Obama mania

Jonah Goldberg:

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.

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Howard Kurtz also notices the media love/infatuation.

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The media overall are being swept up by a wave of Obamamania, in which normally hard-bitten journalists watch the orator in action and come away dazzled by his gifts. A New York Times piece Saturday compared the Illinois senator to JFK and Martin Luther King in the same paragraph. A Newsweek cover story out yesterday gushed that Obama, "tall and handsome and blessed with a weighty baritone, knows how to bring along a crowd while seeming to stay slightly above it." The journalistic scrutiny usually visited on instant front-runners has been replaced by something akin to a standing ovation.

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That probably explains why the media has avoided for the most part his really ignorant statements on Iraq and the effects of the surge. That would not fit the narrative. Some of them would probably wait until after he effected his ridiculous policy of withdrawing troops from Iraq when they noticed the increased violence, but then would still blame it on Bush rather than an inept ignorant Democrat demagogue. Obama has been wrong about Iraq from the beginning and he is even more wrong about it now, but that is what many Democrats like about him.

James Taranto notes that Klein gave a similar over the top review to a Kerry speech in 2004. Taranto suggest this makes Klein a cheap date, but that may be too kind. I think Democrat sycophant may be a better fit.