Conservative Donnybrook

The American Prospect’s Ezra Klein apparently favors Obama’s candidacy.

Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I’ve heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.

… But, very rarely, [politics is] experienced as a call to create something better, bigger, grander, and more just than the world we have.

Emphasis added. Wow! Immanentizing the eschaton, anyone? You know, obviously this is a little ridiculous and also amazingly pompous and naive, as Mickey Kaus points out. But I just don’t get how Obama is having this effect on people. He seems like he should be a compelling figure, but I’ve listened to a couple of his speeches on C-SPAN lately and haven’t been blown away. What’s the deal? His rhetoric is only pretty good, as is his delivery.

Most of what he says seems to be promises to bring about “change”–the tone, politics as usual, etc, etc. But Obama doesn’t seem to offer much in the way of actual “new ideas” or whatever. Near as I can tell he basically promises to push doctrinaire liberalism on us, which will succeed because Red and Blue America will forget their differences and unite around Obama because he’s Obama, who will have changed the tone, politics, etc. Good luck with that! Via Kaus and The Corner.