Yet another bubble?
We’ve seen so many bubbles of late — the internet, housing, oil and so forth. Toby Harnden, the US Editor of The Daily Telegraph, said this in RCP about the man who sits in a special presidential seat on the aircraft dubbed O-Force One:
He may be the narrow front runner for the White House but there’s still an election and the sense of irrational exuberance enveloping his campaign is dangerous.
“the sense of irrational exuberance.” Interesting. The Obama campaign has crafted the messiah narrative effectively and has scared off reporters from looking at the elements that are “not entirely true.” And that intimidation (and self-restraint by reporters who want to be in on “making history”) might just last through November.
But there’s also the question of whether the candidate and the campaign heads are beginning to believe their own press clippings. Time after time the candidate makes absurd and false statements that are grandiose even by the most liberal standards of grandiosity.
“People of Berlin — people of the world — this is our moment, this is our time.”…
“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”
“when the airlift began – when the largest and most unlikely rescue in history brought food and hope to the people of this city.”
“I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal…”
It may be effective to run a campaign as the messiah, but you had better not start believing it yourself. Looking beyond the politics of this situation, there is something that doesn’t sit well in the grandiosity of Senator Obama’s statements. Maybe it’s the inexperience of the candidate and his advisers (said to be “young and arrogant”) — teenagers, after all, think that every first experience they have is mankind’s very first experience of that event. We hope that’s the explanation, because most of the other explanations are even worse, for the candidate and the country as well.