This is from the Wall Street Journal, with intro from Rush. The hypnotism explained. Fouad Ajami. Let me tell you who he is. You've seen him on television. You may not know exactly who he is. He is professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and an adjunct research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. His piece in the Wall Street Journal today, "Obama and the Politics of Crowds: The Masses Greeting the Candidate on the Trail are a Sign of Great Unease." I could read the whole thing to you. It is just profound. He says, "There is something odd -- and dare I say novel -- in American politics about the crowds that have been greeting Barack Obama on his campaign trail. Hitherto, crowds have not been a prominent feature of American politics.
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"The bonuses of the wizards who ran the great corporate entities had not bothered them. It was the spectacle of the work of the wizards melting before our eyes that unsettled them. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late Democratic senator from New York, once set the difference between American capitalism and the older European version by observing that America was the party of liberty, whereas Europe was the party of equality. Just in the nick of time for the Obama candidacy, the American faith in liberty began to crack. The preachers of America's decline in the global pecking order had added to the panic.
"Our best days were behind us, the declinists prophesied. The sun was setting on our imperium, and rising in other lands. A younger man, 'cool' and collected, carrying within his own biography the strands of the world beyond America's shores, was put forth as a herald of the change upon us. The crowd would risk the experiment. There was grudge and a desire for retribution in the crowd to begin with. Akin to the passions that have shaped and driven highly polarized societies, this election has at its core a desire to settle the unfinished account of the presidential election eight years ago. George W. Bush's presidency remained, for his countless critics and detractors, a tale of usurpation. "He had gotten what was not his due; more galling still, he had been bold and unabashed, and taken his time at the helm as an opportunity to assert an ambitious doctrine of American power abroad. He had waged a war of choice in Iraq. This election is the rematch that John Kerry had not delivered on. In the fashion of the crowd that seeks and sees the justice of retribution, Mr. Obama's supporters have been willing to overlook his means," and who he is. "So a candidate pledged to good government and to ending the role of money in our political life opts out of public financing of presidential campaigns. What of it? The end justifies the means. "[Except] in times of national peril, Americans have been sober, really minimalist, in what they expected out of national elections, out of politics itself. The outcomes that mattered were decided in the push and pull of daily life, by the inventors and the entrepreneurs, and the captains of industry and finance. To be sure, there was a measure of willfulness in this national vision, for politics and wars guided the destiny of this republic. But that American sobriety and skepticism about politics -- and leaders -- set this republic apart from political cultures that saw redemption lurking around every corner. My boyhood, and the Arab political culture I have been chronicling for well over three decades, are anchored in the Arab world. "And the tragedy of Arab political culture has been the unending expectation of the crowd -- the street, we call it -- in the redeemer who will put an end to the decline, who will restore faded splendor and greatness. When I came into my own, in the late 1950s and '60s, those hopes were invested in the Egyptian Gamal Abdul Nasser. He faltered, and broke the hearts of generations of Arabs. But the faith in the Awaited One lives on, and it would forever circle the Arab world looking for the next redeemer. America is a different land, for me exceptional in all the ways that matter. In recent days, those vast Obama crowds, though, have recalled for me the politics of charisma that wrecked Arab and Muslim societies. "A leader does not have to say much, or be much. The crowd is left to its most powerful possession -- its imagination. From Elias Canetti again: 'But the crowd, as such, disintegrates. It has a presentiment of this and fears it. ... Only the growth of the crowd prevents those who belong to it from creeping back under their private burdens.' The morning after the election, the disappointment will begin to settle upon the Obama crowd. Defeat -- by now unthinkable to the devotees -- will bring heartbreak. Victory will steadily deliver the sobering verdict that our troubles won't be solved by a leader's magic." That's Fouad Ajami trying to explain the fascination of Obama's crowds. They want a redeemer. They, in times of economic stress, simply look at him as the great equalizer, and they are going to find out... The great point in here about Silicon Valley and how competitive and cutthroat competitive they are out there, how they're all just smitten with Obama, and at some point he's going to burn 'em. Obama is going to burn all these people that support him, and they are in utter denial about it. They think that, "Oh, no, he's not that bad. He's not that bad." All of our conservative intellectualoid pseudointellectuals believe the same. "Oh, he's not going to be a leftist. He'll govern from the center." So the imagination, the faith: He's a blank slate. You don't listen to what he says. You don't listen to what he says he's going to do. You ignore all of that, because the crowd has made of Obama what they want him to be. |
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