The Obama phenomenon: It's the message, not the man

Comment on The Huffington Post, 2/24/08

John Tomasic is wrong when he says that "Obama mania, like Reagan love, has to do with faith in the person..." Although Barack Obama is a confident speaker, with as low a center of gravity and as calm a demeanor as any presidential candidate since Dwight Eisenhower, he could not be generating the response that he has, if he were merely a "rock star". Politics is different than entertainment, because it concerns reality -- the national reality, which most people believe is now as distressing as it has ever been in their lives. The mortgage debt crisis, the endless wars in the Middle East, the collapse of the value of the dollar, the failure of major parts of our national infrastructure, as wide a chasm between the rich and the poor as seen since before the Great Crash of 1929, and a titanic wave of anti-Americanism from Bolivia to Belgrade to Beirut: The alarms are going off on every side.

Only Barack Obama is offering a call to national action that is proportionate to the alarm that people feel. Both Clinton and McCain are walking advertisements for business as usual, and the majority is distinctly uneasy with that choice. This is not about personality, it is about the central message that Obama is delivering: You have to take back your government, we must unify our people, and we can overcome every one of these challenges – “yes, we can.” This primal desire to defy the size of the coming apparent general crisis, to rise to overcome these threats to the American promise, is what is manifested in the response to the clarion call for commitment and sacrifice that Obama is making. His eloquence is merely the means to the end of rallying and redefining patriotism, married not to war but to national renewal. We already knew that something of that scale would be needed. We only needed someone to summon it from us.