Everybody else has already linked to Ezra Klein’s description of Obama as savior, but just in case you missed it, it’s a classic:
Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I’ve heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.
Naturally, a potential leader so radiant and beatific needs his sinister opposite, enthroned in a sulphuric abyss, courtesy of a Politico commenter:
That’s odd…I heard [the New York Times’ corporate jet] was already booked this Friday picking up Bill Kristol from hell.
Wow–I am getting old–I remember when it was the right that embraced evangelicalism and a fire-and-brimstone worldview.
Related: “It’s the secular Left vs. the Christian Left.”
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