Worshiping the little messiah

Howard Kurtz documents some of the mainstream media's Obama worship:

Perhaps it was the announcement that NBC News is coming out with a DVD titled "Yes We Can: The Barack Obama Story." Or that ABC and USA Today are rushing out a book on the election. Or that HBO has snapped up a documentary on Obama's campaign.

Perhaps it was the Newsweek commemorative issue -- "Obama's American Dream" -- filled with so many iconic images and such stirring prose that it could have been campaign literature. Or the Time cover depicting Obama as FDR, complete with jaunty cigarette holder.

Are the media capable of merchandizing the moment, packaging a president-elect for profit? Yes, they are.

What's troubling here goes beyond the clanging of cash registers. Media outlets have always tried to make a few bucks off the next big thing. The endless campaign is over, and there's nothing wrong with the country pulling together, however briefly, behind its new leader. But we seem to have crossed a cultural line into mythmaking.

"The Obamas' New Life!" blares People's cover, with a shot of the family. "New home, new friends, new puppy!" Us Weekly goes with a Barack quote: "I Think I'm a Pretty Cool Dad." The Chicago Tribune trumpets that Michelle "is poised to be the new Oprah and the next Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis -- combined!" for the fashion world.

Whew! Are journalists fostering the notion that Obama is invincible, the leader of what the New York Times dubbed "Generation O"?

Each writer, each publication, seems to reach for more eye-popping superlatives. "OBAMAISM -- It's a Kind of Religion," says New York magazine. "Those of us too young to have known JFK's Camelot are going to have our own giddy Camelot II to enrapture and entertain us," Kurt Andersen writes. The New York Post has already christened it "BAM-A-LOT."

"Here we are," writes Salon's Rebecca Traister, "oohing and aahing over what they'll be wearing, and what they'll be eating, what kind of dog they'll be getting, what bedrooms they'll be living in, and what schools they'll be attending. It feels better than good to sniff and snurfle through the Obamas' tastes and habits. . . . Who knew we had in us the capacity to fall for this kind of idealized Americana again?"

But aren't media people supposed to resist this kind of hyperventilating?

Well, news media people are supposed to stand aloof from this kind of thing but PR flacks, press spokesmen and advertising copywriters are supposed to encourage it. And it is obvious to anyone with even two or three working brain cells that the mainstream media has departed from journalism and become nothing more than volunteer spokesmen for Obama and his administration.

Then Kurtz gets to the heart of the matter:

"We're celebrating a moment as much as a man, I think," says Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham, whose new issue, out today, compares Obama to Lincoln. "Given our racial history, an hour or two of commemoration seems appropriate. But there is no doubt that the glow of the moment will fade, and I am sure the coverage will reflect that in due course."

[. . .]

I am not trying to diminish the sheer improbability of what this African American politician, a virtual unknown four years ago, has accomplished. Every one of us views his victory through a personal lens. I thought of growing up in a "Leave It to Beaver" era, when there were no blacks in leading television roles until Bill Cosby was tapped as the co-star of "I Spy" in 1965. When the Watts riots broke out that year, the Los Angeles Times sent an advertising salesman to cover it because the paper had no black reporters. The country has traveled light-years since then.

But have we really come so far? If a person had said before the election that they were not going to vote for Obama because he was black he would have been correctly identified as a racist. However what does that make people who voted for Obama because he is black?

Thanks to a cooperative media who aided in the coverup Barack Obama's past, other than the heavily edited version put out by his campaign, was a mystery to most Americans. Old, or mainstream media, showed absolutely no curiosity about the kind of people that Obama has consistently chosen to associate with or the kind of books he has read or what the specifics of his positions are on myriads of critically important matters of public policy.

Despite this lack of information a majority of the American public showed a similar lack of curiosity about the presidential candidate they voted for. While I don't believe that everyone who voted for Obama was casting what amounts to an affirmative action vote the majority of those who are clamoring for Obama election special edition newspapers and magazines and who are willing to pour into Washington DC and stand in what could be single digit temperatures for hours to be at Obama's inauguration, even though they won't be close enough to actually see Obama take the oath, certainly are idolizing him primarily because of his race.

So I ask again, have we really come so far? Given that it is just as racist to vote for someone because of the color of his skin as it is to vote against him for that reason are we really a "post-racial" society?