‘The One’? Media, activist adulation of Obama is way over the top.
EZRA Klein, a prominent young blogger at the liberal American Prospect, recently opined:
“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. 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 toward 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.”
“And if we all work together really, really hard we can make this the best yearbook ever!”
OK, I added that last part. Besides, you really can’t beat Klein’s original cri de coeur for earnest over-the-top-ness. As The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat quipped, “Ezra’s got a fever, and the only prescription is more Obama.”
But the fever’s spreading. Ever since his stunning win in Iowa, the long-suspected sense that Obama’s got a rendezvous with destiny has broken out like a pandemic.
Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift, an ever-reliable voice of the liberal establishment zeitgeist, has proclaimed him JFK reincarnated: “Obama represents the possibility of reclaiming the national unity America has lost, and his appeal transcends race and party,” she writes, practically transcribing his campaign literature.
The New York Times, meanwhile, ran a breathless article after Obama’s Iowa win, explaining that he had in effect healed the people of Iowa of their apparently deep-seated racism simply by convincing them to vote for him. “People across America, even in Iowa of all places, can look across the color line and see the person,” marveled one of several African-Americans interviewed for the piece.
The Times insinuated that the only reason past black candidates like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton weren’t as successful is that white voters couldn’t get over the fact they were black. The fact that they were shakedown artists and flim-flammers would only muddy the gospel of Obama the messianic racial healer.
Meanwhile, Obama’s record has received remarkably little scrutiny in the mainstream media, no doubt in part because the press has been eager to keep the race competitive and, perhaps, to help nudge Hillary Clinton off the stage. But part of it must also be a certain reluctance among reporters to pop the bubble.
“OK, you write the piece that takes him down,” my National Review colleague Jim Geraghty recently wrote of the dynamic within the press. “You take this lovely and inspiring story of racial reconciliation and torch it all to hell. You write the exposé of the second coming of Martin Luther King.”
This will only get worse. The fact – assuming it becomes one – that Obama beat Ms. Inevitability will only reinforce the idea that the “Obama Phenomenon” is, in fact, a phenomenon. He’s the audacity of hope made flesh. He is “the one” (as both Oprah and those people in leather pants in “The Matrix” like to say).
America, he is your destiny, the press will proclaim with Darth Vader-like gravity. Our secular savior; our racial redeemer; our last best hope for this, that and the other thing.
A coronation doesn’t even capture what establishment liberalism and the lefty blogs will try to pull off with Obama – because you don’t coronate a messiah, you confirm his bona fides and then you bow.
And now imagine he loses to Huck McRomney. No wait, don’t imagine that, for that is too horrible to contemplate. Hope itself would be hobbled, unity sidelined for the long season of humanity’s time on this earth.
Keep in mind, our politics have been so poisonous these last eight years because the Florida recount threw much of the liberal establishment off its feed. John Kerry’s 2004 defeat spontaneously sparked a slew of absurd conspiracy theories about Ohio being stolen, presumably by the same crew that secretly blew up the World Trade Center. You can expect that sort of thing from Katie Couric if The One loses.
And that may well be Obama’s greatest asset: You can’t get in the way of the freight train of history. The idea that he could lose to just another Republican may be so terrible to contemplate that the left will tell us that anyone who contemplates it is terrible, perhaps even a terrorist.
Obama is an impressive, decent but relatively green politician. It’s a great sign of racial progress that he’s successfully taking on the calcified Clinton establishment. Yet he’s a human being, and the survival of All Good Things does not hinge on his every success. But none may dare say so.
Jonah Goldberg is author of “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.”