President Barack Obama had an approval rating of just 38 percent as of late September and he is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year.
This week, the man who once filled arenas like a rock star suffered the indignity of Wisconsin Democrats walking out on him as he stumped for another struggling Democrat, Mary Burke. Obama’s visit to Wisconsin coincided with the disappearance of Burke’s modest lead in statewide polls. She now trails her opponent, Scott Walker, by seven points. (RELATED: Marquette Poll: Walker Opens Up 7-Point Lead)
The very same thing happened in deep-blue Maryland last week, where the bleachers reportedly began emptying while Obama was giving a speech. The Republican gubernatorial candidate then enjoyed a nine-point polling boost. (RELATED: Obama Visits Maryland; Democrat Drops 9 Points?)
Adding still further to Obama’s misery, a new nationwide poll from Harvard’s Institute of Politics shows his Svengali-like hold over America’s 18-to-29-year-old voting cohort has finally loosened. (RELATED: Their Unrealistic Expectations Crushed At Last, Millennials Reject Obama In Droves)
And in Kentucky, Democratic Senate candidate Alison Grimes won’t even admit she voted for Obama.
The atmosphere has got to be pretty glum in the White House and in various leftist hothouses.
The Daily Caller wants to help.
Here, then, is a fond tribute to those halcyon times when a bunch of dupes waxed ridiculously about Obama as if he was some kind of worship-worthy deity, not a crappy leader with no experience.
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.”
For first place in the propaganda-just-like-North-Korea category, the obvious winner is Eve Konstantine, some leadership coach and Huffington Post blogger. “He represents our diverse whole: he’s brown, book and street smart, somewhat androgynous, strong while adaptive, and, above all, purposeful,” Konstantine wrote of Obama in February 2008. “He’s an amalgam of all that we are. He knows where he’s going, he understands what’s possible, he sees the current imperative, and he’s voicing it for all of us. He is a necessary response to the current zeitgeist. He’s our representation of who we might be as caretakers of the planet. He comes at the hour of our greatest darkness, after we’ve hit a national bottom on the world stage. He’s Everyman, in a way a that [sic] fine white male, brimming with integrity, or a competent white female simply can’t be.”
In January 2008, ultra-wealthy alternative medicine guru Deepak Chopra called Obama the “lighthouse and lightning rod” who “called upon Americans to show their better nature” at The Huffington Post. “I’d suggest that the X factor which sets Barack Obama aside as a unique candidate is his hard-won self-awareness,” Chopra exuded. “If we are lucky, we will wake up and begin the journey back to self-awareness as a people.” Separately, Chopra also “claims you can prevent and reverse cataracts by brushing your teeth, scraping your tongue, spitting into a cup of water, and washing your eyes for a few minutes with this mixture,” according to The Skeptic’s Dictionary.
In February 2008, long-ago-semi-electrifying Democratic politician Gary Hart identified Obama as “a leader” for a “transcendent moment” at HuffPo. “He is in fact an agent of transformation,” Hart explained. “He is not operating on the same plane as ordinary politicians, and this makes him seem elusive to the conventional press and the traditional politicians. His instinct for the moment and the times is orders of magnitude more powerful than the experience claimed by others. Experience in the old ways is irrelevant experience. ”
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?”
In February 2008, Politico, a suburban Virginia blog, noted the messianic effect Obama was having on many Democrats — including celebrities. Take George Clooney, for example. “He walks into a room and you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere,” the hunky college dropout said. Another celeb, Halle Berry, indicated her own cultish devotion to Obama. “I’ll do whatever he says to do,” she swore. “I’ll collect paper cups off the ground to make his pathway clear.” The Politico story also has this interesting tidbit about Obama’s shtick. “The campaign works hard to cultivate the rock star image,” it said. “After he’s introduced, Obama routinely waits about 30 seconds to enter the arena.”
Do cult leaders believe all the wacky stuff their brainwashed, usually protein-starved followers believe about them? For Obama, the answer is a resounding yes. During his 2008 nomination victory speech in St. Paul, Minn., Obama famously told the spellbound crowd: “I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.”
In June 2009, then-Newsweek editor Evan Thomas called Obama “sort of God,” according to the Media Research Center. “We’re not just parochial, we’re not just chauvinistic, we’re not just provincial,” Thomas told MSNBC host Chris Matthews. (Thomas was talking about the Middle East, not defending his cocktail-circuit friends.) “We stand for something – I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God.” Ever the powerhouse intellectual, Matthews responded, “Yeah.”
As every European knows, Europeans are smarter and savvier than Americans. And so it was in December 2009 that Politiken, a leading Danish newspaper, proclaimed to the world that Obama is far greater than Jesus Christ because Obamacare had “passed through the American Senate” but all Jesus did was offer up some miracles “which only benefitted a few.” “Obama is, of course, greater than Jesus – if we have to play that absurd Christmas game,” the newspaper instructed. “But it is probably more meaningful to insist that with today’s domestic triumph, that he has already assured himself a place in the history books – a space he has good chances of expanding considerably in coming years.”
It’s hard to know how many dozens of true believers remain in the Church of Barack Obama, but the president’s wife, Michelle Obama, appears to have remained a stalwart disciple to the last, bitter end. “We have an amazing story to tell,” the first lady said as recently as April 2012, according to The Weekly Standard. “This president has brought us out of the dark and into the light.” (RELATED: The Obamas Have Spent Over $44,351,777.12 In Taxpayer Cash On Travel)
[h/t Is Barack Obama the Messiah?]
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