Could The Cult of Obama Be Going The Way of Jonestown?

Fouad Ajami's Wall Street Journal piece is a terrific analysis of how a community agitator turned an undistinguished fraction of a career in the U.S. Senate into a reservation at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue...and how his "Entertainment Tonight" meets "Camelot" campaign left him vulnerable for the backlash he is now experiencing over his attempt to expand fascism in America.

We were led to this summer of discontent by the very nature of the coalition that brought Mr. Obama, and the political class around him, to power, and by the circumstances of his victory. The man was elected amid economic distress. Faith in the country's institutions, perhaps in the free-enterprise system itself, had given way. Mr. Obama had ridden that distress. His politics of charisma was reminiscent of the Third World. A leader steps forth, better yet someone with no discernible trail, someone hard to pin down to a specific political program, and the crowd could read into him what it wished, what it needed.

The leader would be different things to different people. The Obama coalition was the coming together of disparate groups: the white professional liberals seeking absolution for the country in the election of an African-American man, the opponents of the Iraq war who grew more strident as the project in Iraq was taking root, the African-American community that had been invested in the Clintons and then came around out of an understandable pride in one of its own.

The last segment of the electorate to flock to the Obama banners were the blue-collar workers who delivered him Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana. He was not their man. They fully knew that he didn't share their culture. They were, by his portrait, clinging to their guns and religion, but the promise of economic help, and of protectionism, carried the day with them.

Obama ran on the amorphous words "hope" and "change." Those words said everything and nothing. Those who wanted to believe in the magic could fill in their own definitions and Obama would fulfill those hopes. Many saw through it last year and many more have wised up in the midst of the most rapid expansion of government power in history. Many bought his line that "hope" and "change" meant bringing America back to the values that made it great. Instead, Barry Vladimir Hussein Soetero Obama has set out to destroy all remnants of the Founders vision of a democratic republic with limited government.