the Obama cult...

WASHINGTON - There's no better path to success than getting people to buy afree commodity. Like the genius who figured out how to get peopleto pay forwater: bottle it (Aquafina was revealed to be nothing more thanreprocessed tap water) and charge more than they pay forgasoline. Or consider how Google found a way to sell dictionarynouns -- boat, shoe, clock -- by charging advertisers zillions tobe listed whenever the word is searched.

And now, in the most amazing trick of all, a silver-tonguedfreshman senator has found a way to sell hope. To get it, youneed only give him your vote. Barack Obama is getting millions.

This kind of sale is hardly new. Organized religion has beenoffering a similar commodity -- salvation -- for millennia. Whichis why the Obama campaign has the feel of a religious revivalwith, as writer James Wolcott observed, a "salvational fervor"and "idealistic zeal divorced from any particular policy or causeand chariot-driven by pure euphoria."

"We are the hope of the future," sayeth Obama. We can "remakethis world as it should be." Believe in me and I shall redeem notjust you but your country -- nay, we can become "a hymn that willheal this nation, repair this world, and make this time differentthan all the rest."

And believe they do. After eight straight victories, Obama isnear to rendering moot all the post-Super Tuesday fretting abouta deadlocked convention with unelected superdelegates decidingthe nominee. Unless Hillary Clinton can somehow do in Ohio andTexas on March 4 what Rudy Giuliani proved is almost impossibleto do -- maintain a big-state firewall after an unrelentingstring of smaller defeats -- the superdelegates will flock toObama. Hope will have carried the day.

Interestingly, Obama has been able to win these electoralvictories and dazzle crowds in one new jurisdiction afteranother, even as his mesmeric power has begun to arouseskepticism and misgivings among the mainstream media.

ABC's Jake Tapper notes the "Helter-Skelter cultish qualities" of"Obama worshipers," what Joel Stein of the Los Angeles Timescalls "the Cult of Obama." Obama's Super Tuesday victory speechwas a classic of the genre. Its effect was electric, eliciting arhythmic fervor in the audience -- to such rhetorical nonsense as"We are the ones we've been waiting for. (Cheers,applause.) We are the change that we seek."

That was too much for Time's Joe Klein.

"There was something just a wee bit creepy about the massmessianism," he wrote. "The message is becoming dangerouslyself-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about howwonderful the Obama campaign is."

You might dismiss The New York Times' Paul Krugman's complaintthat "the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming acult of personality" as hyperbole. Until you hear Chris Matthews,who no longer has the excuse of youth, react to Obama's Potomacprimary victory speech with "My, I felt this thrill going up myleg." When his MSNBC co-hosts tried to bail him out, he refusedto recant. Not surprising for an acolyte who said that Obama"comes along, and he seems to have the answers. This is the NewTestament."

I've seen only one similar national swoon. As a teenager growingup in Canada, I witnessed a charismatic law professor go fromobscurity to justice minister to prime minister, carried on awave of what was called Trudeaumania.But even there, the object of his countrymen's unrestrainedaffections was no blank slate. Pierre Trudeau was already aserious intellectual who had written and thought and lecturedlong about the nature and future of his country.

Obama has an astonishingly empty paper trail. He's going aroundissuing promissory notes on the future that he can't possiblyredeem. Promises to heal the world with negotiations with thelikes of Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Promises totranscend the conundrums of entitlement reform that require realand painful trade-offs. Promises to fund his other promises by arapid withdrawal from an unpopular war -- with the hope, Isuppose, that the (presumed) resulting increase in Americanprestige would compensate for the chaos to follow.

Democrats are worried that the Obama spell will break between thetime of his nomination and the time of the election, and denythem the White House. My guess is that he can maintain the spell just past InaugurationDay. After which will come the awakening. It will be rude.

( Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post February 18, 2008)