Beacon Street Journal

Hope springs eternal as they say. But when it comes time to the candidacy of Barack Obama, for many of his Democratic supporters and slavishly devoted members of the press, mere hope has been supplanted by euphoria, infatuation, and at times, delusion. For San Francisco Chronicle writer Mark Morford, Obama is not a mere politician, but rather, a “Lightworker.” Not sure what a Lightworker is? Morford expounds:

Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

Shelley, Keats or Byron could not have penned more idealized prose. Each Morford column that discusses and praises the virtues of the object of his affections is a paen of love to the Exalted One; each successive column more giddy than the last.  Morford’s latest sonnet, or Ode to Obama, while an extreme example, is nonetheless indicative, of the silliness and absurdity to which the press corps has succumbed in their quest to insure an Obama victory. 

On numerous occasions, Barack Obama himself has eagerly and imprudently bought into all this media hype of his seemingly immortal powers. For those who thought Moses’ parting of the Red Sea with his staff was a neat trick, not to be outdone, Obama, in an improvident act of one-upmanship has proclaimed that his candidacy represents and embodies the moment when, “the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal…” Very heady stuff for even a presidential candidate. But, Obama may wish to consult with his “spiritual advisor” and “biblical scholar” on this score. For as the Bible ominously warns, Pride goeth before a fall.

As I noted in an earlier post, in a very real sense, Barack Obama’s natural constituency in his quest for the presidency has not been African-Americans nor latte-liberals, but rather, the mainstream press. As his recent unbroken string of gaffes on the campaign trail irrefutably demonstrate, Obama is no student of American or World History, but he is an astute observer of the American mainstream media. He realized from the start that he would be able to cultivate assiduously the pretences and succor the images that would form the central core or basis for his candidacy with their willing assistance. From the day that he announced his candidacy, his larger-than-life persona was a fiction created by the media, who to this day, continue to perpetuate the Myth of Obama the Uniter.

But his media enablers run the very real risk of dangerously insulating their candidate; that amidst all the hoopla, Barack Obama is starting to believe in his own sense of immortality; that by virtue of all the prolonged adulation, he genuinely believes there is no need for him to conform his preachings to what he practices. The latest example of this central core contradiction of his candidacy is his decision to name former Fannie Mae president, and consummate Washington insider, Jim Johnson to his VP vetting team. Obama has repeatedly demonized Countrywide Financial Corp. as the scourge that is responsible for the nation’s sub-prime mortgage ills. When it was disclosed that Johnson may have secured a sweetheart loan deal from the president of Countrywide, a befuddled and tongue-tied Obama’s tepid and incredulous explanation for his departure from the “old politics”, was that Johnson was somehow not “working” for his campaign.

Consider the conventional wisdom promulgated by those who fancy and flatter themselves as speaking truth to power in this election cycle. It was not too long ago that many of these same geniuses who have now anointed Obama as our savior were proclaiming, with great and solemn authority, that Hillary was invincible and her candidacy had an “aura of inevitability.” Then, shortly after his victory in Iowa, they all breathlessly intoned that she should quit the race for the good of the party; that for her, securing the nomination was a mathematical impossibility (it should be noted it was a mathematical impossibility for Obama, as well, at that time). Hillary the spoiler then proceeded to crush the Chosen One in several successive and key battleground state primaries. With such a dismal track record, prudence would seem to dictate that all the effusive praise on the part of the fourth estate for Obama should be somewhat tempered. But they are having none of it.

Much has been made by Obama’s advocates about the healing and captivating power of his rhetorical skills. On those occasions when reading from the screen, yes, Obama can deliver an uplifting and mellifluous speech. But, when bereft of his remote-controlled teleprompter, Barack Obama has a tendency to be a gaffe-machine. He stumbles, stutters, becomes professorial and defensive — at times, almost petulant. His media enablers seem to forget that in those situations on the campaign trail when Obama was forced to gather his wits, he disappointed mightily. Witness his dismal performance in some of the Democratic primary debates. Do those who currently worship at the Obama altar remember his foolish proclamation at the YouTube debate that he would unconditionally meet with the nations’ enemies? The Exalted One is still trying to rectify the self-inflicted damage from the naivete and rashness of this statement by constantly reinventing and refining his position on this issue (i.e., no preconditions, but lots of preparation).

But if the media have been captivated by the rhetoric and enraptured at the prospect of an unvarnished liberal as president, Obama’s Democratic Party supporters have turned a blind eye to his many shortcomings amidst the many danger signals that have abounded. For a curious thing happened on the road to Nirvana. Barack Obama started to lose, and most of his losses were in key general election battleground states. In short, he captured the nomination, but he limped to the finish line as a damaged candidate. Instead of serving as a catalyst for self-examination, his failure to capture the white, blue-collar vote fostered a period of searching for racism on the part of those, for whom his vapid and vacuous rhetoric simply did not resonate. So too, was his Race Sermon from the Mount that was to have definitively disposed of the Jeremiah Wright controversy. Instead of acknowledging the many deficiencies and inconsistencies of that self-serving exercise in moral equivalence, the media hailed it as a landmark event, a speech that by historical comparison was akin in oratorical splendor to Pericles Funeral Oration, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” peroration. The shelf-life and historical legacy of Obama’s “epoch” Philadelphia speech was approximately thirty days, at which time, a resurgent Jeremiah Wright reared his ugly head to explode all the fraudulent pretenses Obama had professed earlier. 

Thus, for Obama’s supporters, feelings and sentiment have totally supplanted reason as a basis for the stridency of their belief in his exalted status. Objective reality or an analysis of the unvarnished political facts are of no consequence. Thus all sorts and manner of alternative explanations have been offered to help sustain the Obama myth. His supporters keep trotting out their new “electoral map”; this election will not follow any previous templates because Obama will bring new voters into the electoral process, etc., etc…

The question for Barack Obama is: how long can the unadulterated media praise be sustained in light of disturbing revelations about Obama’s past associations, the ever-widening gap between his exalted promises and his actual conduct, and, his plans for the nations future? As columnist Tony Blankley recently asked, Who is Obama? Where is the Press?