No, But Barry Sure Sold Himself as the Ultimate Life Coach

Responding to Velma Hart’s self-professed exhaustion at having to carry the water for President Obama, Tim Cavanaugh of Reason proffers some advice for the President: “Next Time Just Say, ‘I’m the president of the U.S.A. I’m not your life coach.'”

But isn’t that the problem? He is. Or at least, he portrayed himself as one — Obama spent a big part of 2007 and 2008 singing a tune that was a weird mash-up of Tony Robbins on steroids meets L. Ron Hubbard:

“We’re going to keep on praising together. I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth.”

* * *

I am going to try to be so persuasive in the 20 minutes or so that I speak that by the time this is over, a light will shine down from somewhere.

It will light upon you. You will experience an epiphany. And you will say to yourself, I have to vote for Barack. I have to do it.

* * *

“This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

And his wife didn’t help matters:

We have lost the understanding that in a democracy, we have a mutual obligation to one another — that we cannot measure the greatness of our society by the strongest and richest of us, but we have to measure our greatness by the least of these. That we have to compromise and sacrifice for one another in order to get things done. That is why I am here, because Barack Obama is the only person in this who understands that. That before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.

Nor did some of his loonier supporters in the media:

Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare. And this why he is so often compared to Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., to those leaders in our culture whose stirring vibrations still resonate throughout our short history.

Uh-huh.

What did Obama think would happen when he got into office and it would become obvious that no one could live up to that sort of rhetoric? Did he think we’d forget the wacky stuff he, his wife, and his groupies in the media said about him? Did he think he could simply skate through by blaming President Bush for four years, for his not transmuting into the celestial Lightworker?

This video produced the “Don’t Put it on Our Tab” group features presumably young actors playing disallusioned 20-something young men and women fed-up with Obama’s rhetoric:

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But what do actual people of that age think of the disparity between Obama’s rhetoric and the reality of his actions? Have they forgotten his eschatological speeches? Do they blame his personal malaise on the GOP, the random hand of events?

Or as young musician named J. Rotten said about 30 years ago, do they ever get the feeling, as Velma Hart seems to be waking up to understand, that they’ve been cheated?