I appreciate the clarification. I think that Chait might have made his original argument just slightly more difficult to misinterpret if he hadn't kicked it off by writing that "the image of Obama as a messianic figure rests upon an endlessly repeated litany of bogus particulars," and then cited, as two of his four examples of the "particulars" in question, the claim that people faint at Obama rallies, and the notion that Oprah Winfrey once referred to Obama as "The One." These aren't examples of the Democratic nominee "holding himself up as a God-like figure" - they're examples of other people treating him as some sort of God-like figure, and by trying to debunk them at the outset of his piece Chait gave the strong impression that he intended to take on a lot more than just the question of whether Obama himself has a messiah complex.Ross Douthat sarcastically points out that many people do, in fact, regard Barack Obama in overheated or even quasi-messianic terms. I agree with this. What I don't understand is why Douthat thinks this is a rebuttal to the argument in my latest TRB column about Obama and the charge of messianism. Since my argument apparently was not clear enough, I'll sum it up:
1. The Cult of Obama is no stranger or kitschier than the Cult of Reagan or the (short-lived) Cult of George W. Bush. Indeed, Bush, unlike Obama, literally believed he was called by God to lead the world. Ross is more theologically inclined than I am, so I'll leave it to him to decide whether that's less messianic than Obama's primise to ameloriate the effects of climate change upon global sea levels.
2. The notion that Obama is holding himself up as a God-like figure rests upon a series of distortions.
3. It's true that a lot of Obama supporters have unrealistic expectations of what he could accomplish as president, but that is not a good reason to vote against him.
I would also add that while Chait is of course correct that other politicians have inspired icky messiah-like adulation, his examples - Reagan and the post-9/11 Dubya - don't necessarily make the current wave of over-the-top Obamaphilia appear quite as benign as he thinks. I'm certainly no defender of Reagan kitsch or Bush busts, but it's worth noting that the reason Reagan inspires such ardor among conservatives is that they think he was an amazing, world-historical President - the whole "bringing down Communism" thing and all that. The shorter-lived cult of George W. Bush, likewise, blossomed at a time when conservatives (and some liberals) were persuaded that Bush was acquitting himself impressively in the face of the world-historical challenge posed by Islamist terror. As Ramesh points out, the lionization of Obama is weirder than these cases because of how little the Democratic nominee has actually accomplished to date - unless, I suppose, you think of beating Hillary Clinton as a world-historical achievement, in which case it makes a certain sense. That possibility aside, the Obama cult is the equivalent of messiah-hungry right-wingers making busts of Bush in 1999 - which would have been odd, to say the least.
As for Chait's third point, that the over-the-top adulation he inspires isn't a reason to vote against Obama, I would associate myself with Ramesh again: "The point of the McCain campaign's attacks on Obama as a celebrity is not to make people vote against him in disgust at his supporters. It is to suggest that once the halo is taken off him, he isn't a very compelling figure." (Though I would also add that a politician whose supporters overstate his virtues so drastically before he even takes office is being set up for failure in ways that your typical Presidential candidate isn't.) And as for Chait's claim, near the end of his original piece, that liberals "don't like personality cults, which is why you never see any bronze busts of Clinton in anybody's den" - I mean, seriously? A couple of guys named JFK and RFK say hello ...
