On the eve of election, The Daily Caller brings back fond memories for those who probably wish they wouldn’t.
Obama’s speeches “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,” parochial Washington rube Ezra Klein spouted in January 2008 in The American Prospect. “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 towards 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.”
In December 2007, some 30,000 people showed up at a football stadium in South Carolina to see Obama and his campaign buddy, Oprah Winfrey. Both spoke like preachers on the old-time gospel hour — about Obama. “I give all praise and honor to God,” Obama said, according to Politico. “Look at the day the Lord has made.” Meanwhile, Winfrey spoke about a quasi-holy man. “We need a leader who’s going to touch our souls. Who’s going to make us feel differently about one another. Who’s going to remind us that we are one another’s keepers. That we are only as strong as the weakest among us.” The once-popular daytime talk show host also spoke about “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” a novel and movie from the 1970s. This old woman would ask all children, “Are you the one? Are you the one?” “Today we have the answer to Miss Pittman’s question,” Winfrey confidently predicted. “South Carolina: I do believe he’s the one.”
Toni Morrison, the most overrated novelist in human history (and the person who once called Bill Clinton America’s first black president), was an early rider on the Obama Messiah Express. In January 2008, she wrote a letter praising Obama for possessing “a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom.” He had an “un-embargoed” “moral center,” she gushed, according to the New York Observer. He had “courage instead of mere ambition.” Indeed, the novelist most famous for being forced upon a generation of American high schoolers babbled: “There have been a few prescient leaders in our past, but you are the man for this time.”
MSNBC talking head Chris Matthews has semi-coherently called a multitude of things racist since the beginning of the Obama presidency including workfare, Sarah Palin, the Constitution, not liking Washington, D.C.and, in fact, scrutinizing Obama’s presidency. In February 2008, Matthews was hopelessly indoctrinated in the ways of Obama worship. “It’s part of reporting this case, this election, the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama’s speech,” Matthews famously bleated, according to the Media Research Center. “My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don’t have that too often.”
In an almost textbook-perfect, dude-you-must-be-joking example of messianic Obama zeal, San Francisco columnist Mark Morford frothed in June 2008 that Obama “isn’t really one of us.” “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.”
In April 2008, at the crazy leftist website Daily Kos, someone whose vehicle almost certainly features at least 35 bumper stickers posted a truly bizarre rant about Obama, myth, astrology and an obscure 2008 comet. “Obama was born with his sun in Leo, and his story exemplifies the quest of the Solar Hero,” the story goes. “His father, who joins with his mother on an island, conceives a child, and soon thereafter leaves the child and mother to continue his own journeying. Obama, a ‘special ‘child, left to create his own internal image of ‘father’, and related meanings of strength, protection, leadership, etc.” Also, “Perseus had help from the gods. Does it not feel as if some special hand is guiding Obama on his journey, I mean, as he has said, the utter improbability of it all?”