OpEd in my paper this morning: Obamamania: virtue or vice?

[pdxmom]

http://www.newhouse.com/obamamania-virtue-or-vice--3.html

It discusses the issue regarding "cult" that we've talked about here on DU for awhile, and is a pretty good article. But the portion that caught my attention was this:

"Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson denied Monday that the Clinton campaign was doing anything to push the cult-of-Obama meme.

But Sidney Blumenthal, a senior Clinton adviser, did e-mail the Media Matters posting to a list of influential persons, including reporters.

Asked about that, Blumenthal replied by e-mail that the e-mail in question was "off the record. I send some published articles to close friends. However you received one, it was not intended for you, or any other reporter, and you should tell me how my personal confidence was broken and you happened to receive it."

Friends perhaps, but the list of those receiving Blumenthal's e-mail included reporters John B. Judis, a senior editor at The New Republic; Joe Conason, national correspondent for The New York Observer and columnist for Salon.com; and Gene Lyons, columnist with the Arkansas Democrat Gazette and author of "The Hunting of the President: The Ten Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton."

They don't answer the questions and once again, blame the media, for something that they appear to be actively pushing. How is the half of the Democratic party that supports Obama going to feel when they realize the disdain the Clinton camp actually has for them?

[AX10]

1. This "craze" is more similar to a "Cult of Personality"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_personality

[goodgd_yall]

2. Agreed

rather than group cults like scientology and "Moonies." The cult of personality has a tendency to creep into American culture. When there is a "movement," somehow it seems necessary to find a leader of that movement and then focus on that personality rather than the movement of ideas the person is associated with. At times it works in reverse---a charismatic personality draws people to coalesce into a what appears to be a movement.

[SoxFan]

3. Sid needs to calm down and have a drink

Well, maybe he doesn't need a drink
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/0112081blumenthal1.html

[pdxmom]

6. I was stunned by that quote. He sends out a mass email, including reporters

and then complains when someone leaks it. What is he thinking?

[woolldog]

4. Good article

I liked this part:

Marshall Ganz, an organizing guru at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, said the Democratic Party has grown accustomed to nominating "stiffs" — good guys, he said, like John Kerry, Al Gore and Michael Dukakis — who haven't known how to reach people at the level Obama has tapped.

"There is a kind of suspicion of emotion that goes pretty deep — the idea that emotion is dangerous and uncontrollable," said Ganz, who last year helped train Obama organizers and volunteers at "Camp Obama" gatherings in several cities.

But, he said, "what moves us to action is not neck up; it's the heart. That's sort of where we can get the courage to take risks." Hope, he said, is not empty optimism, but the prerequisite for creative social action.

also this:

Lance Hill is a historian and activist in New Orleans, where he is executive director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research. He finds it "sad commentary on American politics when an idealistic and morally driven political campaign is regarded as some kind of dangerous cult."

[Evergreen Emerald]

5. more media bias against Clinton

[MADem]

7. A reporter from the Australian said the BO STAFFERS were using the "C" word, with pride.

And that was a good week ago.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23182456-28737,00.html

I hear that too in the voices of Obama's staff constantly, themselves referring to this "cult of Obama".

"Even if he doesn't go all the way, and I'm not being defeatist, I'm so thrilled to be a part of this and see the size of the crowds turning out," one staffer tells me.