Primal Obama love

Remember Jonathan Chait’s notorious piece in The New Republic in 2004 in which he talked about how he hated George W. Bush with a consuming hatred—not just his political leadership, but his speech patterns, his walk, his everything? Remember how Chait said that “I have friends who have a viscerally hostile reaction to the sound of his voice or describe his existence as a constant oppressive force in their daily psyche”?

Well, here is the opposite of Bush hatred: Obama love, of which we may fairly observe that it is, for the Obama lovers, a constant ecstatic force in their daily psyche. Stephen Marche writes in Esquire:

July 12, 2011, 9:00 AM
How Can We Not Love Obama?
Because like it or not, he is all of us

Before the fall brings us down, before the election season begins in earnest with all its nastiness and vulgarity, before the next batch of stupid scandals and gaffes, before Sarah Palin tries to convert her movie into reality and Joe Biden resumes his imitation of an embarrassing uncle and Newt and Callista Gingrich [FIG.1] creep us all out, can we just enjoy Obama for a moment? Before the policy choices have to be weighed and the hard decisions have to be made, can we just take a month or two to contemplate him the way we might contemplate a painting by Vermeer or a guitar lick by the early-seventies Rolling Stones or a Peyton Manning pass or any other astounding, ecstatic human achievement? Because twenty years from now, we’re going to look back on this time as a glorious idyll in American politics, with a confident, intelligent, fascinating president riding the surge of his prodigious talents from triumph to triumph. Whatever happens this fall or next, the summer of 2011 is the summer of Obama.

And that’s just the first paragraph.

Many times over the last three years commenters at this site have said that white liberals support Obama because it proves that they are not racist, and every time I have replied to them that that wasn’t the whole truth or even the main truth. I said that white liberals support Obama, not to avoid the imputation of racism, but because they like Obama. Does not Stephen Marche’s love poem prove the point?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 16, 2011 06:38 PM | Send