Category: Election 2008

Last week in the New York Times Magazine, Kate Zernike analyzed “The Charisma Mandate”:

The “cult of personality” is used in the pejorative. But recast as a different name — call it charisma — and, as Roosevelt and other examples show, it can be a critical element of politics and its practical cousin, governance. It just can’t be the only element.

“Today, attacks on the cult of personality seem really to mean attacks on the ability to make speeches that inspire,” Mr. Caro said in an interview. “But you only have to look at crucial moments in the history of our time to see how crucial it was to have a leader who could inspire, who could rally a nation to a standard, who could infuse a country with confidence, to remind people of the justice of a cause…”

By any definition, the charismatic leader emerges at a time of crisis or national yearning, and perhaps a vacuum in that nation’s institutions. Mr. Schlesinger wrote in 1960 of a “new mood in politics,” with people feeling “that the mood which has dominated the nation for a decade is beginning to seem thin and irrelevant.” There was, he wrote, “a mounting dissatisfaction with the official priorities, a deepening concern with our character and objectives as a nation.”

Instead of the hype, Grassroots Mom decided to parse Mr. Obama’s and Ms. Clinton’s Senate records.

Some people say that Mr. Obama is too naive and unwilling to play the dirty game of politics.  But for those paying attention, it’s clear he can play – as evidenced by the timing of his speech last Tuesday after his win in Wisconsin.

I have the feeling this is a hoax. It’s just too perfect – too funny to be true. But the story is: a local reporter is hitting on some girl in Georgia and Senator Obama ruins this guy’s day by mistaking him for a kid and saying so at the conference. The reporter writes a story about it.

Mr. Obama decides to call the kid up to apologize for “messing up [his] game.”

Like I said – it’s gotta be a hoax. But supposedly this happened back in 2006.

Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan, known for his controversial rhetoric ((Including his anti-fill-in-the-blank)) was recently diagnosed with cancer.  Today he dedicated his first major public address to boosting Senator Barack Obama.

Mr. Farrakhan called Mr. Obama the “hope of the entire world that America will change and be made better.”

This man whose religion has often spoken of the white race as “the devil” went on to say that: “A black man with a white mother became a savior to us.  A black man with a white mother could turn out to be one who can lift America from her fall.”

The Obama campaign responded saying, “Sen. Obama has been clear in his objections to Minister Farrakhan’s past pronouncements and has not solicited the minister’s support.”

While there are many who will try to spin this to show that there is some sort of connection between Mr. Farrakhan and Mr. Obama, a more plausible explanation is that Mr. Obama – by practicing transformational rather than transactional politics is able to bring many people to support him who would seem to be at odds with him.