12-01-2008, 10:58 AM
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| Gone Fishin | | Join Date: Feb 2008 Location: Lost On A Lake
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‘Obamamania’ on the Wane Quote:
December 1, 2008 - by Eric Scheie
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The more time I spend in Berkeley, California (where I am on an extended visit), the more I find myself wondering about something.
Is the left-wing phenomenon known as “Obamamania” on the wane?
It might be too early to tell, but from what I’ve been reading and hearing, I see clear signs that it is. A number of leftist commentators have worked themselves into quite a lather over Barack Obama’s apparent “centrism” — especially his failure to appoint “progressives” (code language for far leftists).
Things have come a long way since the San Francisco Chronicle’s Mark Morford mythologized Barack Obama as a “powerful luminosity, a unique high-vibration integrity” in a piece which noted approvingly that “spiritually advanced people” saw him as approaching Godhead — as a magical “Lightworker”:
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.
Whether Morford still seeks the beatification of St. Barack, I don’t know, but these days his paper seems more to be playing the role of devil’s advocate. A recent piece (headlined as “Obama Team Heavy On Centrists — Economic appointments make some Republicans happier than liberals” at the web site) grimly noted Republican praise, and liberal skepticism:
While Republicans were praising Obama’ economic team (Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H. said Obama demonstrated “strong and early leadership by his choices), liberal were more skeptical. Noting the heavy reliance on former Clinton administration officials, including Geithner and Summers, Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said both men “supported policies that got us here. They were big fans of financial deregulation, they didn’t take financial bubble seriously - back then it was the stock-market bubble, but they said asset bubbles were not a big deal. The hope is they’ve learned something, and that remains to be seen.”
The Berkeley Daily Planet (”Party’s Over–Time to Get Back to Work“) wasted no time in taking Barack Obama directly to task. The first sentence (sounding eerily like a conservative Op Ed in the Washington Times) laments that “as the economic news goes daily from bad to worse, Obamamania continues unabated.” As the editorial reminds us, the fabled Kennedy of Camelot was a war hawk, and it might be time to take off the rose-colored glasses
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