Obama's Second Coming

My wife's been getting Rolling Stone delivered to our home.

I'm not sure why, since she's not some tattoed alternative rocker or some wild-eyed antiwar counter-culture provocateur. Actually, she's gets a lot of mags like Ladies Home Journal and Redbook, and maybe some subscription renewal incentive had a side deal for the left-wing music magazine.

No matter, I've been reading some of the articles.

It turns out Rolling Stone endorsed Barack Obama with this week's edition.

Why now? That's the first thought that comes to mind. If the mag's got any pull in the rockin' electorate, you'd think they might have laid down an endorsement, say, around the time of the New Hampshire primary. For all of their political reporting, maybe the editors really don't understand the imperatives of frontloading.

But what was really on my mind is the meat in the endorsement itself. Rolling Stone's apparently an alternative media tribune for the idealistic, if not the radical set. Their piece is a classic example of messiah-building on the left (more on that here and here). I mean, take a look at this yourself:

Throughout the primaries, and during a visit he paid to our offices, we have come to know Barack Obama, his toughness and his grace. He would not be intimidated, and he declined to back down, when Senator Clinton called him "frankly, naive" for his willingness to meet leaders of hostile nations. When one of her top campaign officials tried to smear him for his earlier drug use, he did not equivocate or backtrack. On the matter of experience and capability, he has run an impressive, nearly flawless campaign — one that whupped America's most hard-boiled political infighters. Indeed, Obama was far more prepared to run a presidential campaign — from Day One — than Senator Clinton. And at no point did he go negative with personal attacks or character assassination; as much as they might have been justified, they didn't even seem tempting to him.

Obama has emerged by displaying precisely the kind of character and judgment we need in a president: renouncing the politics of fear, speaking frankly on the most pressing issues facing the country and sticking to his principles. He recognizes that running for president is an opportunity to inspire an entire nation.

Obama was far more prepared for "Day One"?

Does that include things like feeding the multitude? Let's give Hillary Clinton some credit here for raising the issue.

Certainly, all this hard-left Obama-worship is exceptionally light on analysis. If Obama's divine, you'd think he'd a least hold his own during press conferences, as Michael Barone points out in comparison to John McCain:

McCain takes questions until the last reporter runs out of things to ask. Obama terminated a probing press conference last week after eight questions with the lame excuse that he was running late. Obama's oratory has been compared to John Kennedy's. But he doesn't have Kennedy's gift for gracefully parrying hostile questions.

Not so miraculous after all, it seems. At least Christ attended to the questions from the high priests.
But not only that. The Rolling Stone endorsement goes further, to rehash all the left-wing demonized talking-points against the last seven years. Speaking of Obama:

Obama ... [has] denounced the Republican campaign of fear. Early in the campaign, John Edwards took the lead, calling the War on Terror a campaign slogan, not a policy. Obama rejected the subtle imagery of false patriotism by not wearing a flag pin in his lapel, and he dismissed the broader notion that the Democratic Party had to find a way to buy into this entire load of fear-mongering War on Terror bullshit — to out-Republican the Republicans — and thus become, in his description of Hillary Clinton's macho posturing on foreign policy, little more than "Bush-Cheney lite."

We have a deeply divided nation, driven apart by economic policies that have deliberately created the largest income disparities in our history, with stunning tax breaks for the wealthiest and subsidies for giant industries. The income of the average citizen is stagnant, and his quality of life continues to slowly erode from inflation.

We are embittered and hobbled by the unnecessary and failed war in Iraq. We have been worn down by long years of fear- and hate-filled political strategies, assaults on constitutional freedoms, and levels of greed and cynicism, that — once seen for what they are — no people of moral values or ethics can tolerate.

A new president must heal these divides, must at long last face the hypocrisy and inequity of unprecedented government handouts to oil giants, hedge-fund barons, agriculture combines and drug companies. At the same time, the new president must transform our lethal energy economy — replacing oil and coal and the ethanol fraud with green alternatives and strict rain-forest preservation and tough international standards — before the planet becomes inhospitable for most human life....

We need to recover the spiritual and moral direction that should describe our country and ourselves. We see this in Obama, and we see the promise he represents to bring factions together, to achieve again the unity that drives great change and faces difficult, and inconvenient, truths and peril.

Whoa!

That's a lot, apocalyptic even. No wonder Obama's nomination is seen as no less than the second coming - he's our savior!