Saving the savior

Question: What do Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, most American liberal journalists and international human rights advocates have in common?

Answer: They are all pinning their hopes and hearts on Barack Obama...

• Medvedev wants Obama to "patch up" relations between America and Russia.
• Geoffrey Robertson, author of Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice, believes that Obama to "right the wrongs" of all previous American administrations.
• Michael Hirsh pontificating about the failure of unregulated capitalism in this week's Newsweek, thinks Obama "job" is not only to to rescue the American economy, but also to save capitalism itself by acting "as a kind of cosmic broker between the end of one historical era and the beginning of another."

And all this before breakfast. Poor Barry O.

Experienced journalists like Hirsh should know better than to create such absurdly unrealistic expectations for a young man without much political experience. To say, as Hirsh does in "Barack the Savior?", that it "may well fall to Obama not just to save the world economy, but to save capitalism, as FDR did" is not only patently ridiculous but also wrong.  Obama has no grand "third way" strategic vision that attempts to bridge capitalism and socialism. And besides, it was Hitler, rather than FDR, who saved capitalism by causing a war that jump-started a world economy still deeply depressed in the late Thirties.

To misquote Churchill, never has the world expected so much from so little.  One reason, I suspect, both FDR And Reagan turned out to be inspirational Presidents is that few people regarded them as saviors when they came to office. The Obama era will turn out to be disastrous if we invest the young, unproven politician with Hollywood scale cosmic qualities. Under promising and over delivering is a good rule that Obama should borrow from business. And we -- as both citizens and journalists -- can save help the savior by not transforming him into an illusion before he's even come to office. 

Comments

[Stephen Smoliar]

I think we have been here before, Andrew, like back when your European friends were waxing over Obama when you posted "The America that we want back." That gave me an excuse to do another riff on secular messianism, and things have not changed much:

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2008/06/our-greatest-loss-loss-of-balance.html

Remember, Jesus took his Judaism seriously enough to try to disavow HIS followers of their Messianic thinking. He didn't do that good a job, did he? I still hold to the position that the American culture has been successfully infantalized by those who have succeeded in really running the show (as elaborated at the other end of the above hyperlink). Obama may be able to do a lot of things for us, but I doubt that he will be the instrument through which we reclaim our adulthood!

[Vince Williams]

Putin, through his proxy Medvedev, is sounding the diplomatic waters around the treacherous shoals of the subject of a US missile shield in Eastern Europe.

Meanwhile, not content to have Obama, as promised, "hit the ground running" when he assumes office, Michael Hirsch would have him wear the mantle of Christ in a too-lame-for-Hollywood fantasy of our black Moses incarnate striking the rocks of capitalism's prostration with a mighty rod and bringing forth those crystal waters that flow from the land of milk and honey.

When in reality the marketing team that sold Obama crafted the ultimate product: a living embodiment of the projected desires of Consumer Nation, a tabula rasa for every customer to fill with the content of his own dreams or nightmares.

And now we have our mutant prince, a self-aware archetype of Stephen's secular messiah, who, mirror-like, reflects us in all our conflicted passions.

So every fool or dreamer can have his own personal Jesus to worship or abuse, while the same old pirates rob our patrimony.