David Brooks reports from the coastal elite’s recovery wards.

At first it seemed like a few random cases of lassitude among Mary Chapin Carpenter devotees in Berkeley, Cambridge and Chapel Hill. But then psychotherapists began to realize patients across the country were complaining of the same distress. They were experiencing the first hints of what’s bound to be a national phenomenon: Obama Comedown Syndrome.

The afflicted had already been through the phases of Obama-mania — fainting at rallies, weeping over their touch screens while watching Obama videos, spending hours making folk crafts featuring Michelle Obama’s face. These patients had experienced intense surges of hope-amine, the brain chemical that fuels euphoric sensations of historic change and personal salvation.

But they found that as the weeks went on, they needed more and purer hope-injections just to preserve the rush. They wound up craving more hope than even the Hope Pope could provide, and they began experiencing brooding moments of suboptimal hopefulness. Anxious posts began to appear on the Yes We Can! Facebook pages. A sense of ennui began to creep through the nation’s Ian McEwan-centered book clubs.

Up until now The Chosen One’s speeches had seemed to them less like stretches of words and more like soul sensations that transcended time and space. But those in the grips of Obama Comedown Syndrome began to wonder if His stuff actually made sense. For example, His Hopeness tells rallies that we are the change we have been waiting for, but if we are the change we have been waiting for then why have we been waiting since we’ve been here all along?

Patients in the grip of O.C.S. rarely express doubts at first, but in a classic case of transference, many experience slivers of sympathy for Hillary Clinton. They see her campaign morosely traipsing from one depressed industrial area to another — The Sitting Shiva for America Tour. They see that her entire political strategy consists of waiting for primary states as boring as she is.

They feel for her. They feel guilty because the entire commentariat now treats her like Richard Nixon. Are liberal elites rationalizing their own betrayal of her? Is Hillary just another fading First Wife thrown away for the first available Trophy Messiah?

As the syndrome progresses, they begin to ask questions about The Presence himself…

Read the whole thing.

Dan Calabrese isn’t worried about Obama. In fact, he think conservatives should stand aside, smile, and let Obama take care of Hillary for us. Obama will be easy enough to deal with in the real campaign.

if you really look closely at Obama, it’s hard not to notice some disquieting things.

First, he rarely says anything of substance, and on the rare occasions when he does, it’s completely bizarre. He wants to meet with Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. He wants to invade Pakistan. He wants to “reward work instead of rewarding wealth,” because as we all know, work and wealth are in a perpetual state of war with each other.

Maybe he’s better off just talking about “change” and “the audacity of hope,” and denouncing “cynicism.” He’s playing to his own strengths when he goes big on the rhetoric and small on the substance.

Second, people have weird reactions to him. The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto chronicled last week in his Best of the Web Today column how many times people have fainted at Obama rallies – almost like a charismatic service at a Pentecostal church, except that Pentecostals start fainting and speaking in tongues by the power of the Holy Spirit. What is doing it to them at Obama rallies? Maybe it’s whatever creepy thing made MSNBC’s Chris Matthews start to feel a thrill up his leg when he heard Obama speak. That’s just disturbing.

Third, and very much playing to the whole cult-of-personality thing surrounding Obama, people seem to see him as whatever they want him to be. Have you noticed something about the way Obama looks in pictures? Far more frequently than other politicians, Obama is photographed from an angle that looks up at him. It makes him look that much more towering in his stature, and plays into the notion of him as this all-powerful force of change. He looks the part, too. If you take a picture of Hillary from ground level, she looks like a female Gestapo officer. Obama looks like the man with the plan – even though he has no plan.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, Obama is endorsed by Oprah Winfrey. This is no surprise, of course. Obama likes to say things that sound good and mean absolutely nothing. If he and Winfrey are not a match made in Heaven, I don’t know what is.

Add to all this the fact that Obama has very little experience in Washington, and has the most liberal voting record in the Senate, and the reasons not to elect him start filling out a very long and compelling list. We need to talk about all this.

But not yet!

Until at least March 4, when he has a chance to deal a fatal blow to Hillary in the Texas and Ohio primaries, I’m lovin’ me some Obama. Change we can believe in! I am so there. And if Hillary lives to fight another day, I’ll love Obama a little longer – all the way to the Democratic National Convention in August if need be.

The man is giving the Clintons the shellacking of a lifetime. Ever since Hillary first invaded our national consciousness in 1992, she’s been trying to figure out a way to become president, and conservatives have been hoping she could be stopped. Obama’s stopping her. Let the man do his job.

Then we can start helping John McCain point out that Obama is liberal, shallow and weird. We can start reminding people that tax increases don’t help the economy, surrender doesn’t win a war and socialized health care doesn’t make anyone better.

There will be plenty of time for that. First thing’s first.

the liberal’s view of the universe

Frank Rich, spokesman for New York’s intellectually and politically homogeneous Upper West Side, points to diversity of epidural pigmentation in crowds of urban democrats as proof of the intrinsic superiority of Barack Obama and his supporters.

Senator Obama’s televised victory oration celebrating his Chesapeake primary trifecta on Tuesday night was a mechanical rehash. No matter. When the networks cut from the 17,000-plus Obama fans cheering at a Wisconsin arena to John McCain’s victory tableau before a few hundred spectators in the Old Town district of Alexandria, Va., it was a rerun of what happened to Hillary Clinton the night she lost Iowa. Senator McCain, backed by a collection of sallow-faced old Beltway pols, played the past to Mr. Obama’s here and now. Mr. McCain looked like a loser even though he, unlike Senator Clinton, had actually won.

But he has it even worse than Mrs. Clinton. What distinguished his posse from Mr. Obama’s throng was not just its age but its demographic monotony: all white and nearly all male. Such has been the inescapable Republican brand throughout this campaign, ever since David Letterman memorably pegged its lineup of presidential contenders last spring as “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club.”

For Mr. McCain, this albatross may be harder to shake than George W. Bush and Iraq, particularly in a faceoff with Mr. Obama. When Mr. McCain jokingly invoked the Obama slogan “I am fired up and ready to go” in his speech Tuesday night, it was as cringe-inducing as the white covers of R & B songs in the 1950s — or Mitt Romney’s stab at communing with his inner hip-hop on Martin Luther King’s birthday. Trapped in an archaic black-and-white newsreel, the G.O.P. looks more like a nostalgic relic than a national political party in contemporary America. A cultural sea change has passed it by.

One reads this sort of thing all the time in leftwing papers expressing the views of the narcissist urban elite. It is the large city, featuring struggling immigrants, lower-class minorities, left wing intellectuals, the Gay community, Bohemian young people (and lots of chic, trendy restaurants) which is the real America… the future! This, of course, is not America. It’s New York City.

Obama can win every single large city, and no one expects a democrat candidate to do anything else, and there is still all that terribly unfashionable, filled with middle-aged white guys, ordinary America, who could care less what the latest thing is, still amply large enough to vote him down. That should be a frustrating thought for Mr. Rich.

But Captain Ed is declining to drink the Kool-Aid.

People mocked Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney for their religious backgrounds often during the presidential campaigns, but at least they never claimed to be on a mission to save the souls of Americans through government action. Oh, people accused them of wanting to do so — to impose Southern Baptist or Mormon theology on an America that wants relentless secularism, but in point of fact both men gave stirring speeches on how their faith informs them personally but not their governance.

One campaign really has explicitly claimed to be on such a mission, however. Michelle Obama gave a speech at UCLA earlier this month in which she told supporters that her husband was the only man who could fix American souls — if we elect him President first. …

We have lost the understanding that in a democracy, we have a mutual obligation to one another — that we cannot measure the greatness of our society by the strongest and richest of us, but we have to measure our greatness by the least of these. That we have to compromise and sacrifice for one another in order to get things done. That is why I am here, because Barack Obama is the only person in this who understands that. That before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.

…

It’s the notion that only Barack Obama can save our souls that is the most offensive part of the speech, by far. Government doesn’t exist to save souls; it exists to ensure domestic tranquility and provide for the common defense. If I feel my soul needs saving, the very last place I’d look (in the US) for a savior would be Washington DC or Capitol Hill. I’ll trust God and Jesus Christ with my soul, and I’m not going to mistake Barack Obama for either one.

This, though, is the religion of statism distilled to its essence. Only a government can rescue people from the consequences of their own decisions. Only government programs can provide for your every need, and only government can use your money wisely enough to ensure that your needs get covered. Individuals cannot possibly manage to help their neighbors through their churches or community organizations, let alone encourage people to do for themselves.

And all you need to enter the statist Utopia is to sell your soul. So that it can be fixed.

No, thank you.

Senator Obama has been dusted with the media’s magical fairy dust and is sailing happily above the political fray right now, immune to hostile fire, wafted along on pink gaseous clouds of oratory. But, even media fairy dust has its limitations, and one day, well before November, the magic will wear off, and this candidate will plummet right back to earth, right back to the real world, where his absence of meaningful political accomplishment, and the precise details of his agenda, are going to be subjected to real scrutiny and real debate. Then even the Press will sit up, shake their heads, rub the sand from their eyes, and give Mr. Obama a good hard look.

Dahlia Litwick delivers the bad news.

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. …

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.

Elizabeth Wurtzel contemplates the messianic Obama, but the feminist in her is rooting for Hillary.

I’ve been told that I no longer need to do yoga, take up Pilates, or study Kaballah, and I can even stop listening to Bruce Springsteen. Apparently 45 minutes at a Barack Obama rally — preceded by two hours and 45 minutes of waiting in the snow outside to get in — will be all it takes to change my life. Forever. An open mind, a free spirit, a loving heart, a renewed appreciation for democracy — and possibly even thin thighs — will be mine for keeps, if I just take in the junior senator from Illinois at a high-school gymnasium in Waukesha or a Nascar track in Pocono or an arena in Dallas. In less time than it takes to get through a single session of psychotherapy, Mr. Obama can cure me. …

We see Hillary, we see Barack, and we see our own version of hell: Here is this amazing woman, top of her class, implausible marriage to impossible man, works as hard as the day is long, masters all the forms and spreadsheets of governing, even manages to raise a pretty darn good kid — and then along comes this guy, this groovy Obamarama, with his pleasing mien, his high style, his absolute fabulousness, and he wants the top floor, corner office that she earned.

And women — women have seen this movie, women have heard this story, women know the drill, have had their manicured fingers ready to ring that particular fire alarm for years now. Women, finally, will say no to that. Real women don’t care what Caroline Kennedy and Maria Shriver with their easy words and easy lives have to say about any of this. No one with a job takes advice from someone with a chef.

Right now, it looks like Barack Obama will be the nominee. Hillary Clinton is unlikely to win any more primaries for a few more weeks, and at that point, it may be too late for this championship season. But pundits count her out at their own peril. That woman is a force of nature. One of these years, Hillary is going to the White House. If she has to win every single vote one by one, she’ll do it. If she has to take hostages, hold a gun to the head of every voter as he enters the booth, she’ll do that too. She may even cry.

Never underestimate Hillary Clinton.

Read the whole thing.

Tony Blankley explains that Hillary still has a few tricks up her sleeve which may yet sink the Zombie-master Obama.

Starting about a week ago, we started seeing references in the national media (ABC, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times) to Obama spawning a “cult of personality” — a theme that had existed back in Illinois for some time but mysteriously didn’t substantially appear in the national media until about Super Tuesday. The maxim in political strategy is always to go at your opponent’s strength.

If you turn him on that, the battle is over. So, the cult of personality perfectly targets his strength: that Obama has a wonderful personality. The Clintons (presumably) are suggesting, in effect, that he may be delectable, but he’s not electable; that it is unhealthy to adore a leader — undemocratic, in fact.

But beyond that are dark hints of yet to be revealed facts about Obama. I was chatting with a senior Clinton surrogate in a cable TV green room late last week — a former Clinton White House senior appointee. He mentioned to me that, while they couldn’t bring it up, Obama said (unspecified) things back when he was in the Illinois Senate that may be on news videotape. He said it was way beyond what a general election electorate could swallow (implicitly: too leftish for the public). Obama is just not electable, he suggested.

Here, in Virginia, Barack Obama was recently obliged to speak without the assistance of his teleprompter.

Dean Barnett examines the unenhanced candidate’s performance and finds an unenhanced message.

It was.. interesting to see Obama climb to the stage at Virginia’s Jefferson-Jackson Dinner on Saturday night. As he strode to the podium, Obama clutched in his hands a pile of 3 by 5 index cards. The index cards meant only one thing–no Teleprompter.

Shorn of his Teleprompter, we saw a different Obama. His delivery was halting and unsure. He looked down at his obviously copious notes every few seconds throughout the speech. Unlike the typical Obama oration where the words flow with unparalleled fluidity, he stumbled over his phrasing repeatedly.

The prepared text for his remarks, as released on his website, sounded a lot like a typical Obama speech. All the Obama dramatis personae that we’ve come to know so well were there–the hapless family that had to put a “for sale” sign on its front lawn, the factory forced to shutter its doors and, of course, the mother who declares bankruptcy because “she cannot pay her child’s medical bills.”

The tone was also vintage Obama. The prepared text reached out to all Americans, including (gasp!) Republicans. It also evidenced Obama’s signature lack of anger. While his colleagues have happily demagogued complex issues and demonized the Bush administration, Obama always has taken pains to strike a loftier tone.

But Saturday night’s stem-winder turned out quite differently from the typical Obama speech. With no Teleprompter signaling the prepared text, Obama failed to deliver the speech in his characteristically flawless fashion. He had to rely on notes. And his memory. And he improvised.

The results weren’t just interesting because they revealed Obama as a markedly inferior speaker without the Teleprompter. Obama’s supporters have had ample notice that the scripted Obama is far more effective than the spontaneous one. The extremely articulate and passionate Obama that makes all the speeches has yet to show up at any of the debates. For such a gifted and energetic speaker, he is an oddly tongue-tied and indifferent debater.

What was especially noteworthy about his Virginia speech were the diversions Obama took from the prepared text. Because of Obama’s improvised moments, this speech was different than the usual fare he offers. We didn’t get the normal dosages of post-partisanship or even “elevation.” Virtually every time Obama deviated from the text, he expressed the partisan anger that has so poisoned the Democratic party. His spontaneous comments eschewed the conciliatory and optimistic tone that has made the Obama campaign such a phenomenon. It looked like the spirit of John Edwards or Howard Dean had possessed Obama every time he vamped. While Paul Krugman probably loved it, this different Obama was a far less attractive one.

At one point, Obama launched an improvised jeremiad against the current administration that took special note of the recent revelation that he and Dick Cheney are distant relations:

“Now I understand some of the excitement doesn’t have to do with me. I know that whatever else happens whatever twists and turns this campaign may take, when you go into that polling place next November, the name George Bush won’t be
on the ballot and that makes everybody pretty cheerful. Everyone’s happy about that. The name of my cousin Dick Cheney won’t be on the ballot. That was embarrassing when that news came out. When they do these genealogical surveys, you want to be related to somebody cool. So, but, his name went be on the ballot.

“Each of us running for the Democratic nomination agrees on one thing that the other party does not–that the next president must end the disastrous policies of George W. Bush. No more Scooter Libby Justice! No more Brownie incompetence! No more Karl Rove politics.”…

Looking past the missed opportunity regarding the vice president, how many times has Obama deliberately pushed angry-left hot buttons like Scooter Libby and Karl Rove? Obama has run looking to the future, and thus hasn’t felt it necessary to dwell on the purported horrors that the Bush administration has visited upon the nation. This tack has made him look above the fray.

Other improvised moments also contradicted the generally lofty tone of the Obama campaign. At one, point when addressing what we have to do for the economy, Obama ad-libbed, “The insurance and the drug companies aren’t going to give up their profits easily . . . Exxon Mobil made $11 billion this past quarter.” This is the kind of empty class warfare shtick that earned John Edwards an early exit from the race. What’s more, it displayed the kind of simplistic sloganeering that Obama had previously eschewed. …

What makes Obama’s Jefferson-Jackson speech especially relevant is where he went when he went off script. The unifying Obama who has impressed so many people during this campaign season vanished, replaced by just another angry liberal railing against George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Exxon Mobil, and other long standing Democratic piñatas.

Just look at what’s hanging on the wall in Obama Campaign headquarters in Houston, Texas. Gives you a pretty clear idea of who it is that’s working to make Barack Obama President of the United States, doesn’t it?

The image of a Cuban flag with Che Guevara’s face superposed on it appeared last week in a Houston television news video, and the story has just been broken on the Internet by Newsbusters today.

Australian correspondent Geoff Norman tells his readers back home about how, on a distant continent, a holy man politician-cum-prophet has turned massive crowds of primitive indigenes into worshipers expecting miracles.

It was early 1994 when Nelson Mandela gave a speech in a slum outside Cape Town and spoke in grand terms of a new beginning and how when he was elected president every household would have a washing machine.

People took him literally. A few months later he became South Africa’s first black president. That’s when clerks in department stores in Cape Town had to turn people away demanding their free washer and dryer.

Having spent some time as a reporter in South Africa watching the Mandela presidency I was reminded of that story this week when I travelled with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on the campaign trail. …

How does a cult figure, in the eyes of some something akin to a messiah, make the transition to a political frontrunner – president even – where disappointment will soon crush what seemed to be a journey to a promised land?

Looking into the faces of a more than 16,000-strong crowd in a basketball stadium in Hartford, Connecticut this week, the Mandela magic I’d seen before was there too. Black and white, and the youth; they appeared in a state close to rapture watching Obama speak. Here and there one could see women crying and the some men wiping away tears too.

It was not the promise of a washing machine, of course. Mandela was heading a Rainbow Revolution – a new governing coalition. The sense of renewal in those heady days in South Africa in the mid-’90s was palpable. A political and cultural boil was being lanced. There was relief and joy. Cape Town in those days was humming.

In the US today there are echoes of that Rainbow Revolution. Through the media and on the streets people are getting a bit giddy over Obama. In this man they are projecting a new course – one that he says he will lead – where the US buries the culture wars, charts a new course in bipartisan politics and heralds a new dawn for America. …

Obama is part politician, part cult. Supporters wearing T-shirts with an Andy Warhol like pop-art image of his face testify to that. But then they – him – were once easy to dismiss until people realised Obama’s charisma was being matched by one of the most sophisticated ground operations ever seen. It is one that is outsmarting the Clinton machine. He’s marrying inspiration and cult with old-fashioned political grunt.

One would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by Obama on the stump. It’s not so much by what he says but it’s the way the crowds respond to his words. When 16,000 people, without prompting, start shouting some of his keynote phrases as he delivers them, you know something special is going on.

The atmosphere at his events is such that one wonders if Obama is about to walk out with a basket with some loaves and fishes to feed the thousands.

Barack Obama and Tony Rezko superposed on the Obama mansion

better house photo here

In this 10:06 video of the second part of a speech made January 31, 2008 in Wilmington, Delaware, Michelle Obama is complaining about how “they move the bar.”

This is the reality, we’re told, for “regular folks on the ground,” people like Michelle Obama herself with what she calls “my simple, little life,” all this is not fair. It’s just not right.

Rather than being blocked by some moving and shifting bar, Michelle Obama has obviously experienced considerable upward mobility. She graduated from Princeton and Harvard, presumably receiving both racially-based admissions preference and scholarship assistance. If so, the latter did not prevent her from claiming that her father, a democrat party precinct captain coincidentally employed at the municipal filtration plant, had been able, in the good old days of the early 1980s (before “they” started moving the bar), to send two children to Princeton.

Neither has any bar kept Michelle Obama from occupying a $316,962-a-year position as vice president at the University of Chicago Hospitals.

Her simple, little life occurs domestically in a 96-year-old Georgian revival home that has “four fireplaces, glass-door bookcases fashioned from Honduran mahogany, and a 1,000-bottle wine cellar,” purchased in 2005 for $1.65 million.

Mrs. Obama’s lifestyle is additionally enhanced by an adjoining parcel of real estate, previously associated with her house but offered for sale separately in 2005, which was purchased for $625,000 by the wife of Obama campaign donor and long-time supporter Antoin “Tony” Rezko, who has been subsequently indicted for extortion.

The Reskos sold the Obamas a portion of the second property, all of which is only accessible via the Obama’s property, and also paid for the erection of a fence. “The bars keep moving.”

Sources:

Chicago Tribune 1-Nov-06

ABC News 10-Jan-08

Isn’t it wonderful that the consequences of changes in the world, all the inconveniences and dislocations produced by economic progress, can be repealed if we just give power to “regular folks” like Barack & Michelle Obama?

Supporters at Obama Rally singing: “Yes we can”

Barack Obama has gained astonishing traction among voters simply by looking good and repeating in his mellifluous announcer’s voice a carefully-chosen litany of utterly and completely vacuous political mantras: Change, Hope, Move Beyond, which (everyone seems to fail to notice) commit Obama to absolutely nothing concrete and specific, and which (best of all) leave his opponents no policy position to attack.

In this downright scary, Obama 4:30 campaign music video, a collection of celebrity performers (including Jesse Dylan, Will.i.am, Common, Scarlett Johansson, Tatyana Ali, John Legend, Herbie Hancock, Kate Walsh, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Adam Rodriquez, Kelly Hu, Adam Rodriquez, Amber Valetta, Eric Balfour, Aisha Tyler, Nicole Scherzinger and Nick Cannon) have been turned into pod people who echo all the phrases of one of Obama’s speeches in song with the glazed eyes and reverential expressions of members of a religious cult.

Or worse.

As in Night of the Living Dead, you wonder if you might not have to shoot the zombies in the head before one of them bites you.

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Hat tips to Andrew Sullivan and Walter Olson.