[Washington Post] “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?
“Obama is a figure, especially in pop culture, in a way that most new presidents are not,” historian Michael Beschloss says. “Young people who may not be interested in the details of NAFTA or foreign policy just think Obama is cool, and they’re interested in him. Being cool can really help a new president.”
So can a sense of optimism, reflected on USA Today’s front page. “Poll: Hopes soaring for Obama, administration,” the headline said, with 65 percent saying “the USA will be better off 4 years from now.”
But what happens when adulation gives way to the messy, incremental process of governing? When Obama has to confront a deep-rooted financial crisis, two wars and a political system whose default setting is gridlock? When he makes decisions that inevitably disappoint some of his boosters?
“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.”
That media types are already comparing Obama, before his first day in office, to what polls generally show as the most or second most (behind George Washington) accomplished president ever really says all you’ll ever need to know about media slant and bias.
And yeah, but um, Lincoln wasn’t really celebrated until the years following his assassination. That is, he actually had to do something first, and then die because of it.
While Lincoln was president, the nation was hotly divided, and not just among North and South, but Northern Democrats versus Northern Republicans. Lincoln’s head general, George McClellan, would call Lincoln, “nothing more than a well-meaning baboon”, a “gorilla”, and “ever unworthy of … his high position.” Many Northern newspapers, columnists and orators of that day, particularly from the Anti-War Copperheads, publicly and vociferously vilified Abraham Lincoln in terminology similar to that of George Bush today — tyrant, shedder of the Constitution, and so on.