The Obama Campaign: This Is A Political Cult

"Obama is part politician, part cult. Supporters wearing T-shirts with an Andy Warhol like pop-art image of his face testify to that,...He's marrying inspiration and cult with old-fashioned political grunt.

...the danger remains for Obama in managing the cult-like fervour.

...Well known political journalist Joe Klein of Time magazine, who was travelling on the campaign plane this week with Obama, too, wrote of a nagging concern about this kind of rhetoric of inspiration over substance, noting 'there was something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messiahnism'.

In his Super Tuesday speech Obama said 'we are the ones we've been waiting for', attempting to make the case the time was now to get some "change" in Washington: a post-partisan world where politicians reach across the aisle for the common good. 'This time can be different because this campaign for the presidency of the United States of America is different,' he said. 'It's different not because of me. It's different because of you.'

As Klein notes, this is 'not just maddeningly vague but also disingenuous: the campaign is entirely about Obama and his ability to inspire.'

'Rather than focusing on any specific issue or cause - other than an amorphous desire for change - the message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is.'

I hear that too in the voices of Obama's staff constantly, themselves referring to this 'cult of Obama'."

— Geoff Elliott, back on February 09, 2008, telling Americans what we're now caught in - using the words of the Obama campaign itself - in The Australian.

But only one blog has been focused on the cultish aspects of this campaign, and that's: