enters the realm of worshipful.
Klien is not alone. The media has gone gaga over Obama. The astonishingly reverent coverage of his events presages even more rock star images if he were to win New Hampshire. Hillary Clinton may be about to be steamrolled not by a candidate but by a man on a white horse.
This substanceless, platitude-spouting lightweight with no foreign policy experience ("My grandmother grew up in a mud hut") is being annointed as a combination re-incarnation of Robert Kennedy and Joan d'Arc. No doubt eventually, the media will tire of building this empty suit of a candidate up to the skies.
But until then, have the barf bags ready. It's going to be a crazy ride.
