Obama: Creating new and better realities.
Simon Woods, a volunteer for Hillary Clinton, writes in the Telegraph about the Obama Dipdive videos:
The Obama campaign uses a religious calling as its central rhetorical trope: "I'm asking you to believe," reads the banner across the top of barackobama.com. His appeal to voters is an archetype of religious conversion: instead of being asked for support, Americans are exhorted to "join the movement"....
It's not an argument for better government; it's an exhortation to see the light. It's not a plan for the Presidency, but a leap of faith.
This idea came to a head in Obama's Super Tuesday speech, with those much talked about phrases: "We are the change that we seek… We are the ones we've been waiting for." This is the language that the second Will.I.Am song has taken on. This marked a new level of discourse, and journalists wrote warily about its "messianic" feel.
But I think that misses the point. The real problem with this is not the cod-religious congratulation of being the chosen ones, but a quieter, more insidious message: that the campaign itself is the change he talks about.
That seems about right to me. The Dipdive videos were the creepy culmination of the Obama campaign's messianic rhetoric. And they even seemed to make the campaign's most fanatical supporters a bit queasy.
Obama's rhetoric was always empty, but coming from the man himself, eloquent as he is, everyone seemed willing to overlook how silly it all was. Once you get Jessica Alba and Scarlett Johanson repeating the same phrases and chanting his name as though he were some kind of political immortal--well, it all became far more transparent.
