Jonathan Chait, knocking down all the "Obama is the Messiah" bullshit:
Next, there is Obama's declaration that "we are the ones we've been waiting for." The point, which he has made many times, is that voters should take responsibility themselves for enacting change, and thus that his supporters should not treat him as a savior. Obama-as-cult-leader screeds insist upon reading the meaning as the exact reverse. Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote, "in the words of his own slogan, 'we are the ones we've been waiting for,' which, translating the royal 'we,' means: 'I am the one we've been waiting for.'" As a pundit, I'm intrigued by this technique of taking a word out of your subject's statement and substituting its opposite. Did you know that McCain's slogan, "Country first," could be translated via the Krauthammer method into "Country last"? Why does John McCain hate America?He also goes into the inconvenient fact that the GOP's Reagan cult is both a lot more durable and a lot more creepy. Posted by Stephen Silver at August 25, 2008 07:07 PM
I agree that the Reagan cult is a lot more creepy because Reagan is dead, but just because Obama might not be insisting he is the messiah doesn't mean that many of his supporters haven't gone a little bit over the edge in their "messianic" fervor over the man. Krauthammer's busted logic aside, when any human being becomes that much larger than life in the eyes of any group, it does ring of messianism.
Posted by: Dan at August 26, 2008 12:36 PM