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Updated August 23, 2012, 4:55 p.m. ET
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Out of Mani, One
The philosophical roots of the Obama cult..
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444812704577607463243209208.html?mod=djemBestOfTheWeb_hBy JAMES TARANTO
In an interminable article on the president's fund-raising problems, The New Yorker's Jane Mayer puts it down in part to his aversion to schmoozing:
Big donors were particularly offended by Obama's reluctance to pose with them for photographs at the first White House Christmas and Hanukkah parties. . . .
Creating a sense of intimacy with the President is especially important with Democratic donors, a frustrated Obama fund-raiser argues: "Unlike Republicans, they have no business interest being furthered by the donation-they just like to be involved. So it makes them more needy. It's like, 'If you're not going to deregulate my industry, or lower my taxes, can't I at least get a picture?' "
Mayer has come in for criticism from irritated conservatives, who rightly note that the substance of the quote is preposterous. We haven't read the whole piece--we'll suffer for our craft, but only up to a point--but we can't fault Mayer for reporting that one of her sources said something silly.
And it's a revealing quote. We encountered almost exactly the same bizarre claim back in June, when we were on a cable-news panel with one of those Democratic "strategists."
"What's going on," she said, "is you have billionaires who are trying to buy this election because they understand that Gov. Romney will put in place policies that put more dollars into their pockets while taking dollars out of the middle class. And you have contributors to President Obama's campaign who are doing it because they want to grow the economy for everyone in a fair and equitable way."
Note carefully what is being asserted here. It's not just that Democratic ideas are morally superior to Republican ones or that Barack Obama is a better president, or a better man, than Mitt Romney or would be, or is. Rather, the claim is that whereas billionaires who support Romney are greedy and selfish, those who back Obama are altruistic--or, to the extent they have a selfish motive, it is a relatively benign one, a simple desire to be in the presence of the Dear Leader.
It's a leftist cliché that money corrupts politics. These leftists, however, believe that their politics somehow purifies money--that writing a check to Obama for America is an act of moral money-laundering.
There's a word for people who see the world in such stark terms of good vs. evil: Manichaean. As the capitalization suggests, it's a proper noun, referring not just to a generic attitude but to a specific creed, founded by a man named Mani. "The religion disappeared from the West in 10th century, and from China in the 14th century, and today it is extinct," according to an essay by Tore Kjeilen.
Can Mani help us explain The One and his acolytes? Perhaps. "Manichaeism is the largest and most important example of Gnosticism," Kjeilen explains. "Central in the Manichaean teaching was dualism, that the world itself, and all creatures, was part of a battle between the good, represented by God, and the bad, the darkness, represented by a power driven by envy and lust."
Gnosticism is a utopian philosophy. Its essential premises are that the world, not man, is fallen and the route to salvation lies in knowledge (gnosis in Greek), not faith. As poet David Solway explains in a PJMedia.com essay: "The world and all its customs, beliefs, norms, usages, and statutes was disavowed as a vast and perverse deception. The imperative was to restore a prior or potential, but shattered, harmony by whatever means necessary and thus to recreate the Creation."
Solway argues that the psychology of contemporary left "is intrinsically a Gnostic one":
All of the Left's diverse manifestations, from radical communism to the more complaisant forms of soft-focus socialism, are actuated by the mystical lure of a harmonious society posited as the end-goal of History--a society in which the elements of conflict have been banished and sufficient wherewithal is assured for all its members. The Hegelian assumption--partially adopted by Marx--of the "end" toward which the forces of History are tending is the secular version of the Gnostic reverie of the benign blueprint that was somehow botched. The Leftist dream of ultimate "ends" mirrors the Gnostic illusion of first beginnings, of a pre-existent purpose. For this psychology, only the Ideal is Real, and the Real is recognized as something that is opposed to the actual, to what is presently the case.
This makes sense of the disconnect between Obama's largely uplifting 2008 campaign and his unrelentingly vicious 2012 one. Then, he presented himself as "the Ideal," the bringer of "hope and change" whose promise was "fundamentally transforming the United States of America."
What won him the election was that the voters were as "opposed to the actual" as he was. But they didn't want fundamental transformation, just peace and prosperity, which he has manifestly failed to deliver. This time around, he's still running as "the Ideal" opposed to "the actual," but he's lashing out and blaming others because he is constitutionally incapable of accepting responsibility for his own failures in office, which he may not even perceive as failures. What difference does it make if unemployment is the 5.2% his advisers promised or the 8.2% it actually is when you've got a country to fundamentally transform?
Yahoo! News's Walter Shapiro, picking up on the Mayer piece, writes:
Obama is unusual in politics . . . in his apparent refusal to be awed in the presence of billionaires. Unlike the Clintons and the Romney-Ryan ticket, Obama is not a devout believer in the gospel of wealth. As a Democratic fund-raiser, quoted in the Politico e-book [Glenn Thrush's "Obama's Last Stand"], says about the president, "He doesn't understand the rich. He's an intellectual elitist, not an economic one."
An "intellectual elitist"--one who believes that the route to salvation lies in knowledge. Shapiro concludes, however, that "the president's steadfast reluctance to schmooze-you-can-use with everyone else in politics may speak to a far deeper problem about using the full powers of the White House to govern."
There's a word to describe the "problem" to which Shapiro alludes: incompetence.
Solway writes that "there can be little doubt that the suffering caused by the Gnostic disease is immeasurable, for the world is not amenable to radical transformation." Immeasurable perhaps, but not limitless, especially in America. Not only is Obama subject to regularly scheduled elections and the 22nd Amendment, but the otherworldliness of his outlook is a check on his political effectiveness.
The Vetting
"NBC News unsuccessfully went back to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney to request an interview for this week's prime-time special on the Mormon faith," the Associated Press reports:
The newsmagazine's ["Rock Center"] producers thought it worthwhile to examine the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on the eve of one of its members becoming the Republican nominee for president. During the hour, correspondent Harry Smith does a piece on why Mormons are so successful in business and tours a Salt Lake City warehouse where a huge amount of supplies is kept for the needy. . . .
"What we set out to do very broadly is not an hour on Mitt Romney but an hour about the religion that has played a very important role in shaping who he is," [executive producer] Hartman said Wednesday.
That sounds fine, but do you remember NBC's 2008 prime-time special exploring the views of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ and its pastor, Jeremiah Wright? Neither do we.
The Presidential SEAL?
"A detailed first-person account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, written by a member of the Navy SEALs who participated in the mission and was present at Bin Laden's death, will be released next month, the publisher said on Wednesday," reports the New York Times:
A closely held secret within Penguin, the publishing house that is planning to release it on Sept. 11, the book promises to be one of the biggest titles of the year, with the potential to rattle the presidential campaign in the final weeks before the Nov. 6 election.
Titled "No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama bin Laden," the book was written by a member of the SEALs who is using the pseudonym Mark Owen.
So Barack Obama is writing under a pseudonym now?