Looking back at the magic
Ace has a post about people who’ve soured on Obama that contains some extraordinary quotes from the past. It’s easy to forget exactly how fulsome the praise was back then in its cultlike extremity.
Here’s a passage Tina Brown wrote in 2008, but it could have been any number of other supposedly intelligent people. That sort of hero-worship is truly frightening, not just because it’s about Obama—who has turned out so badly as president, a fact someone astute could have foreseen quite easily—but because it’s about any mere human:
This has been an election full of magic. White Magic that only the black man from everywhere and nowhere could perform. Even his adored grandmother dying on the eve of the victory had a mythic feeling of completion to it in a candidacy full of signs and symbols. Remember the three-point basketball shot when he played with the soldiers in Kuwait? It’s as if Obama is the prince who lifts the curse in a fairy story, a curse that began eight years ago with an election wrenched away from the rightful winner and begetting as a consequence the wrathful visitation of tragedy and wars and hurricanes and economic collapse.
Magic. Curse. Fairy story. These are the words of a child, not an adult. And yet the woman who wrote them was in her mid-50s at the time. She was not alone, either, and it was by no means just women who felt that way. However, it is a fact that Obama always had more support among women than among men, and this is true of the Democratic Party as a whole.
Why is that? Probably another story for another time, but I’ll take a stab at a few possible reasons: on average, women are more interested in protection and a feeling of security than men, and they think Democrats offer that in terms of economics and health because they promise it (although some woman have been learning that Obama hasn’t offered much safety even in those arenas, and especially in the areas of Islamic terrorism and ebola). In general, women aren’t as keen to follow the nitty-gritty details of politics as men; at least, I’ve observed that among my friends and acquaintances.
Some would also say that, in general, women are less logical. But my observation is that lack of logic, at least regarding politics and/or history, is close to endemic among both sexes.
If you want some equal-opportunity Obamamanic insanity from a man back in 2008, I offer this article by SF Gate columnist Mark Morford. An excerpt will give you an idea of its flavor:
Barack Obama isn’t really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway.
…I’ve heard from far too many enormously smart, wise, spiritually attuned people who’ve been intuitively blown away by Obama’s presence – not speeches, not policies, but sheer presence – to say it’s just a clever marketing ploy…
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.
Madness. Frightening.
Morford has always been a step or two beyond merely psychologically bizarre.
Perhaps he’s already evolved into that new species he rhapsodizes about … or a mutant of some kind.
And people ask how, in oh, so cultured Germany, a Hitler could come to power.
P.S.–Hysteria we will always have with us.
Obama’s fake Greek columns where real small potatoes when compared to the Nuremburg Party Rallies and Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda masterpiece, “Triumph of the Will,” but you have to have the basic ingredient, people all too willing to be fooled, then led, for any of this to work, and many of them apparently Erik Hoffer’s “true believers,” .
Can’t you just see the smirk on Obama’s face when he read that nauseating rhapsody?
In earlier days, when he was an object of worship, I could see his contempt for the people who gushed over him. Now that people no longer throw themselves at his feet, he’s angry. His eyes — oh, those terrible eyes — are baleful.
mizpants:
Funny you should mention the anger. See this, which I just published a moment ago.
I’m not so certain it’s madness. Obama, for liberals and many leftists, embodies a kind of cultural gestalt. It very much reminds me of JFK and the whole ‘Camelot’ thing. I’m sure you remember, as we are of “a certain age”.
As silly as it was, who can forget Chris Matthew’s ‘tingle down his leg’? I think he was being sincere and accurately conveying what he was feeling. I also suspect that for those so predisposed, Obama’s presence, his sheer physical presence is indeed viscerally striking. He does indeed embody their hopes and dreams. Which is why I suspect that until personally threatened (ISIS, Ebola), his support remains virtually unchanged.
Reportedly, Bill Clinton has what all great conmen have, the ability to focus so intensely upon a person, that they feel like they are the only person in the room.
Obama doesn’t have Clinton’s people person thing going for him and obviously he is a conman but he does have that, “man of destiny” thing going with those for whom ‘hope’ in the possibility of ‘kumbaya’, counts above all else.
You really didn’t need to be all that astute. But the power of whatever it was that was at work creating the mass delusion swept away many who otherwise seemed too astute to be so deluded and swept away. I wonder the extent to which historians will accurately record this phenomena.
Geoffrey Britain:
I remember Camelot. It was gritty realism itself compared to Obamamania.
I’m serious. To me, there’s no comparison. Kennedy was very much liked by many, of course, as a witty, charismatic, young, charming person with a lot of energy. People hoped his administration would be a breath of fresh air. For the most part, that was it. Oh, perhaps there were a few worshipers, but nothing whatsoever like this. And most importantly, he didn’t promote himself as a mystical cultish figure. He was somewhat self-deprecating, and came across as basically mainstream and realistic. His differentness was in his style (and that of his wife, I might add).
The vast majority of people will willingly enslave themselves if given the opportunity.
One weird way Obama was attractive to older voters was, he was a parent’s dream. Good looking, just cocky enough, didn’t get into too much trouble, got all the right degrees at the right schools, always said the right thing, successful without ever really having to work too hard. It was what they would want for their children, so they awarded him the final prize, Presidency of the United States.
Hysteria or not, I keep circling back to the fact that, without the indispensable help of our MSM Obama would never have become President and that if, instead, our MSM had done its work and thoroughly investigated and then fully reported on the myriad of things that were “off” about Obama, Obama would never have been a viable candidate for a Senate seat, much less for the Presidency.
But, the MSM has covered for Obama every step of the way, while also trying to shut up and destroy Obama’s critics, and what is probably the vast majority of our MSM still cover for Obama to this day.
For this and for most of the wreckage we see all around us, we have to thank Antonio Gramsci’s “long march through the institutions,” which made a stop at J schools, where reporting the news morphed into “changing society.”
The first link doesn’t go to a post by Ace, it goes to a Yahoo story about Ebola.
I find these people impossible to understand. Either they are simply overly dramatic because they have columns to fill, or they are nuts.
I liked George Bush but I never had any problems seeing flaws. Why are these people different?
colagirl:
Thanks, I’ll fix it.
Leftists (including your garden-variety liberals) seem to have a deep-seated need to perceive heroic and larger-than-life (if not godlike) attributes in their presidential candidates and causes. I’ve never understood it. It’s like celebrity worship.
Wolla Dalbo,
I agree.
Focusing too much on Obama as fount, source, center of gravity, etc, is misleading. Obama is an avatar, a company rep of a full-spectrum activist social movement.
It’s not that Obama the man is magic. It’s that competent Marxist-method activists, collectively organized, are social illusionists.
For Brown and Morford, the Obama avatar is a myth, and they are myth-makers. In turn, the myth-makers ply their trade in a social cultural/politically encompassing contextual zeitgeist built by activist media, activist academics, activist educators, activist entertainers, activist lawyers and judges, activist bureaucrats, and yes, activist elected officials.
It’s like how CG movies are made: different departments building together visual and audio layers to construct a convincing artificial-reality ecosystem.
Narrative contest for the zeitgeist is part of the activist game, the only social political game there is.
I have seen clips of JFK press conferences in documentary films. No teleprompters.
Light has been shined on Obama’s narcissism and authoritarianism, but there is something creepy about him that has yet to come out of the fog. There has to be a reason why so many people would enthusiastically place their trust in an empty suit. Are that many Americans eager for a furrier?
Or maybe the question is who tailored the suit? Who pulls the strings. How can a live-in consiglieri escape analysis by even a fawning media? Is Valeria Jarrett really just a counselor or a puppet master?
JFK had a deferential press, but there was nothing like the smoke and mirrors that are necessary to make Obama appear substantial.
Eric:
Very well put!
I see it now: they see themselves not as starry-eyed, brainwashed dupes, but as powerful myth-makers.
↑ furrier should be fuhrer.
FDR too. We’re all too young to remember or know it first-hand, but I’m pretty sure they had him all romanticized up too. And he also had the usual media suspects eating out of his hand. Take a look sometime at how Life magazine depicted him for the masses, as he won his four terms, and even upon his death. It’s in the same vein as what we are talking about here.
And neo, I think you are too quick to dismiss the JFK comparison. They are quite comparable. With Obama it is worse, because he is even less qualified than JFK was. Plus, bottom-line, JFK was a patriot and was anti-communist. But, in those days it wasn’t unusual for Democrats to be patriots and anti-communist.
I cringe every time I see him referred to as the light worker, given that Lucifer stands for light bringer. Just too close for comfort – or could it be a subtle poke at Christians?
And I too think these people (Brown, Matthews, etc.) are being sincere when they say these things. The problem is we the people.
You know, and the rest of us know, that it is worse than mere celebrity worship.
Conservatives have repeatedly sneered that progressives attribute god-like qualities to the State. It’s a stale observation, and commonplace by now.
It’s also apparent that for Progressives (or whatever we want to call collectivists) the “head of state” or government, more or less functions in place of the Second Person of the Trinity.
Read their literature … Our Constitutional Redemption … the promise realized … blah blah.
Yet they accuse and mock conservative Christians for supposedly having a millenarian mindset.
God doesn’t exist, and as we all know he was just a projection in the first place, so we will now consciously fashion Him out of our own dreams and yearnings and bring him to life through politics.
Theirs is a different mentality. If you do them the favor of taking them seriously, you realize that in their opinion, the opinion of “Progressives”, our salvation from pain and injustice, from the trauma of personal responsibility, and that most terrible of all burdens “alienation”, can only come through “evolution” (of a particularly directed sort), not through reasoning about and from, natures as they are.
Bliss, bliss. If we just build the right machine, social, biological or otherwise, worthy of our worship and unconditional submission, all our problems will be solved. God will have arrived: and being a product of our own hands, he will naturally love and cherish us for evermore ….
G Jourbert:
How old are you? I don’t know whether you personally remember the Kennedy years or not. But my recollection is that the Kennedy phenomenon was very very different. I’m not saying it wasn’t overblown, but it had a completely different flavor and quality. It did not verge on the weirdly mystical. The Camelot comparison actually came later, from Jackie. Also, quite a bit of the more over-the-top stuff only came after Kennedy was assassinated, in reaction to that event.
How many pictures of him in a wheelchair do you think our grandparents or parents saw?
G Jourbert and DNW:
I’d be curious whether you could find anything written about either JFK or FDR that could compare to those two excerpts I offered in the post.
Neo,
They can be both true believers and myth makers. Good activists are.
Add: Their true belief, however, may be more in what Obama represents than Obama the man, which points the way to myth-making of an avatar that is distinct from the man on which the avatar is based.
Poor Tina Brown. How let down she must feel. And here she is now comparing Obama to “that guy in the corner office, you know, who’s too cool for school”:
Oprah Winfrey emotionalism helped Obama win much of the women who vote out of emotionalism.
I think it is in part the “style over substance” culture; a culture that is, BTW, feminized and infantilized and where magical thinking rules.
I agree with Neo, I notice a great difference between the Liberals and Democrats of my childhood and today’s Progressive. In the past, most were not “blame America firsters”, and they had enduring principals, not principals that were relative, like their morals. For example, whether I agreed with them or not, I have never thought of Humphrey, Mondale, or McGovern as sneaky and underhanded. The last “Liberal” intellectual was Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
I have not looked concerning JFK, and other than the usual sexually tinged hero worship he received from some, I can’t think of anything offhand.
FDR’s problems and foibles were covered up by the press, and he was more or less small “d” deified by the ignorant, but I don’t believe anyone saw him in terms of the Maitreya-Jesus, as so many of Obama’s hysterical supporters, ostensibly male, and female, have.
So yeah, shrill and hyperbolic “FDR saved capitalism and democracy” and so forth, but nothing I can think of to literally compare him to the Second Coming, or imagining that he was inaugurating a new metaphysical reality.
“Transformational…” How’s that view of the catastrophe known as Obama workin’ for ya, Colin Powell???
Neoconscum, I think Colin powell has permanent government funded health care being retired military brass. A 1%, just like Congress.
And Mark Mumford, that embarassing piece, all I can say is “oh brother”! And to think this same crowd would laugh at, belittle, & sneer at some little 13 yr old girl who just had a vision of the Virgin Mary!
(Must hold on to their *glee* for future reference)
This is the diabolical, the demonic.
Tina Brown et al are possessed of the devil. Satan is exactly the one who draws the crowd, “possesses” it, enthralls it, and turns its mass hysteria/hatred (it is hatred btw) to use.
Tina Brown and the SF Giy are like most people – full of deep hates and resentments. Obama made them feel justified and even redeemed. That is what the devil does.
The comes the deluge.
The single best way to describe Obama is as an anti-Christ. He is of that type. It is the “spirit of anti-Christ” the Bible talks about (not some Hollywood film caricature.) Obama without doubt has and is possessed himself of that spirit, and so, sadly, are all of his followers.
The odd one here and there is waking up from the spell. The most are still under it.
My high school remembrances of Kennedy were 1) the excitement of the Boston Irish nuns at his nomination and election; 2) getting us through the missile crisis); 3) his war experience and patriotism; and 4) Jackie’s tour of the WH as a way to increase our awareness of our heritage. I also don’t remember worship, but I do remember the assassination and the relief at seeing Johnson taking the oath of office on the plane. For me, the latter was like a reassurance that the US would continue. As to Camelot, I think there was a willingness to embrace it because it was like saying childhood is over but it was a good childhood. When I saw the kids at the coffin, it sort of made me appreciate the fact that I still had a father.
In some ways the Camelot myth stuck because it was a time of stability that was followed by the upheavals of the later 60s. In my senior year of high school we had a peaceful transition to a new president. In my senior year of college, we had riots.
These are not astute, highly intelligent, sophisticated people. They are 15 year olds wetting their panties at a Beatles concert circa 1965. Same goes for the males of this cult of kool-aid drinkers. Julias and pajama boys with hot chocolate are a waste of oxygen as they exhale CO2 killing imaginary polar bears.
OMT: In contrast to JFK and Jackie, who taught us to love our country and its heritage, Obama and Michelle have taught the young that the country is fatally flawed. Worship of Obama was and still is the only way to save ourselves.
I am now aware of Kennedy’s mistakes, girlfriends, etc, so I am not a worshipper. But his death did end a era in which patriotism was a good thing.
If I’m not mistaken, Tina Brown went similarly gaga over Bill Clinton. Some cringe-making stuff about him asking us to join him in the Now. It is something lefty women tend to do about an attractive male politician. There’s clearer some very low-level animal-instinctive mate-seeking stuff at work there–powerful man means safety (I’ve also noticed that about women, Neo), plenty of food, etc. And if he’s also attractive–well, you sometimes you get a loss of control like Tina’s. Very similar to the groupie phenomenon, I expect.
We men don’t have as many occasions to be that stupid because there aren’t many women in politics who do to us something comparable to what Clinton and Obama do to women. Physical attractiveness aside, the whole dynamic is different–a powerful woman doesn’t give us hormonal surges.
Here it is: “[Bill Clinton] is vividly in the present tense, and dares you to join him there.”
If I ever wrote anything like that–and, God forbid, published it– I would feel like killing myself on re-reading it after I’d come down.
Leftist women are weak links in the chain of what made America great, women on the right tend to be pit bulls. Go Joni Earnst!
Mac:
The only political figure I’ve ever felt that way about was JFK, and only somewhat, and I was basically a child. I’ve definitely had crushes on actors and writers and even the Beatles, but not politicians. Although I was a Democrat in the Clinton years and I thought Clinton rather attractive, I was basically immune to his charms even then. I thought his speeches were trite and long, and he was basically a BS-er.
I did meet him once, and had a short conversation. But he seemed distracted (and he was; it was during the Lewinsky thing). He didn’t look well.
I’ve also met Romney and Scott Brown, both of whom I think are very attractive. I certainly don’t idolize or idealize either, though. With JFK, there was a sense of excitement; that’s what I remember. During the 1960 campaign he gave a speech in a public place where I lived, and I wanted to go and hear him, but my parents nixed it, saying I could see him some other time. Well, that other time never came.
JFK was in so many ways the anti-0bama:
He was largely unscripted. In some of the footage it’s obvious that he used 3×5 cards — just a few — and then largely winged it.
He had a very quick wit, too.
Kennedy held more informal ‘pressers’ than any prior president. At the time he was accused of running the presidency from a microphone. He averaged about one presser per week. (!)
These could happen anywhere and at any time. Kennedy would simply wander over to the press pool and start chatting them up.
By doing so, Kennedy made many junior players into national names. Yes, they loved him for it. Most of their queries were ‘softballs.’
No other president has ever attempted to equal that style.
LBJ and RMN really ‘took the candy away’ — Vietnam-centric questions ruined the media chemistry.
It’s now almost entirely forgotten: JFK got America involved in Vietnam. Ike thought the French (ex)colony was as toxic as Algeria… or the French project to get the Suez canal back.
[ Paris talked London and Tel Aviv into the 1956 Sinai campaign. As Israel’s primary source for defense manufactures, France had a lot of clout. Most of these dirty dealings have been held back — and highly classified. It has taken fifty-years to get the records opened. All Cold War era accounts are now known to be tripe, for all official sources were lying their heads off. ]
[ Ike had learned during WWII: don’t get in bed with the French. Their domestic politics are a total mess. As the Czechs could tell you: they are totally unreliable allies. It was France, not Chamberlain, that dictated the Munich deal. She was the only player with an army of consequence. The British army was a joke — compared to the continental powers. ]
So JFK plunges into Vietnam — with an excessive diplomatic investment — not having learned the Truman lessons of Korea.
LBJ’s tapes clearly show that he was so dense that he didn’t know how to turn around and back out of Kennedy’s diplomacy.
Yet, by the end, the Press had transformed Vietnam into Nixon’s war. (!) The truth being that Nixon started backing out of Vietnam from day one.
It’s now forgotten, but at the time, Kennedy was CONSTANTLY on the hot seat. His performance was SO INFERIOR to that of Ike, even the Press were shocked.
&&&&
As I’ve posted: Barry has a magnetic arrogance. Most women pick up on his vibe — and assume that he MUST have the goods to back up his strut. But he doesn’t.
He has one other tick most unusual in a politician: he’s not a people person. He shuts out most people — to include his own crew.
blert:
Nixon was also not a people person. But he was more of a people person than Obama, although he didn’t have much of a facade. Obama has a better facade than Nixon.
The worshippers are filling a deep hole within themselves. What sad, little people. What multitudes.
The OBama phenomenon provides some insight into the psyches of men and women who are otherwise “intelligent” that can be sucked into worshipping a charlatan or cult leader. Seems to be human nature for many people to believe there are men among us who have supernatural abilities, who see and know things about the universe and ourselves the rest of us cannot. Those people probably lack the cynic’s gene.
In another system where it was possible, it would surely tempt Obama to use the power these fools relenquish to him for his own interests.
Oh never mind…I keep forgetting our system isn’t as good as we thought
Blert & Neo; not only is Obama less of a people person than Obama; But, Nixon was LOYAL to his people.
As we all know, the same cannot be said about Obama. He will throw anyone and everyone under the bus.
I’m very glad to hear you eluded the Clinton charm, Neo. He was/is indeed basically a B-S-er. I pegged him pretty quickly as a type I’ve often encountered in the South: the smarmy and probably dishonest preacher. I think he bears more than a little resemblance to the Bible salesman in Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People”.
Of course there are many, many women who aren’t susceptible to these guys, at least to the TV presence. My wife is one. She saw through both Clinton and Obama immediately.
I think we’re about the same age, but I don’t recall giving JFK a lot of thought one way or the other. At that age I hardly thought about politics and politicians at all.
Remember also……. Kennedy was a “war hero”, memorialized in the story of PT109, its ramming by a Japanese destroyer and Kennedy’s subsequent survival. That he was also a relatively good-looking youthful WWII veteran (as compared to the older more fatherly prior President D. D. Eisenhower) did not hurt his popularity with the younger generation.
To be annoyingly literal, Camelot refers to a royal court with the handsome prince (king) and beautiful princess (queen) with all manner of wonderful things happening there, and flowing from there. But none of the JFK worship was, and I was born in 1945, worship as we see it with Obama. Kennedy was supposed to be a terrific president who was good at presidenting as demonstrated by his results (YMMV).
Obama is just…..too wonderful for words and presidenting is practically beneath him, and even if things go wrong, it could not possibly be his fault because he’s too wonderful for words.
The mythos of the USN PT boat fleet is vast.
1) They were not considered an ‘attack’ arm of the navy.
2) Their primary purpose was to liaise with the Polynesian locals – particularly for the purposes of IJN activities and the rescue of downed Allied pilots.
The latter role was their primary mission as far as the admirals were concerned. The number of pilots rescued by PT boats — and submarines — and sea planes, is, all in all, quite astonishing.
3) As for the politics: the PT boats were overrun with Ivy league officers from New England. Kennedy was far from unique.
The Navy brass was delighted to dump off head-strong, politically connected, junior officers into a role that kept them out of harms way. The intended routine was to stay entirely out of the way of IJN destroyers.
(American torpedoes were problematic — and normally set deep enough to scoot right underneath a Japanese destroyer — all of them. From the very first, they were designed for deep draft vessels: battleships, cruisers, and freighters. The experts figured out that the MOST effective blast would be from below the keel. This would make (BB) belt armor irrelevant. The technical problem was that setting the depth too shallow ruined the scheme, but at a proper running depth, they’d shoot underneath all destroyers. For obvious morale reasons, this latter detail was never made public. Adjusting the setting — at sea — in action — WAY too touchy in first generation designs. (This was before digital logic, of course.) There wasn’t even a provision for accessing the logic when at sea.)
4) The PT boat ‘project’ kept New England (wooden) boat builders extremely happy. This also paid huge political dividends for the USN.
5) As for the Ivy League boys: they made for ideal liaison officers. They were certainly never slotted for higher commands.
The Navy never wanted PT boats to really mix it up with Japanese destroyers — who out-classed them drastically. (Some cheap shots from island shallows would do nicely, though.) Naturally, that’s exactly the kind of action that attracted Ivy League talent!
Kennedy ends up rescuing his own crew — instead of pilots.