The making of the Democrats’ rising star
The Obama myth
socialistworker.org[excerpted]
“LIKE ALL pre-campaign manifestos of presidential hopefuls, The Audacity of Hope is a tedious read. Even Obama’s self-deprecating humor–rare among the oversized egos in the U.S. Senate–comes off like so much market-researched branding.
Indeed, Obama never strays far from the well-worn path of similar books. There’s Obama’s intellectual communion with inspiring figures of the past, a la John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage; the let’s-heal-America-together motif of Jimmy Carter’s post-Vietnam and Watergate book Why Not the Best? and the Democratic Leadership Council pro-business orthodoxy of Putting People First, the campaign manifesto credited to Bill Clinton and Al Gore during the 1992 presidential race.
What makes Obama’s book different is the speed at which he has been catapulted into the national–and international–spotlight.
Obama milks this sudden rise for full effect, portraying himself as an ordinary guy who unexpectedly finds himself a member of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body–a real-life version of the Jimmy Stewart character in the 1939 movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
In the film, Mr. Smith battles the forces of corruption, restoring faith in the system and offering hope that U.S. democracy can live up to its promise. Obama has written a similar script for himself. The question now is whether liberals desperate for a leader will believe the image–or face the reality.” (more…)
====
The reality that they are referring to here is their critique that he is a flip-flopper on the issues they deem important to Liberals.
Personally, I have not taken the time to study Sen. Obama so I have very little to say about him. What does concern me is the overkill of media praise for him in such a short amount of time. After the midterm elections, perhaps I will spend more time reading up on him.
