The pathological investment of the media in Obama demanded that he be larger than life, so they made him larger than life. Like idiot tinsmiths, they made their own god and forgot that they made him and that being made of tin, he will melt if the temperature is high enough.
The cult of Obama has needed to believe in him. And at the debate he let them down by not being extraordinary and by seeming only human next to Romney. The media had been complaining for a while that the magic was gone. But the “magic”, as with so many of these trends, is not in the speaker, it’s in the audience.
Years ago the media had already become atheists in denial, trying hard to recapture the magic of ’08 and blaming themselves and then their man for not feeling it anymore. The truth is that after Bush they needed someone to believe in and they found him. Obama’s extraordinary nature was as fake as the rest of his bio. He wasn’t special, he was just there when they needed him. Now he isn’t.
Obama was a story that the left told itself and then they told it to us. The debate doesn’t end the story, but it hurts the story. Belief is reserved for extraordinary things. Faith is for amazing things, not for ordinary politicians who do the minimum amount of work and stand there droning on stage about technical differences. Only fools put their faith in that.
It’s hard to tell that the emperor is naked, if you never see him next to a man with clothes on. Unique, you come to think that it’s perfectly normal for him to be naked. That this is what an emperor is. And no matter how many small boys shout, “The emperor is naked”, that doesn’t change. Small boys shout things all the time. Who pays attention to them?
It’s when the emperor struggles into his pants, one leg at a time, and poses for a photo with a prospective emperor, then the sense of wrongness sets in and the emperor with pants on seems more naked than he ever did before.
Originally published at Sultan Knish.