http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/gerard_baker/artic
le3941450.ece
Barack Obama: the new Great Redeemer
First it was Kennedy... now the US media are prostrating themselves
before the saviour Gerard Baker
Every decade or so the people who control the way we see the world
anoint some American politician the Redeemer of a Troubled Planet.
In the late 1960s the media placed the halo on Robert Kennedy, the
tragic dynast whose antiwar and civil rights credentials made him in
life - as he remains to this day in death - a kind of devotional
figure for most political journalists.
Kennedy at least had charisma and intelligence. But to prove that
these were by no means necessary preconditions for the honour, it was
conferred a few years later on Jimmy Carter, the plodding nonentity
elevated by a willingly compliant press into Everyman, brandishing
his steely sword of Truth against the Manichean mendacity of Richard
Nixon's Republican legacy.
Partly because of the Carter embarrassment, the 1980s were barren
years for the idolators. Try as they might, they couldn't work
themselves into much ecstasy over Walter Mondale in 1984 or Michael
Dukakis in 1988, though they had little flings with bit-part players
Gary Hart and (I kid you not) Bruce Babbitt, a genial former Governor
of Arizona.
But by the 1990s a new Democrat, or rather a New Democrat, was come
among us, a man the media told us would lift our eyes from our
selfish greed and rid the world of the ineffable misery left by 12
years of reactionary rule. It's hard to imagine now, after the
battering he's taken from his old friends in the press these past few
months, but Bill Clinton was once their idol. His cleverly cynical
balancing act - promising a return to high-minded tolerance while
executing mentally ill prisoners in Arkansas, for example - was
lauded as a brilliant synthesising of traditional liberal ideology
with the political realities of the modern age.
The alert among you will have noticed by now that what all these
spiritually uplifting leaders have in common. They are all Democrats.
Never in any of the chapters of this hagiography does a Republican, a
conservative, appear in a remotely similar light. These alien
creatures by contrast have always been portrayed as cartoonish
representatives of the Dark Side of humanity, or, if they were really
lucky, simply idiots, failed B-movie actors and irredeemably ignorant
hicks with embarrassingly neanderthal views on women, religion and
communism.
It's been a while coming - neither Al Gore in 2000 (before the
luminescence created by his recent joint Nobel/Oscar triumphs) nor
John Kerry in 2004 quite fit the bill. But it's fairly clear now
that, with the near-certain nomination by the Democrats of Barack
Obama everything is in place for the media to indulge in one of the
greatest, orgiastic media fiestas of hero-worship since Elvis Presley.
You will not see a finer example of the genre than the cover story of
this week's Newsweek, which was entitled "The O Team". This rhapsodic
inside account of Senator Obama's campaign reads a little like a
cross between Father Alban Butler's Life of St Francis and the sort
of authorised biography of Kim Jong Il you can pick up in any good
bookshop in Pyongyang.
Mr Obama is portrayed throughout as an immanently benevolent figure.
Not human really, more a comforting presence, a light source. He is
always eager to listen to all aides of an argument, always instilling
confidence in the weak-willed, resolutely sticking to his high
principles and tirelessly spurning the low road of electoral
politics. I stopped reading after a while but I'm sure by the end he
was healing the sick, comforting the dying, restoring sight to the
blind and setting prisoners free.
The panegyric included the now conventional wisdom in the media that
Republicans have only ever won elections in the past 40 years through
lies and fearmongering - smearing their opponents and spreading false
fears that a vote for a Democrat would open the country to foreign
invasion.
To be fair, the Newsweek credo was only the latest and perhaps most
shameless phase of the pro-Obama liturgy in the media. Some cable TV
channels prostrate themselves nightly before him. Most newspapers
worship at the altar. They have already set up a neat narrative for
the election between Senator Obama and John McCain in November - the
Second Coming versus Old Grouchy, The Little Flower of Illinois up
against the Scaremongering Axeman from Arizona.
There's a special irony here. Senator McCain is the Republican who
has received probably the single most favourable treatment from the
media in the past 40 years. He has been a favourite because he
conformed to the first law of contemporary political journalism: the
only good conservative is a bad conservative. His willingness to defy
his party on everything from taxes to global warming, to take on
George Bush, has earned him at least an honourable mention in the
martyrology of American politics of the past 40 years.
But now that he's up against Oh! Bama! he will have to be recast in
the more familiar Republican mould of villain and scaremonger-in-
chief.
This media narrative is not only an outgrowth of the journalists'
natural enthusiasm for a Democrat such as Mr Obama. It is also a
clever ploy to pre-emptively de-legitimise any Republican critique of
the Democratic nominee. It is designed to prevent Mr McCain from
asking reasonable questions about Mr Obama's strikingly vacuous
political background, or raising doubts about his credentials for the
presidency.
The idolatry of Mr Obama is a shame, really. The Illinois senator is
indeed, an unusually talented, inspiring and charismatic figure. His
very ethnicity offers an exciting departure. But he is not a saint.
He is a smart and eloquent man with a personal history that is
startlingly shallow set against the scale of the office he seeks to
hold. It is not only legitimate, but necessary, to scrutinise his
past and infer what it might tell us about his beliefs, in the
absence of the normal record of achievement expected in a
presidential nominee.
If the past 40 years have taught us anything they have surely taught
that premature canonisation is an almost certain guarantee of
subsequent deep disappointment.
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