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• Friday, November 28, 2008 09:14 PM

  @hawkpsd

  I agree that the "dear leader" tag seems a bit of a low blow.

  I have criticized Mr. Obama's most ardent supporters, including Oprah Winfrey (who suggests he is the second coming of Jesus Christ) and Donna Brazile (who compares the president-elect to Jesus, and Sarah Palin to Pontius Pilate). I know apolitical people who went absolutely berserk over the election this year. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, where I attended a Sarah Palin rally, there is a mural on a downtown building with one word on it, "hope" -- kind of a Chavez-esque tribute. I suspect there are many others like it around the country.

  Having said that, I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. Some conservatives think Mr. Obama is trying to create a quasi-fascist youth corps through his national service projects. Their predecessors said the same thing about FDR and the CCC/WPA. Kind of hard to imagine, honestly. One of my favorite FDR-penned articles from Warm Springs, Georgia, involves his mockery of such criticism, even before he was elected president. (Incidentally, there is no greater critic than me of the Obama tax rebate plan for those who pay no federal income tax; I just don't think even that makes him a "dear leader").

  The murals, and the adulation, also remind me a bit of Jean Aristide of Haiti, whose illiterate supporters were encouraged to identify a rooster on the ballot (the symbol of Aristide's party). Any time you are dealing with symbols instead of words, or with murals of a political figure, it is not imprudent to start exploring foreign stock funds. :) But again, this is America, after all, and I think a lot of this was just plain silliness. Mr. Obama may even be more clever than we think, in understanding this silliness and acting cautiously at the outset in response to it.

  I personally think a lot of apolitical centrists got on board the train over (i) Iraq and (ii) the significance of electing our first African American president, and did not want to deal with the cognitive dissonance of any contrary facts. And, of course, there were the pre-train boarding euphorics of people like Ms. Winfrey and Ms. Brazile. It's been a kooky year, but I suspect we'll get through it all right. Unless, of course, Mr. Obama turns out to be more Manley-esque than we thought.

  —Readerreader Read Readerreader's other letters
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