We Were Stardust, We Were Golden

Former World’s Biggest Celebrity looks back wistfully on his salad days:

U.S. President Barack Obama said Tuesday “all that hopey changey stuff” from his 2008 campaign “was real” and it’s “still there.”

Speaking to an audience at a political fundraiser in New York, Obama recalled a line from a speech by 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin in which she ridiculed the themes of his presidential campaign by referring to “hopey changey stuff.” Without mentioning Palin by name, he told his audience Tuesday: “All that hopey changey stuff, as they say? That was real. It wasn’t something … it was real, you could feel it. You know it. It’s still there.

“Neither a president speaking to the people who love him the most nor a man in bed with his lover should ever have to talk this way,” Kyle Smith writes. “If you have to say it, you’ve kind of lost the argument.”

Jim Hoft adds that Obama is “starting to sound like an old child actor, living in the glory days of the past when most people had no idea who they were electing. Today Americans know better.”

To me, Obama waxing nostalgic sounds like a cross between an early ’70s stoner believing that the utopian hippie dreams of the Woodstock era were real, man, they were real! As well as the wistful final scene of Russell Crowe’s Gladiator and all its talk that “There once was a dream that was Rome,” a line that was a homage to supporting actor Richard Harris’s earlier role in Camelot.

In 1976’s “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” Tom Wolfe wrote, “It is entirely possible in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi-military gear and guerrilla talk.” That was also the central point of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism.

But Obama in 2008 trumped the notion of politics as a substitute religion. He was the religion, as Mark Steyn writes in After America:

“Do you believe in sin?” Cathleen Falsani, the religion correspondent for the Chicago Sun-Times, asked then Senator Obama. “Yes,” he replied. “What is sin?” “Being out of alignment with my values.” That’s one convenient religion: Obama worships at his own personal altar at the First Church of Himself.

No wonder he’s so wistful for the glory days when the planets aligned, and everything seemed fresh and wonderful, and all things were possible. Even if it was all BS to mask an overachieving Chicago machine hack, as he told one biographer back then, “You know, I actually believe my own bulls***.”

And back then, there was so much of it to believe in: he was stardust, he was golden. He was the one he was waiting for. Just ask him.