Looking back at Michael Hastings’ campaign reporting from 2008:
I simply cannot imagine what it is about Obama that gets people going this way (and yes, I understand there’s a racial element of attraction to a cool black guy, but that doesn’t really explain the depth and weirdness of it, IMHO), except to say that it’s clearly something non-verbal. I believe it has been operating with Obama for virtually his entire life and has worked to his very great advantage. Quite a few people have always reacted to him as though his mere presence were almost supernaturally attractive, as if he exuded a kind of force field that made them—as Hastings so well put it—practically swoon.
It’s a dangerous phenomenon. I believe that Obama understands it and cultivates it, too. And no, I don’t think it’s actually hypnosis, although it works in some powerfully suggestive manner. It also takes advantage of the fact that so many journalists today are very young writers (like Hastings) who have done almost nothing else for a living, and so they seem especially susceptible. In the mid-20th century, reporters for major publications used to be uniformly older and to have had more varied prior experience in life and the world—more hard-boiled and hard-nosed, and less susceptible to swooning hero worship, although they were hardly immune to respect and liking.
In their childish emotionalism, they’ve helped usher in an era of massive wealth destruction, ruining millions of lives. And only now, with the revelations of the AP and Fox News, are they starting to realize the danger they should have seen with things like this:
That’s the way this White House works on the press: engender hero worship bordering on the hysterical, and then use the threat of withdrawal of the chance to be in the loved one’s presence to compel compliance.
Sick. Dangerous. And it explains quite a bit, doesn’t it?
Yes, and like an abused spouse, fearing the “war on women” and other chimaera, they’ll return to him in time for next year’s election, to unwittingly try to continue the destruction.
Occasionally I tune into Charlie Rose because his show offers useful glimpses into what the current Hive party-line is, and what the Hive-Mind is thinking (if you can call it “thinking”). Rose had some guy from Ireland on and they mentioned that Obama was in Belfast and had given a speech there. I gather we were all supposed to think “How wonderful!” or “The One does it again!” They played a segment of the speech, which was the usual Obama bushwa punctuated by that Mussolin-esque chin-tilts that “Il Dufe” likes to do. I thought: “My God, he’s not posing any longer–he really thinks he’s one of the Great Men of History–and these bozos are swallowing it!”
It’s funny. I’ve been a regular at Neo-Neocon since about 2004, yet I completely missed this thread.
“Neon lights, Nobel Prize
When a mirror speaks, the reflection lies.”