Hope's For Dopes

one of the more revealing articles about where, once all the rhetoric is through and the governing begins, we might find ourselves, as predicted through the experiences of Emerson through Barack's potential "wrang wrang" Deval Patrick (via Slate) by Fred Siegel, who is not the fashion guy

Yes, We Can’t

From Ralph Waldo Emerson to Deval Patrick, the politics of hope have been a bust.

Aging baby boomers see in Barack Obama’s down-the-line liberal voting record the promise of a left-wing revival. The college students and twentysomethings of the Millennial Generation see in him a way of pushing the quarrelsome, narcissistic baby boomers off the stage. Someone is bound to be disappointed by this extraordinary performance artist. But what both the boomers and the Millennials share is a desire to be part of what Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing in the 1840s, called “the politics of hope.” Emerson wrote during a time of numerous experiments in utopian living. Obama—whose candidacy rests upon a standard utopian dichotomy between the earthly evils of poverty, injustice, war, and partisanship, and the promise of the world to come if we allow him to rescue us—appeals to the same Elysian strain in American and Western political life, largely in remission since 1980, when the 1960s truly ended.

America’s founding fathers were a famously hard-headed lot; they understood that government had to be structured to remedy the “defects of better motives.” Since self-serving interest groups—or factions, as Federalist 10 calls them—were an unavoidable element of liberty, interest could only be checked by competing interest. But while this insight is the main stem of our political tradition, there is another, albeit punctuated, branch—a utopianism that derives from the millenarianism of the sects that emerged from the Protestant Reformation and eventually populated America. “Utopian . . . ideas,” notes Daniel Flynn in his new history of the American Left, are as “American as Plymouth Rock.” This is why, as Sixties activist Bo Burlingham put it, “the Left bobs up and down in American history, a battered and leaky craft which often disappears beneath the tide, but somehow never sinks.”

In the wake of bloody utopian experiments in 1930s Europe, a slew of erudite authors launched compelling attacks on them. Jacob Talmon, Karl Popper, Raymond Aaron, Czeslaw Milosz, and Hannah Arendt laid waste to the historical, philosophical, sociological, and literary assumptions that supported communism and fascism. But their arguments didn’t endure, despite their power. By the mid-1960s, utopianism had again taken hold, and its lure was such that even Arendt, once a vocal opponent, found herself drawn to the religion of politics. Propelled by her disdain for America in general and the Vietnam War in particular, as well as the promise, as she saw it, of worker-control experiments in Europe, she effectively reversed much of her earlier writings.

She wasn’t alone. In 1949, Arthur Schlesinger had published The Vital Center, the canonical statement of disillusioned, empirical, and anti-utopian post–World War II liberalism. Schlesinger praised “the empirical temper” and a realistic sense of man’s limitations that recognized that “freedom means conflict.” Tracing the shared assumptions behind Brook Farm—the famous American utopian experiment of the 1840s—and the Soviet Union, he distanced liberalism from an optimism born of eighteenth-century rationalism and a nineteenth-century romanticism about progress, which left “too many unprepared for the mid-twentieth century.” Democracy, he wrote, “brooks no worship” of great leaders because “it knows that no man is that good.” And Schlesinger rebuked the leftists who, admiring the USSR, couldn’t believe that “ugly facts underlie fair words.” It was an intellectual tour de force.

But a little more than a decade later, Schlesinger—romanced by John F. Kennedy—walked away from these arguments. His admiration for the liberalism of a “moderate pessimism about man” was replaced by hero-worship and a sense of the dashing, aristocratic, articulate Kennedy as someone who could transcend standard political categories. Kennedy’s untimely death canonized the hard-nosed Massachusetts pol—with a mixed record at best as our first celebrity president—as JFK, a Lincoln-like martyr to civil rights, the King of Camelot who, if he had lived, would have made all right with the world. This Kennedy passed into Democratic Party legend and still inspires some today: remember Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign ads, featuring a picture of the young Clinton visiting the White House with a group of young student leaders and shaking hands with Kennedy. Kennedy, the ads implied, was passing the torch.

Obama, the celebrity-like candidate drawing on his generational appeal and noble bearing, fits better into Kennedy’s robes than Clinton did. Unlike Kennedy, who didn’t think of himself in messianic terms, Obama seems short on irony. Still, for lovelorn boomers and for youngsters who’ve known only the failures of the Bush years, Obama promises a Camelot-like reenchantment with politics. “I’ve been following politics since I was about five,” says TV host Chris Mathews. “I’ve never seen anything like this. This is bigger than Kennedy. [Obama] comes along, and he seems to have the answers, he’s the New Testament.” In this view, just as Kennedy’s victory in 1960 brought the country out of its Eisenhower-era stupor and put the Catholic question to bed for good, so an Obama victory will reenergize our politics and bring an end to poverty and racial division.

Hillary Clinton has searched in vain for a way to combat Obama’s appeal. In the recent Austin debate, she criticized Obama for borrowing generously from the speeches of his good friend and coeval Deval Patrick, the first African-American governor of Massachusetts. “Lifting whole passages from someone else’s speeches,” she challenged in the debate’s one charged moment, “is not change you can believe in, it’s change you can Xerox.” Clinton’s arrow here was not aimed so much at plagiarism—all candidates borrow heavily from each other and from past campaigns—as at Obama’s claim to authenticity. But with the press, on both left and right, all but openly rooting for Obama, little came of her attack; more important, the press missed the true importance of the Patrick comparison.

Bay State journalist Rick Holmes describes Obama and Patrick, fellow Harvard Law School graduates, as “peas in a pod.” Patrick is the Obama campaign’s national cochair. Obama’s presidential campaign has modeled itself on Patrick’s gubernatorial campaign. Patrick’s 2006 campaign slogan was “Together we can,” while Obama’s is “Yes we can.” The brilliant Chicago political operative David Axelrod has managed both men’s campaigns. Both candidates have made persistent appeals to “the politics of hope.”

So Clinton’s criticism seems an opportune moment to ask how Patrick’s inspirational rhetoric has translated into governing a state where Democrats control both houses of the legislature—the likely scenario for Obama, too, should he take office. Patrick’s governorship is the closest thing we have to a preview of the “politics of hope”—and that governorship has been a failure to date. As Joan Vennochi observes in the Boston Globe, “Democrats who control the Legislature ignored virtually every major budget and policy initiative presented by a fellow Democrat.” Patrick’s record in office, Vennochi concludes, “shows that it can be hard to get beyond being the face of change, to actually changing politics.” His stock has sunk so markedly that Hillary Clinton carried the state handily against Obama in the Democratic primary despite, or perhaps because of, Patrick’s support for his political doppelgänger.

In one area, however, Patrick has achieved some of his goals. In thrall to the state’s teachers’ unions, he has partly rolled back the most successful educational reforms in the country. Most states gamed the federal testing requirements that were part of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act. But Massachusetts, thanks to Republican governors William Weld and Mitt Romney, created the Office of Educational Quality and Accountability to ensure that the state’s testing methods conformed closely to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—federal tests that are the gold standard for measuring educational outcomes. In 2007, Massachusetts became the first state to achieve top marks in all four categories of student achievement. One of Patrick’s first efforts as governor was to eliminate the Office of Educational Quality and Accountability.

Patrick hasn’t delivered reform, much less the transformation that both he and Obama promise. This should come as no surprise. Obama’s utopian vision of transcending the interests that make up the fabric of our democracy is unlikely to fare any better than the “politics of hope” did in Emerson’s time. The key question at hand is whether Obama’s Edenic bubble bursts before or after the election.

and from the Boston Globe an article about Turning Hope Into Action that looks at Deval's time in office so far, and I can see the Obama administration doing the same thing

Cynics get things done if for no other reason than they don't have their heads in the clouds and so know what it looks like on the ground

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“Barack Called Me an Asshole”

is it perhaps possible that Barack isn’t some deity sent down to save us all in our darkest moment but is actually just a man and a [gasp!] politician?
(But messiahs aren't supposed to curse!)


Here is one reporter’s heroic tale of dealing with “the meanie"
as a young reporter covering a hungry state legislator It seems that the real Barack emerges

some excerpts

It's not quite eight in the morning and Barack Obama is on the phone screaming at me. He liked the story I wrote about him a couple weeks ago, but not this garbage.

Months earlier, a reporter friend told me she overheard Obama call me an asshole at a political fund-raiser. Now here he is blasting me from hundreds of miles away for a story that just went online but hasn't yet hit local newsstands.

It's the first time I ever heard him yell, and I'm trembling as I set down the phone. I sit frozen at my desk for several minutes, stunned.

I was flipping through right-wing rants on AM radio. Dennis Praeger was railing against Michelle Obama for her clumsy comment on being proud of her country for the first time.

Praeger went on to call her husband a blank slate. There's no record to look at, he complained, unless you lived in Barack Obama's old state Senate district.

Well, I lived and worked in that district for three years — nearly half Obama's tenure in the Illinois Legislature. D-13, the district was called, and it spanned a large swath of the city's poor, black, crime-­ridden South Side.

It was 2000 and I was a young, hungry reporter at the Hyde Park Herald and Lakefront Outlook community newspapers earning $19,000 a year covering politics and crime.

I talked with Obama on a regular basis — a couple times a month, at least. I'd ask him about his campaign-finance reports, legislation he was sponsoring and various local issues. He wrote an occasional column published in our papers.

Then, in 2002, dissatisfaction with President Bush and Republicans on the national and local levels led to a Democratic sweep of nearly every lever of Illinois state government. For the first time in 26 years, Illinois Democrats controlled the governor's office as well as both legislative chambers.

The white, race-baiting, hard-right Republican Illinois Senate Majority Leader James "Pate" Philip was replaced by Emil Jones Jr., a gravel-voiced, dark-skinned African-American known for chain-smoking cigarettes on the Senate floor.

Jones had served in the Illinois Legislature for three decades. He represented a district on the Chicago South Side not far from Obama's. He became Obama's ­kingmaker.

Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city's most popular black call-in radio ­program.

I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:

"He said, 'Cliff, I'm gonna make me a U.S. Senator.'"

"Oh, you are? Who might that be?"

"Barack Obama."

Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.

"I took all the beatings and insults and endured all the racist comments over the years from nasty Republican committee chairmen," State Senator Rickey Hendon, the original sponsor of landmark racial profiling and videotaped confession legislation yanked away by Jones and given to Obama, complained to me at the time. "Barack didn't have to endure any of it, yet, in the end, he got all the credit.

"I don't consider it bill jacking," Hendon told me. "But no one wants to carry the ball 99 yards all the way to the one-yard line, and then give it to the halfback who gets all the credit and the stats in the record book."

During his seventh and final year in the state Senate, Obama's stats soared. He sponsored a whopping 26 bills passed into law — including many he now cites in his presidential campaign when attacked as inexperienced.

It was a stunning achievement that started him on the path of national politics — and he couldn't have done it without Jones.

Before Obama ran for U.S. Senate in 2004, he was virtually unknown even in his own state. Polls showed fewer than 20 percent of Illinois voters had ever heard of Barack Obama.

Jones further helped raise Obama's profile by having him craft legislation addressing the day-to-day tragedies that dominated local news ­headlines.

For instance. Obama sponsored a bill banning the use of the diet supplement ephedra, which killed a Northwestern University football player, and another one preventing the use of pepper spray or pyrotechnics in nightclubs in the wake of the deaths of 21 people during a stampede at a Chicago nightclub. Both stories had received national attention and extensive local coverage.

I spoke to Jones earlier this week and he confirmed his conversation with Kelley, adding that he gave Obama the legislation because he believed in Obama's ability to negotiate with Democrats and Republicans on divisive issues.

So how has Obama repaid Jones?

Last June, to prove his commitment to government transparency, Obama released a comprehensive list of his earmark requests for fiscal year 2008. It comprised more than $300 million in pet projects for Illinois, including tens of millions for Jones's Senate district.

Shortly after Jones became Senate president, I remember asking his view on pork-barrel spending.

I'll never forget what he said:

"Some call it pork; I call it steak."

Hyde Park was the most racially integrated neighborhood in a city with a long, tortured history of segregation. Along 53rd Street, the neighborhood's main commercial corridor, chess players filled the parks, student activists chanted political slogans and women clad in bright colors and elaborate headwraps sang church hymns while strolling the sidewalks.

I would sometimes sit smoking on the fire escape outside my office and feel like I'd wandered into a Spike Lee film.

The communities surrounding Hyde Park were predominantly black and impoverished, marked by high crime, boarded-up storefronts and vacant lots. In some residential areas, banks and grocery stores were several miles away.

On the stump, Obama has frequently invoked his experiences as a community organizer on the Chicago South Side in the early 1990s, when he passed on six-figure salary offers at corporate law firms after graduating from Harvard Law School to direct a massive voter-registration drive.

But, as a state senator, Obama evaded leadership on a host of critical community issues, from historic preservation to the rapid demolition of nearby public-housing projects, according to many South Siders.

Harold Lucas, a veteran South Side community organizer who remembers when Obama was "just a big-eared kid fresh out of school," says he didn't finally decide to support Obama's presidential bid until he was actually inside the voting booth on Super Tuesday.

"I'm not happy about the quality of life in my community," says Lucas, who now heads a black-heritage tourism business in Chicago. "As a local elected official, he had a primary role in that."

In addition to Hyde Park, Obama also represented segments of several South Side neighborhoods home to the nation's richest African-American cultural history outside of Harlem.

Before World War II, the adjacent Bronzeville community was known as the "Black Metropolis," attracting African-American migrants seeking racial equality and economic opportunity from states to the south such as Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

Storied jazz clubs such as Gerri's Palm Tavern regularly hosted Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Josephine Baker and many others. In the postwar era, blues legends Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and B.B. King all regularly gigged in cramped juke joints such as the Checkerboard Lounge.

When the City of Chicago seized the 70-year-old Gerri's Palm Tavern by eminent domain in 2001, sparking citywide protests, Obama was silent. And he offered no public comments when the 30-year owner of the Checkerboard Lounge was forced to relocate a couple years later.

Even in Hyde Park, Obama declined to take a position on a years-long battle waged by hundreds of local community activists fighting against the city's plan to replace the historic limestone seawall along Lake Michigan — a popular spot to sunbathe and swim — with concrete steps.

It would be comparable to representing Barton Creek in Austin, and sidestepping any discussion about conservation.

Obama's aloofness on key community issues for years frustrated Lucas and many other South Siders. Now they believe he was just afraid of making political enemies or being pigeonholed as a black candidate.

Though it didn't make national news, Obama inflamed many residents in his old state Senate district last March when he endorsed controversial Chicago alderman Dorothy Tillman in a runoff election.

Flamboyant and unpredictable, Tillman is perhaps best known for once pulling a pistol from her purse and brandishing it around at a city council meeting. The ward she represented for 22 years, which included historic Bronzeville, comprised the city's largest concentration of vacant lots.

Just three months before Obama made his endorsement, the Lakefront Outlook community newspaper ran a three-part investigative series exposing flagrant crony­ism and possible tax-law violations that centered on Tillman and her biggest pet project, a taxpayer-funded cultural center built across the street from her ward office that had been hemorrhaging money since its inception.

The series won a national George Polk Award, among the most coveted prizes in journalism. Not bad for a 12-page rag with a circulation of 12,000 and no Web site. I had already left the Outlook and had nothing to do with the project.

In the end, Tillman lost the election despite Obama's endorsement, which critics said countered his calls for clean government. Obama told the Chicago Tribune that he had backed Tillman because she was an early supporter of his 2004 U.S. Senate campaign.

Many speculate Obama only bothered to weigh in on a paltry city council election during his presidential campaign as a gesture to Chicago's powerful Mayor Richard M. Daley, a Tillman supporter. Even so, Obama should have remained neutral, says Timuel Black, a historian and City Colleges of Chicago professor emeritus who lived in Obama's state Senate district.

"That was not a wise decision," Black says. "It was poor judgment on his part. He was operating like a politician trying to win the next step up."

Obama has spent his entire political career trying to win the next step up. Every three years, he has aspired to a more powerful political position.

He was just 35 when in 1996 he won his first bid for political office. Even many of his staunchest supporters, such as Black, still resent the strong-arm tactics Obama employed to win his seat in the Illinois Legislature.

Obama hired fellow Harvard Law alum and election law expert Thomas Johnson to challenge the nominating petitions of four other candidates, including the popular incumbent, Alice Palmer, a liberal activist who had held the seat for several years, according to an April 2007 Chicago Tribune report.

Obama found enough flaws in the petition sheets — to appear on the ballot, candidates needed 757 signatures from registered voters living within the district — to knock off all the other Democratic contenders. He won the seat unopposed.

"A close examination of Obama's first campaign clouds the image he has cultivated throughout his political career," wrote Tribune political reporters David Jackson and Ray Long. "The man now running for president on a message of giving a voice to the voiceless first entered public office not by leveling the playing field, but by clearing it."

At the time, the Illinois media had fallen head-over-heels in love with Obama and his squeaky-clean image. "As pedigrees go, there is not a finer one among the Democratic candidates," the Chicago Tribune gushed in its endorsement.

All this predated TV pundit Chris Matthews's more recent comment that Obama's speeches send chills up his legs.

"He's been given a pass," says Harold Lucas, the community organizer in Chicago. "His career has been such a meteoric rise that he has not had the time to set a record."

A week after my profile of Obama was published, I called some of my contacts in the Illinois Legislature. I ran through a list of black Chicago lawmakers who had worked with Obama, and was surprised to learn that many resented him and had supported other candidates in the U.S. Senate election.

"Anybody but Obama," the late state Representative Lovana Jones told me at the time.

State Representative Monique Davis, who attended the same church as Obama and co-sponsored several bills with him, also did not support his candidacy. She complained of feeling overshadowed by Obama.

"I was snubbed," Davis told me. "I felt he was shutting me out of history."

The morning after the story was posted online, I arrived early at my new offices. I hadn't taken my coat off when the phone rang. It was Obama.

The article began, "It can be painful to hear Ivy League-bred Barack Obama talk jive."

Obama told me he doesn't speak jive, that he doesn't say the words "homeboy" or "peeps."

It seemed so silly; I thought for sure he was joking. He wasn't.

He said the black legislators I cited in the story were off-base, and that they couldn't have gotten the bills passed without him.

I started to speak, and he shouted me down.

He said he liked the other story I wrote.

I asked if there was anything factually inaccurate about the latest story.

He repeated that his former colleagues couldn't have passed the bills without him.

He asked why I wrote this story, then cut me off when I started to answer.

He said he should have been given a chance to respond.

I told him I had requested an interview through his communications director.

He said I should have called his cell phone.

I reminded him that he had asked me months ago to stop calling his cell phone due to his busier schedule.

He said again that I should have called his cell phone.

Of course a lot of this is old news but I'm hopeful that this time around people actually pick up on it

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Even Jesus Was Questioned More Than Barack

But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came.

25 The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the LORD. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe (John 20:24-25)

And it’s not like I’m comparing Barack Obama to Jesus Christ, but…

Here’s Dan Balz (hehe) of the Washington Post’s take

The focus will be on Hillary Clinton tonight when she and Barack Obama meet here for their last debate before next week's primaries in Ohio and Texas. But should it be Obama who comes under closer questioning?

The political community and the press are consumed, understandably, by the horse race. Obama is at worst tied with Clinton in Texas and, while he still trails in Ohio, he has narrowed Clinton's once-hefty margin.

Two new national polls out Tuesday morning show Obama now leading Clinton among Democrats by double digits for the first time in this long nomination battle (though some other national polls show Obama and Clinton running much closer).

Pollsters know that if those national numbers are moving rapidly away from Clinton, Ohio is not far behind. In past general elections, the Buckeye State has come close to mirroring the final outcome, and it's likely that Democrats here reflect overall national trends as well.

All this spells big trouble for Clinton, whose advisers know the consequences of losing both states next week. If that were to happen, there would be a rising chorus within the Democratic establishment for her to end her candidacy and embrace Obama for the good of the party. Even a split decision may not be enough to prevent a groundswell for shutting down the Democratic contest. Certainly Bill Clinton believes that.

Pre-debate talk has been consumed with the question of which Clinton will show up here in Cleveland -- the magnanimous candidate from last week's Texas debate or the angry Clinton who demanded on Saturday that Obama meet her to answer questions about his conduct during the primaries and caucuses.

Much, obviously, rides on her performance, but rarely has a debate truly changed the state of the race. The clear exception was the Philadelphia debate in late October, when Clinton stumbled over the issue of driver's licenses for illegal immigrants and opened herself up to attacks from her rivals that ultimately helped Obama. What Clinton needs may be less a stellar performance on her own part and more one by Obama that raises, in dramatic fashion, questions about his fitness to be president or his positions on important issues.

In what could be a decisive week in the Democratic campaign, the rising candidate is receiving accolades for big crowds, the enthusiasm of his supporters, his apparent ability to inspire a new generation to become active in politics and his facility to have captured the desire for change after eight years of the Bush presidency and more than a decade of polarized politics.

Those are not insignificant accomplishments, but more than that will be required to actually win the presidency in November and then to govern this still-divided country. Which is why Obama ought to face rigorous questioning in these final days before Ohio and Texas.

Can he truly be the candidate of MoveOn.org and red-state politicians alike? Have those at different ends of the Democratic political spectrum attributed to him positions -- on issues ranging from Iraq to health care to the economy -- that are compatible with their own views, but not with the other's?

Is there any major issue upon which he parts company with the big labor unions, or has he adopted their agenda in totality? More broadly, where has he shown a willingness to take on some of his own party's constituencies, and if he's not willing to do so, how can he suggest that he can bring Republicans and independents into a governing coalition?

Does his anti-NAFTA rhetoric of the past few weeks reflect his true feelings about trade, or has this been a mostly tactical exercise to attack Clinton? Is he turning his back on what has been a general consensus on trade issues and turning toward a significantly more protectionist stance for the United States?

What are his real priorities were he to become president? Ending the war, certainly, but exactly how? Health care for all Americans within his first term, though with how much compromise with the Republicans to get it done? Beyond that, where will he focus his attention in his first year in office?

When would he take on the entitlement challenges of Social Security and Medicare? What does he really think about budget deficits and fiscal discipline? What would he give up to lower the deficit, or does he not think that that matters? What taxes would he raise, other than rolling back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which would largely be eaten up paying for health care?

If President Bush failed to change the tone in Washington, in part because he sought to govern as a conservative, would a President Obama be prepared not to govern as the liberal he has been in the Illinois and U.S. senates in order to change politics in Washington, as he has promised?

Obama's success against Clinton to date speaks to his considerable gifts as a politician, but that success does not wash away hard questions that he, or anyone else who seeks to lead the country, should face at such a challenging time.

A really good article all around but I’m surprised the Obamacans haven’t denounced Balz yet. I mean this article is indicative of a pre-Barack political mindset- who needs to actually have the presidential frontrunner answer questions about, y'know issues when he speaks so pretty? it's that kind of dissent that should not be tolerated in this New America.
To question Barack is to question Hope and Progress and the Future itself.
Plus every time you do question Barack a kitten dies- you're not a kitten killer, are you?

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Accomplishments? Who Needs 'Em?!

if there's one thing that this election cycle has proved is that you don't need silly little things like "experience" or "any legislative accomplishments" when you're young and cool and can say other people's words in a pleasing manner

Hannity & Colmes asking Obama supporters if they can name a single accomplishment of the Sun God Barack Obama


and Chris Matthews, in a shocking change from his HUGE man crush on Barack, ask Texas State Senator Kirk Watson if he as a campaign rep could name any legislative accomplishments of The Obama


but but Barack speaks so pretty! and says "Hope" and "Change" and We" a lot!

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Even I've Been Proud of America

So I’m sure by now you’ve seen or heard about this

when I first heard about it I didn't think it was that big a deal but then I thought about it more and it actually really pissed me off
Good job Michelle it takes your husband getting close to becoming President to get you to be proud of America. Nothing has made you proud of your country, like when you went to Harvard and Princeton and you looked back a few generations to where your ancestors where and where you had come to and though even for a fleeting instance that only in America could this happen?
As for me even though I hate America sometimes to the point of sedition even I as a black transgender socialist I’ve been proud of America ; Like after September 11th when the whole country came together, during AmeriCorps going all over and seeing the amazing things that people can and will do for no real reward, every Olympics hearing the National Anthem, reading stories about soliders who believe in America enough to go and fight and die for it, seeing images of new citizens, people in their 90s whose life long goal was to become United States citizens. I'm proud that for a lot of people even if the reality of America doesn't reach the ideasl there is that ideal of America. And that bloodless exchange of power that happens every 4 or eight years, sure we may take that for granted but look at Kenya for instance.

I believe in America. Being proud of your country doesn't necessarily mean being proud of your government or leaders it also means being proud of those "everyday" people.

or as John Podhoretz points out

Really proud of her country for the first time? Michelle Obama is 44 years old. She has been an adult since 1982. Can it really be there has not been a moment during that time when she felt proud of her country? Forget matters like the victory in the Cold War; how about only things that have made liberals proud — all the accomplishments of inclusion? How about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1991? Or Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s elevation to the Supreme Court? Or Carol Moseley Braun’s election to the Senate in 1998? How about the merely humanitarian, like this country’s startling generosity to the victims of the tsunami? I’m sure commenters can think of hundreds more landmarks of this sort. Didn’t she even get a twinge from, say, the Olympics

Sure especially in the past 8 years America has sucked…but it hasn’t sucked like other countries’ worst 8 years
In fact as much as I hate to admit it and like to think I’m so bored of the U.S.A. and will renounce my citizenship for some socialist paradise I could never do that just because I do have some strange pride in being American. It’s my country right or wrong but I have no problem calling out what I think my country is doing wrong. Love the right and fight to make the wrong become right as well.

My country tis of thee, sweet land of Liberty, of thee we sing
land where my fathers died,land of the pilgrims' pride, from every mountainside let freedom ring.

And with statements like that from Michelle does she really think this barack worship and love in will continue for conservatives and independents many of whom did and still do despise Hillary for her manner. Good luck with that


Are there no patriots left?

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Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too

Consider the fact that
Maybe you've been brainwashed too
Many will tell you otherwise
I bet you trust your bank
Just wait until it tanks
Your parents had it planned
We're almost like them?
Fun, racist professional sports
Management gets the real rewards
Multi-national owned evening news
If we believe we're fools
You watch 4.5 hours of t.v a day
And we should listen to what you say?
Opinions on life and the world
You eat at the Hard Rock abroad and disrespect your girl
Sexism is so ingrained
that women get the blame
Is it smug middle-class satisfaction you peddle?
Better hope your car don't break down in the Ghetto
Rich companies lobby best
Use their products, prepare to lose a breast
Why your sick mother's health insurance got
"Accidentally" cancelled is no mystery
Somebody's paying the government a lot
To have access to everybody's medical history
Greedy banks bought all the farms
Chemical food, aren't our lives charmed
Teenagers baited, their money spent
With credit cards at twenty percent
Too broke to worry about the loan
Their funkin turning off your phone
And politics, a f***ing joke
Right and left; they're both a hoax
Just hope the "international" markets don't crash!
Rock 'n' Roll! Some truth? Alas!
Careerist cowards sucking ass
Is real investigative reporting dead?
Of course, but keep watching your CNN
The glitz, the glamor, all jokes aside
If a sponsor pays enough, they'd turn a blind eye
On third world genocide
"Bro, don't get heavy, the bills are paid!"
Twice a week (missionary style) we all get laid
Middle management goes first, you're out on your ass
Most ignorance is bred at home
Good Christian families? then why condone
Petty hatred of anythng different or new
The fat girl hung herself in June
No love at home, they thought she was strong
Her classmates made her up her own song
"Piggy Peggy ate everyone's pie"
"The kids moved on," one teacher cried
The kids switched targets
The week after she died
Well? human nature won't change much
Unless we make a shameful bunch
Of those we see so glaringly
Who show hate, ignorance, and hypocracy
Don't be a coward - make a stand!
Get in their face - act like a ham
Let people know it's not PC
To be greedy and judgemental under the guise of religion and democracy
Get loud and stand up every time
If you even give a f*** about mankind
Cuz if human nature don't evolve soon
Don't kid yourself, you're f***ing doomed!
Don't run away from change and growth
Let's start right now, "I take the oath!"
But first accept one simple truth
That maybe you've been brainwashed too

3:40- 5:40


Maybe, just maybe you’ve been brainwashed too.
Charisma- a certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which s/he is "set apart" from ordinary people and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These as such are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as divine in origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader

Generally, personality cults are most common in regimes with totalitarian systems of government, that seek to radically alter or transform society according to revolutionary new ideas. Often, a single leader becomes associated with this revolutionary transformation, and he becomes treated as a benevolent "guide" for the nation, without whom the transformation to a better future cannot occur.

The Charisma Mandate

“What is troubling about the campaign is that it’s gone beyond hope and change to redemption,” said Sean Wilentz
“It’s posing as a figure who is the one person who will redeem our politics. And what I fear is, that ends up promising more from politics than politics can deliver.”

From the day Mr. Obama announced his candidacy, he has billed it as a movement, and himself as the agent of generational change

Accounts of the campaign’s “Camp Obama” sessions, to train volunteers, have a revivalist flavor. Volunteers are urged to avoid talking about policy to potential voters, and instead tell of how they “came” to Mr. Obama.

“To confuse this with Teddy Roosevelt or J.F.K. or F.D.R. is to make a fundamental historical error,” he said. “It’s confusing the offer of leadership with the offer of redemption. One offers specific programs, the other is hope and change. Certainly F.D.R. gave hope, but he was going to do it through these various programs.

“If you don’t talk about issues in great detail, if you do it in a way that is not the centerpiece of your campaign, of your rhetoric, then you become a blank screen,” Mr. Wilentz said. “Everybody thinks you are the vehicle of their hopes.”

New Radicals- Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too [download]



Barack Obama lives for our sins and would die for them as well

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Letters to the (Probable) President

from a current longtime supporter as told through the L.A. Times

I'm enclosing my third donation to your campaign because I believe strongly in your candidacy. But please, before you cash my check, consider my concerns:

I'm a University of Chicago graduate student, and I was your constituent when you were a state senator and when you became a U.S. senator. I know your strengths as a genuine progressive with a vision rooted in social justice movements and a trenchant critique of our political system. But I've lived in Southern California for the last few years, and as you saw on Feb. 5, a lot of people in California and around the country are unable to see in you what your current constituents do. Please stand up and distinguish yourself!

I hear smart, progressive, well-educated, politically engaged people out here saying - over and over - that you and Sen. Hillary Clinton are essentially the same. Even while giving you an enthusiastic endorsement, the Los Angeles Times recently stated that the two Democratic front-runners are "a hairsbreadth apart" on policy. I believe you are close on major policy issues but far apart on fundamental principles: executive power, financial transparency and ethics, philosophy of foreign diplomacy, commitment to reforming racist aspects of the criminal justice system, commitment to the 1st Amendment and a perspective that comes from community organizing rather than from corporate power and insider politics. My friends tell me, "You must know that from living in Chicago, because I'm not hearing that in the debates or in the campaign speeches."

Second, these smart progressive people are getting really cynical about the rhetoric of "hope" and "uniting people" when it's not backed up by substance. And there I have to sympathize with them. Hope is an empty diversion without substantive, original arguments on issues. When will you discuss rebuilding New Orleans? Can you offer creative thinking on the Iraq war as it currently exists, instead of just reminding people you opposed it years ago? Why don't you demonstrate a respectful, nuanced view of the Middle East instead of referring to the "the terrorists," as you did in a recent debate? How do you envision the United States' role in Africa's many dire problems and conflicts? How do you plan to fix our decrepit infrastructure and invigorate the economy in just and environmentally responsible ways? Will you argue for the value of a well-regulated, domestically produced food supply, favoring produce over commodity crops, for our safety and environmental health? What are your positions on international trade agreements? Do you have creative ideas for generating more affordable housing in our cities? And how will you handle the responsibilities of the presidency when you can't unite and persuade, as will inevitably happen sometimes?

When I express my support for your candidacy, people ask me these questions, and I can't answer them on your behalf. When I can't answer, I wonder if I too should be more skeptical of your visionary-but-vague rhetoric.

It's too late for me to sway any more California voters than I already did (and I swayed plenty to vote for you). But it's not too late for you to stand up and do it yourself in the primaries still to come. Please - we need you, yes, but we also need to know why to need you.

With continued commitment to you and your candidacy for president,

Sarah M. Miller

and one from a "young, hip, cynical former Obamaniac" (who sounds a little like me...if I had ever been sucked into The Hope that is)

Dear Barack:

I know it's kind of lame to break up with you on Valentine's Day. And on the Internet to boot. But it's also kind of ironic. And that's what I need to tell you. As an ironic, contrarian, so-hip-it-hurts Gen X-er, I just can't love you anymore. I can't like you because … because, well, everyone else does. And suddenly supporting you just seems soooo last week.

Last week, my hip friends were all thronging stadiums and manning phone banks for you. Now they're all blogging against you and downing water and Tylenol like they've just done 12 Obama shooters in 20 minutes and then barfed in the cloakroom.

I know this is going to sound strange, but it's not you, Barack, it's me. Really it always was me, but now it's really, really about me. I don't know when we started to feel weird supporting you, but: My friend Hanna thinks it started with that "Yes We Can," video. I mean, last week I was totally crying watching it. Now just thinking about how choked up I got gives me the creeps. I think I felt something at the time, but even if I did, I'm pretty sure I don't want to feel it anymore. Feeling inspired is soooo early-February.

Or maybe it started when everyone began madly posting last week about how you are not the Messiah. And that got me thinking. Then, when commentators started accusing me of being a venomous drone in a "cult of personality," I just needed to get out. I mean cults are soooo 1970s. And cults of personality? So totally first century.

Cult or no cult, this week I just started getting really confused about you. I mean, when people start to say that your strengths are actually weaknesses? That just makes sense, if you really think about it. I mean, what's the point of being such an inspirational speaker if all you can do is give inspirational speeches? Do better, Barack. I mean, do worse!

So I've been thinking a lot about our time together, Barack. Supporting you wholeheartedly was the best damn 14 days of my life. I liked you before liking you was cool. But now it is, so it's not. Know what I mean? At least now I can go back to being flip and cynical and edgy again. I bet you wish you could, too.

But don't be sad! My friend has a Web site: IlikedObamabeforehewascool.com. It's not much of a site, but it sure is funny. As for me, well, I just can't be comfortable liking you now that liking you is like liking an iPhone. Maybe if you can be more of a jerk or play hard to get or something? Maybe you could uninspire some of your fans? Maybe then I could believe in you again. I'm hopeful. Or at least just hopeful enough to still be cool.

Me, I'm going to roll up my sleeves and start working for the Dennis Kucinich 2012 campaign. Edgy, no? And if things start really truly going south for you, I want you to know that you can count on my future fleeting and conditional support in the months and years ahead. Yes, you can.

and finally one from the Media

Dear Barack,
We wuuuuuuv you!

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There Will Be Blood

spilled in the Democratic Party no matter who wins the nomination. Paul Krugman’s column from earlier this week (that I fully agree with, btw)

Hate Springs Eternal

In 1956 Adlai Stevenson, running against Dwight Eisenhower, tried to make the political style of his opponent’s vice president, a man by the name of Richard Nixon, an issue. The nation, he warned, was in danger of becoming “a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland.”

The quote comes from “Nixonland,” a soon-to-be-published political history of the years from 1964 to 1972 written by Rick Perlstein, the author of “Before the Storm.” As Mr. Perlstein shows, Stevenson warned in vain: during those years America did indeed become the land of slander and scare, of the politics of hatred.

And it still is. In fact, these days even the Democratic Party seems to be turning into Nixonland.

The bitterness of the fight for the Democratic nomination is, on the face of it, bizarre. Both candidates still standing are smart and appealing. Both have progressive agendas (although I believe that Hillary Clinton is more serious about achieving universal health care, and that Barack Obama has staked out positions that will undermine his own efforts). Both have broad support among the party’s grass roots and are favorably viewed by Democratic voters.

Supporters of each candidate should have no trouble rallying behind the other if he or she gets the nod.

Why, then, is there so much venom out there?

I won’t try for fake evenhandedness here: most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody. I’m not the first to point out that the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality. We’ve already had that from the Bush administration — remember Operation Flight Suit? We really don’t want to go there again.

What’s particularly saddening is the way many Obama supporters seem happy with the application of “Clinton rules” — the term a number of observers use for the way pundits and some news organizations treat any action or statement by the Clintons, no matter how innocuous, as proof of evil intent.

The prime example of Clinton rules in the 1990s was the way the press covered Whitewater. A small, failed land deal became the basis of a multiyear, multimillion-dollar investigation, which never found any evidence of wrongdoing on the Clintons’ part, yet the “scandal” became a symbol of the Clinton administration’s alleged corruption.

During the current campaign, Mrs. Clinton’s entirely reasonable remark that it took L.B.J.’s political courage and skills to bring Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream to fruition was cast as some kind of outrageous denigration of Dr. King.

And the latest prominent example came when David Shuster of MSNBC, after pointing out that Chelsea Clinton was working for her mother’s campaign — as adult children of presidential aspirants often do — asked, “doesn’t it seem like Chelsea’s sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?” Mr. Shuster has been suspended, but as the Clinton campaign rightly points out, his remark was part of a broader pattern at the network.

I call it Clinton rules, but it’s a pattern that goes well beyond the Clintons. For example, Al Gore was subjected to Clinton rules during the 2000 campaign: anything he said, and some things he didn’t say (no, he never claimed to have invented the Internet), was held up as proof of his alleged character flaws.

For now, Clinton rules are working in Mr. Obama’s favor. But his supporters should not take comfort in that fact.

For one thing, Mrs. Clinton may yet be the nominee — and if Obama supporters care about anything beyond hero worship, they should want to see her win in November.

For another, if history is any guide, if Mr. Obama wins the nomination, he will quickly find himself being subjected to Clinton rules. Democrats always do.

But most of all, progressives should realize that Nixonland is not the country we want to be. Racism, misogyny and character assassination are all ways of distracting voters from the issues, and people who care about the issues have a shared interest in making the politics of hatred unacceptable.

One of the most hopeful moments of this presidential campaign came last month, when a number of Jewish leaders signed a letter condemning the smear campaign claiming that Mr. Obama was a secret Muslim. It’s a good guess that some of those leaders would prefer that Mr. Obama not become president; nonetheless, they understood that there are principles that matter more than short-term political advantage.

I’d like to see more moments like that, perhaps starting with strong assurances from both Democratic candidates that they respect their opponents and would support them in the general election.

Well that article sparked quite a response as the Times printed Letters to the Editor either in supporting and understanding of Paul Krugman’s column, or whatever Barack supporters think.
I’ve separated them into two sections (because nuance doesn't have a place in our society anymore

Obamans

Re “Hate Springs Eternal,” by Paul Krugman (column, Feb. 11):

Mr. Krugman, a consistent critic of Barack Obama, did not produce a shred of evidence for his categorical statement that the “venom” being displayed in the Democratic campaign comes from Obama supporters, “who want their hero or nobody.” And it seems to perpetuate the same bizarre bitterness that he derides in his column.

Even worse is his assertion that “the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality.” I am surprised and saddened that a thoughtful public intellectual like Mr. Krugman would write such a careless and unfair statement at a moment of critical potential in national politics.

Barack Obama is changing the way we think about race in America. His inclusive message is so refreshing that, in addition to strong backing from blacks, he is drawing unprecedented nationwide support from white voters. It is so upsetting that this remarkable and historic feat is belittled as a “cult of personality.”

William Julius Wilson
Cambridge, Mass., Feb. 11, 2008

The writer is a professor of sociology and social policy at Harvard University.

To the Editor:

Paul Krugman decries the “bitterness of the fight for the Democratic nomination” and then proceeds to contribute to the name-calling by comparing Obama supporters to members of a “cult.” I find that offensive.

I am passionately in favor of a change from the current administration. Does that make me a member of a cult? I am passionately opposed to a Clinton presidency. Does that make me a member of a cult?

Like thousands of other voters who lean Democratic, I don’t pledge allegiance to the Democratic Party. I will vote for the candidate I think will best serve the nation.

I don’t have to give Mr. Krugman or anyone else my strong assurances that I will support the Democratic nominee, and I don’t have to apologize to Mr. Krugman or any Democratic Party apparatchik for passionately opposing Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Robert Bonello
Edina, Minn., Feb. 11, 2008

To the Editor:

As a self-identified progressive, I often find useful insights and information in Paul Krugman’s columns. Not so in “Hate Springs Eternal.”

Mr. Krugman paints supporters of Barack Obama with too broad a brush when he alleges that they “want their hero or nobody,” and therefore engage in venomous attacks on Mr. Obama’s rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I am an Obama supporter, as are many people I know. Every Obama supporter I know wants to see a Democrat next in the White House first, and Mr. Obama as that Democrat only second. The “examples” Mr. Krugman cites demonstrate that Clinton-bashing is popular sport, not that Obama supporters (rather than the media or isolated individuals) engage in it.

To top it all off, Mr. Krugman compares Mr. Obama’s ability to inspire and organize to George W. Bush’s demonstrated penchant for conceit and self-indulgence in Operation Flight Suit. Who’s perpetuating “Nixonland” now?

Brian W. Stull
Durham, N.C., Feb. 11, 2008

To the Editor:

I believe this is the first time I’ve ever disagreed with Paul Krugman. The source of vitriol is not to be found in the putative “cult of personality” among supporters of Barack Obama. The source is not to be found among supporters at all. One needs to look at the leaderships of the campaigns.

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign keeps careening between sweetness and scorched-earth policies. Mrs. Clinton has created an impression that she will do anything and say anything to win, from sponsoring flag-preservation legislation to the bizarre racial innuendo by her campaign in South Carolina. (Does South Carolina bring out the worst in every campaign?)

The vitriol is not the result of a cult of personality in the Obama camp. The vitriol is a reaction to very real deficiencies in Mrs. Clinton’s personality.

Bill Morris
San Diego, Feb. 11, 2008

To the Editor:

Can’t Paul Krugman see that there is a growing number of Americans who do not want to relive the days of Clintonian testiness and right-wing vitriol? Former President Bill Clinton alerted many of us to the dangers of a Hillary Rodham Clinton victory by his arrogant behavior in the week before the South Carolina primary.

The fact that many Democratic voters would simply stay home in November rather than vote for Hillary Clinton is not a sign of “hate” or “venom.”

Mr. Krugman brings up his preference for Mrs. Clinton’s health care agenda, but why should we think she could achieve it after a bitter campaign, without enough Democratic senators to break a Republican filibuster and with the same old team back in charge?

Bill Dawers
Savannah, Ga., Feb. 11, 2008

To the Editor:

Paul Krugman, in his account of the strong emotions that the Clinton-Obama race has raised among progressives, doesn’t mention one notable fact.

Many antiwar Democrats continue to view with suspicion Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s attitude toward the Iraq war. Her clarifications for her support of the various pro-war bills proposed by President Bush revolve around her criticisms of the execution of the war, not around the thinking that led us into the war in the first place.

Progressives have found Senator Barack Obama’s more specific denunciation of the whole mind-set that created the war much more helpful. I believe that it continues to be a leading explanation for why he is doing so much better against Mrs. Clinton than anyone originally predicted.

Jon Landau
Purchase, N.Y., Feb. 11, 2008

I agree with Paul Krugman’s assertion that the attitude “their hero or nobody” is divisive and silly. But just because both Democratic candidates are strong doesn’t mean I find them to be equal.
I resent the implication that “hero worship” is inherently dogmatic or without substance. I long for a day when I can name a sitting American president as my hero. [Ed. Note: How old are you that you would ever look up to a politician as a hero? Become someone else’s hero don’t look for someone to elevate as yours. Call me a cynic but I've never "found a hero" in far off places]

For me, one of Barack Obama’s biggest strengths, both as a leader and as a candidate, is that he inspires people to participate in politics who otherwise wouldn’t get involved.

If voters fail to respond to Hillary Rodham Clinton in that way, I think it’s much more a legitimate flaw on her part than it is an example of Americans falling prey to “Clinton rules.”

Though Mr. Obama is my preference, if Mrs. Clinton is the nominee, I will campaign for her 100 percent because I want to see a Democrat in the White House. For the moment, however, this is still a contest, and I feel no obligation to come to the defense of someone who is my second choice.

If Mrs. Clinton can’t stand against me, who sees her merely as the lesser of an embarrassment of riches, how will she ever last when the opponent gets much tougher?

Suzanne Joskow
Los Angeles, Feb. 11, 2008

To the Editor:

The Barack Obama supporters I know would ultimately be happy to see any Democrat become president. “It’s an embarrassment of riches,” I’ve heard from my fellow Democrats countless times. Both candidates are smart, experienced and capable.

I voted for Mr. Obama, but I will support his opponent with unmitigated enthusiasm should she win the nomination. Where Paul Krugman sees a “cult of personality” forming around Mr. Obama, I see involved citizens who are deeply excited about their candidate.

Mr. Obama is not L. Ron Hubbard. If there’s an Obama cult, then there’s also a Hillary Rodham Clinton cult, a John McCain cult, a Mike Huckabee cult and so on. [Ed. Note- Scientologists don’t believe their in a cult started by a crock either. And I don't see anyone getting tattoos for any other politician especially before he's even nominated.]

Mr. Krugman, usually so dead-on, is way off in this case.

Laura Cummins
New York, Feb. 11, 2008

The Leader is good, the Leader is great, we surrender our will as of
       this date!

Realists

To the Editor:

Cult of personality, indeed. Barack Obama has style, but no substance. He has been in national politics only a couple of years. And the media have given him a virtually free ride.
But we did “likability” and inexperience eight years ago with George W. Bush and look where that’s gotten us. It is frightening how easily some of us are persuaded by hype, especially when we are confronting such serious problems as a nation and in the world.
Hillary Rodham Clinton does have substance: knowledge, experience, intelligence, sensitivity, stamina. She has withstood attacks from all sides and come out whole. She is the only candidate in this race in whom I have complete faith and confidence to do the right thing. With all that is at stake, I can only hope that the media will start doing their job and that the American people will see the light this time around.

D. Murphy
Merrick, N.Y., Feb. 12, 2008

To the Editor:

I see nothing illogical that a close competition for the most important leadership role in the world would be extremely competitive. But venomous? We’re not even close. Just this year, the Republicans (John McCain versus Mitt Romney) have been much more combative than Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Perhaps Paul Krugman is closer to the point in recognizing that we are a nation focused on personality; much of what passes for public discourse is driven by celebrity, hyped-up conflict, and the trend for news and sports coverage to resemble each other.

Barack Obama’s supporters certainly did not create this trend, nor can they be faulted for recognizing that character and inspiration are as important as ideas in picking a leader. This is not a result of some irrational spell, and implying that we’re joining a cult of personality really misses the point about our recognizing the qualities our nation needs to effectively move forward to collectively meet our challenges.

Richard C. Hubbard
Evanston, Ill., Feb. 11, 2008

To the Editor:

Senator Barack Obama’s campaign reminds me of a series of revival meetings. There’s the charismatic speaker who uses emotional words to raise the audience to a fever pitch, followed by conversion to his ideas and the passing of the hat.

Supporters who wrap themselves in these emotional promises find that it works for a while. But then it grows quiet, and looking around, the converts see that the revival tent has moved on and everyday life intervenes.

Where is the critical thinking here about how to achieve getting out of Iraq? To help the economy? To solve the health care crisis? There’s just the emptiness of the emotional words, ringing hollow in the air.

Sue Roupp
Evanston, Ill., Feb. 11, 2008

My stance has long been clear on this but they're both b.s. though one is more so than the other but maybe it’s things like this, where Michelle Obama who should be a leader in her husband’s movement says “she’d have to think about supporting Hillary if she were the nominee”
while everything from the Clintons has been of course I’ll support the Democratic nominee, it’s about taking back the white house
And maybe Krugman’s ideas about the cult of personality and the Messianic fervor that Barack is cultivating stems from stuff like this in the media as documented in Slate's Obama Messiah Watch

Is Barack Obama the Nazarene? To answer this question, Slate has periodically gathered gratuitously adoring biographical details from newspaper, television, and magazine profiles of the U.S. senator from Illinois, best-selling author, Harvard Law Review president, Men's Vogue cover model, two-time Grammy winner, efficient note-taker, physics wunderkind, descendent of George Washington's great-great-great-great-great grandfather, teenage jazz enthusiast, possible telepathic communicator with space aliens from distant galaxies, improvement on all civil rights gains since 1957, calmer of turbulent Iownas, and front-running candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

I merely suggested that a few excitable souls in the media bear the apparant conviction that Obama is the Redeemer. To this growing list we must now add the Reuters photographer who snapped this

Hail Michelle,
full of grace,
the Lord is with you.
Blessed are you among women
and blessed is [he that made holy your] womb
Holy Michelle, consort of God,
pray for us sinners
now and at the hour of our death
Amen.

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Not My Brand Either

I'm just trying to get people to not buy so easily into all the hype.

From The Root, Slate's black sister if you will, and a column by Marc Lamont Hill assistant professor of urban education and American studies at Temple University.

Not My Brand of Hope

Obama's politics of cunning, compromise and concession.
From the beginning of his presidential campaign, which unofficially began with the release of his second book The Audacity of Hope, Senator Barack Obama has been positioned as an underdog against the Clinton machine. Now, with polls showing him in a virtual dead heat with Sen. Hillary Clinton, the media has constructed his early success as a David-over-Goliath narrative that proves that ordinary people have the power to slay the beast that is Washington through a radical politics of hope. Unfortunately, the Obama campaign has perverted the concept of hope by wedding it to a dangerous politics of compromise, concession and cunning.

Within the black faith tradition that Obama appeals to, hope is the belief that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, our circumstances can be transformed into something previously unimaginable. It is this notion of hope—coupled with organized resistance from the people catching the most hell—that led to the end of slavery, Jim Crow, and apartheid. In Obama's corporate-sponsored universe of meaning, however, hope is not the predicate for radical social change, but an empty slogan that allows for a slick repackaging of the status quo.

After Obama's recent success with white voters, particularly his win in Iowa, many have announced America's transition into a post-racial moment. Even Obama himself has claimed that race will no longer prevent the fair-minded citizenry from supporting his bid. In reality, however, an Obama presidency is already being treated as a racial talisman that would instantly heal the scars of a nation wounded by racism.

For whites, an Obama victory would serve as the final piece of evidence that America has reached full racial equality. Such a belief allows them to sidestep mounds of evidence that shows that, despite Obama's claims that "we are 90 percent of the way to equality," black people remain consistently assaulted by the forces by white supremacy. For many black people, Obama's success would provide symbolic value by showing that the black man (not woman!) can make it to the top. Although black faces in high places may provide psychological comfort, they are often incorporated into a Cosbyesque gospel of personal responsibility ("Obama did it, so can you!") that allows dangerous public policies to go unchallenged.

Despite its convoluted racial logic, the election of Obama would still be acceptable if his policies were properly aligned with a leftist agenda. Unfortunately, Obama has clung to a rigid centrism that is incompatible with full-scale social change. Despite his claims of being a peace candidate, Obama has repeatedly expressed a commitment to ramping up military and continuing the presidential legacy of using war as an instrument of foreign policy. Although he opposes the war in Iraq, Obama refuses to vote against its funding.

While Obama supports health care for all Americans, he does not embrace a universal single-payer system that would effectively undermine private corporate interests. At the same time that he bemoans the loss of jobs and expansion of global poverty, Obama fails to denounce free trade agreements and extols the virtues economic globalization. In addition, Obama has been conspicuously silent on topics such as the prison industrial complex, the Zionist occupation of Palestine, and the economic underdevelopment of Africa.

In the face of a black electorate that still craves messianic leadership, Obama has skillfully positioned himself as the Martin Luther King of his generation. Unlike King, however, Obama does not aim to disrupt the fundamental structure of society. Rather than dismantling the triple threat of global racism, poverty, and militarism that King warned against, Obama has promoted a doctrine of compromise that is self-serving rather than strategic, milquetoast rather than pragmatic. As opposed to Dr. King, whose legacy has been promiscuously appropriated by his ideological opponents after his death, Obama has freely offered himself up to the enemies of the Left by attaching few material stakes to his grandiose moral and political vision.

Many people, including some of his critics, have come to Obama's defense by claiming that his progressive half-stepping is an inevitable part of national politics. Others have argued that, despite his shortcomings, Obama is still the best choice among the remaining democratic field. While such claims may be true, they prove that Obama is merely the most attractive in a group of political siblings rather than the revolutionary outsider that he's portrayed to be. Unfortunately, Obama isn't selling himself as the best of the pack, but as an entirely new breed of candidate.

To believe that Obama is a Kucinich leftist rather than a Clinton centrist is to ignore his own expressed positions. To believe that the world will be markedly improved after an Obama presidency is to ignore the structure of corporate-controlled politics. To believe that Obama is prepared to address the fundamental structure of our political system is to ignore his own investment in it. Unfortunately, this is exactly what Barack Obama is asking us to do: vote for him as a change maker against all evidence to the contrary. That sounds more like the hope of audacity than the audacity of hope.

Of course for every person like Professor Hill speaking what I consider to be the truth there seems to be three who think like Joel Stein. Seriously doesn't Obamaphilia sound like some disease where you obviously hemorrhage common sense?

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