Obama's Politics of Collective Redemption

[stephanie]

Interesting...

February 11, 2008
Obama's Politics of Collective Redemption
By Kyle-Anne Shiver

"Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes not divine, but demonic." Pope Benedict XVI


A messianic fever grips a segment of the American populace and media. A great leader seems to them poised to redeem our collective sins and change nearly everything, bringing about a new era in which permanent solutions are found to age-old conditions.

Whenever I watch Barack Obama, listen to his eloquent but nonspecific oratory, and see the near-swooning young people who invariably follow him wherever he goes, I cannot help but think of the pied piper and wonder toward what destination he is marching our youth. Obama is having this pied-piper effect not only on kids, but also on a large swath of Democrat and not a few independents and Republican voters, too.

Call me skeptical, but this whole Obama phenomenon seems downright eerie.

Over and over again, Obama invokes his double mantra: "It's time for change!" and "Yes, we can!"

read the rest..
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/02/obamas_politics_of_collective.html

[Kathianne]

A bit more on the fervency:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YzliZThmMTA4YTM1NzlhN2E2MTdjZTQ1ZjhhZWQ0ZWQ=


The Next Great Awakening
Obama 2008's messianic fervor won’t last.

By Charles Krauthammer

There’s no better path to success than getting people to buy a free commodity. Like the genius who figured out how to get people to pay for water: Bottle it (Aquafina was revealed to be nothing more than reprocessed tap water) and charge more than they pay for gasoline. Or consider how Google found a way to sell dictionary nouns — boat, shoe, clock — by charging advertisers zillions to be listed whenever the word is searched.

And now, in the most amazing trick of all, a silver-tongued freshman senator has found a way to sell hope. To get it, you need only give him your vote. Barack Obama is getting millions.

This kind of sale is hardly new. Organized religion has been offering a similar commodity — salvation — for millennia. Which is why the Obama campaign has the feel of a religious revival with, as writer James Wolcott observed, a “salvational fervor” and “idealistic zeal divorced from any particular policy or cause and chariot-driven by pure euphoria.”

“We are the hope of the future,” sayeth Obama. We can “remake this world as it should be.” Believe in me and I shall redeem not just you but your country — nay, we can become “a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, and make this time different than all the rest.”...

I’ve seen only one similar national swoon. As a teenager growing up in Canada, I witnessed a charismatic law professor go from obscurity to justice minister to prime minister, carried on a wave of what was called Trudeaumania.

But even there the object of his countrymen’s unrestrained affections was no blank slate. Pierre Trudeau was already a serious intellectual who had written and thought and lectured long about the nature and future of his country.

Obama has an astonishingly empty paper trail. He’s going around issuing promissory notes on the future that he can’t possibly redeem. Promises to heal the world with negotiations with the likes of Iran’s Ahmadinejad. Promises to transcend the conundrums of entitlement reform that require real and painful trade-offs and that have eluded solution for a generation. Promises to fund his other promises by a rapid withdrawal from an unpopular war — with the hope, I suppose, that the (presumed) resulting increase in American prestige would compensate for the chaos to follow.

Democrats are worried that the Obama spell will break between the time of his nomination and the time of the election, and deny them the White House. My guess is that he can maintain the spell just past Inauguration Day. After which will come the awakening. It will be rude.

[Hugh Lincoln]

It says something about our electorate -- we love figures and characters, not minds, ideas and wills. That's good and bad. I have mixed feelings about that. I am pretty sure Reagan and Clinton were elected for being who they were, not what they stood for (which was at odds, somewhat). I know ideology (liberal v. conservative) only counts for a very small portion of the electorate, and these days, party affiliation is only a little bigger. To hear "Republicans" say they'll vote for Obama because "he's got vision" is an indication that whatever caused these people to identify as Republican in the first place wasn't ideological. But what's going on? Are people just idiots?

I suppose the argument could be made that personality IS a legitimate trait to vote on. A charismatic leader inspires hope and confidence, and that's not a bad thing. But of course, that leaves a lot of room for disastrous policies and other consequences. Stalin might have been a big personality, but he perpetuated an evil system. James Madison was a genius, but he was this little ugly dude who probably didn't inspire like Washington did. And so on.

As an idea person, it just bewilders, depresses and frightens me that personality alone moves so many voters, and they don't care in the least about policies.