Specifics and the cult of personality

The Times Kate Zernicke hints ominously that Obama risks perception of having a cult of personality.

From the day Mr. Obama announced his candidacy, he has billed it as a movement, and himself as the agent of generational change. He has mocked his rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, for accusing him of raising “false hopes.” “We don’t need leaders who are telling us what we cannot do,” he said in New Hampshire. “We need a president who can tell us what we can do! What we can accomplish! Where we can take this country!”

Accounts of the campaign’s “Camp Obama” sessions, to train volunteers, have a revivalist flavor. Volunteers are urged to avoid talking about policy to potential voters, and instead tell of how they “came” to Mr. Obama.

“If you don’t talk about issues in great detail, if you do it in a way that is not the centerpiece of your campaign, of your rhetoric, then you become a blank screen,” Mr. Wilentz [a long-time friend of the Clintons] said. “Everybody thinks you are the vehicle of their hopes.”

Jeff Zeleny, writing in the same paper, now concedes that Obama is "reacting to criticism" and is adding specifics to his soaring oratin'...but doesn't mention a single specific Obama mentioned.

By every indication, this was not a random change in the Obama style. The senator decided to clue in his audience to the shift on a recent morning in Janesville, Wis., where he presented an economic proposal to create seven million jobs over the next decade.

“Today, I want to take it down a notch,” said Mr. Obama, of Illinois, standing on the floor of a General Motors plant. “This is going to be a speech that is a little more detailed. It’s going to be a little bit longer, with not too many applause lines.”

After raising more money, winning more states and garnering more votes than Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama has demonstrated a new air of certainty. But advisers said despite his questionable flares of confidence — acknowledging to audiences, for example, that he believed he did in fact give a good speech — he was mindful of being too sure of himself at this unfinished moment in the Democratic nomination fight. And clearly the criticisms by Mrs. Clinton — and, not incidentally, by Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee — that Mr. Obama is a candidate with more flash than substance are being taken as something of a warning shot.

What, for God's sake, was the freakin' proposal?

Anyhow, at least we know where the latest shot at making Obama look odd, different from (ahem) you and me (in a way that safely doesn't mention the color of his skin) is going to come from.

L.A. Times columnist Joel Stein is cited, calling it “Obamaphilia. Then two of the very serious people sect have their opinions presented, Conservative columnist David Brooks in the NY Times, through his alter-ego Dr. Retail:

Meanwhile, Obama’s people are so taken with their messiah that soon they’ll be selling flowers at airports and arranging mass weddings. There’s a “Yes We Can” video floating around YouTube in which a bunch of celebrities like Scarlett Johansson and the guy from the Black Eyed Peas are singing the words to an Obama speech in escalating states of righteousness and ecstasy. If that video doesn’t creep out normal working-class voters, then nothing will.

Or Joe Klein in Time magazine, in a piece called Inspiration vs Substance. None too subtle is Joe. Klein also introduced the descriptor “creepy” to Obama-mania.

“There was something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism … [T]he message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is.

And although not mentioned in the CNN piece, the truly creepy conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer gets into the act yesterday with this Washington Post column The Audacity of Selling Hope.

Interestingly, Obama has been able to win these electoral victories and dazzle crowds in one new jurisdiction after another, even as his mesmeric power has begun to arouse skepticism and misgivings among the mainstream media.

ABC’s Jake Tapper notes the “Helter-Skelter cultish qualities” of “Obama worshipers,” what Joel Stein of the Los Angeles Times calls “the Cult of Obama.” Obama’s Super Tuesday victory speech was a classic of the genre. Its effect was electric, eliciting a rhythmic fervor in the audience — to such rhetorical nonsense as “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. (Cheers, applause.) We are the change that we seek.”

Krauthammer compares it to what he experienced as a young man growing up in Montreal, in what became known as Trudeaumania. The more obvious example to many Americans who remember the spring of 1968 is with Robert Kennedy. It would seem the traditional media’s reaction to inspirational political figures has not improved in the intervening 40 years. If anything it’s only gotten worse.

Or as Will Bunch succinctly put it:

But the real takeaway here is that passion + politics = cult.

God — the real one — save our political discourse.

I think Roy said something about our need for Michael Dukakis.