Letters to the Editor
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@ Anonymous 6:31 PM, I have little to add to what you have said.
I just wanted you to know that you have been heard and understood by at least one person. I guess that I can vote for Obama (in November only) because I have mostly ignored politics and my emotional investment is not what yours has been. You use the word "spoonfeed." It is easy to spoonfeed people if you are a practiced "pickup artist." I am not suggesting that Obama is in any way an evil man, but rather that he has made a study of the art of mass seduction and that he is employing skills he has developed due to having a gift for public speaking and a facility with words. There is the gift, a thing which seems to come from somewhere outside oneself, and then there is the care and feeding of the gift, the development of a useful skill set. The gifted can begin to mistake themselves for the chosen. Certain gifts -- the power to move people by speech for example -- invite the ego to invest in itself and feed itself and to believe in its own carefully packaged spiel. Circularly, the seducer can become the victim of his own arts. The question I ask myself is, if by some miracle, should he actually make it to the White House, will he in any way be equal to the task of governance.
As to his ardent supporters, his adorers, his naive fan club, these words keep humming through my head: Lemmings, lemmings, lemmings ... It astonishes me that they have been able to convince themselves that the results in the primary will somehow automatically replicate in the general election. The demographics which are now to Obama's advantage will change utterly in the fall. What are they thinking?