What to make of Obama

There’s an air of inevitability to Sen. Barack Obama’s run for the presidency, and a lot more than that.

Romney, in the end, failed to inspire. By contrast, Barack Obama is nothing but inspiring–so inspiring that it is becoming deeply creepy. The Boston Globe reports on a new music video touting Obama:

“Inspired by the speech Barack Obama delivered in Nashua the night of the state primary, will.i.am [of the Black Eyed Peas] set Obama’s text to simple guitar and a soulful melody, recruited 36 artists to appear in a music video that was conceived, shot, and edited over three days last week, and posted “Yes We Can” online over the weekend. . . .”

The unmoored passion is intensifying.

The video…depicts people who appear to be in some sort of trance as they mouth along with Obama’s various rhetorical flourishes from his speeches, then repeat the mantra “Yes, we can.” The whole thing has the feel of a cult of personality.

We aren’t the first to make that observation. The other day one Kathleen Geier, who says she voted for Obama and considers him “a good progressive,” took to the liberal TPMCafe site to declare that she is “increasingly weirded out by some of Obama’s supporters”:

She quotes from a Sacramento Bee article that she (and we) found “unsettling”:

“He looked at me, and the look in his eyes was worth 1,000 words,” said [Kim] Mack, now a regional field organizer. Obama hugged her and whispered something in her ear–she was so thrilled she doesn’t remember what it was. . . .
She urged volunteers to hone their own stories of how they came to Obama–something they could compress into 30 seconds on the phone.

As Geier notes, “this sounds more like a cult than a political campaign”:

“The language used here is the language of evangelical Christianity–the Obama volunteers speak of “coming to Obama” in the same way born-again Christians talk about “coming to Jesus.””

This is true, and troubling, and more than a few media folks and common folks are starting to notice…and be troubled.

ABC’s Jake Tapper notes other enthusiasts and detractors from the enthusiasm, all on the Democratic left. “I’ve been following politics since I was about 5,” Chris Matthews tells the New York Observer. “I’ve never seen anything like this. This is bigger than Kennedy. [Obama] comes along, and he seems to have the answers. This is the New Testament.”

On the other side, Time’s Joe Klein writes that there is “something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism” of the Obama campaign, which “all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is.” Adds the dyspeptic leftist James Wolcott:

“Perhaps it’s my atheism at work but I found myself increasingly wary of and resistant to the salvational fervor of the Obama campaign, the idealistic zeal divorced from any particular policy or cause and chariot-driven by pure euphoria. . . . I don’t look to politics for transcendence and self-certification.”

What are we to make of Obama himself in the midst of all this adulation?

…Does anyone know Barack Obama well enough to say?

We’d better find out before we make him president.