The Latest Nastiness in Politics

You have to know how impressive it is in the current campaign for the White House that THOUSANDS of people are showing up when Barak Obama speaks.

In any setting, it is unusual for anyone to get thousands of people to come for s SPEECH, let alone a POLITICAL speech. In my life time, which goes back to watching my brother take campaign material for Wendall Wilke around to neighbors' homes, I have never seen anything like it.

As a professional public speaker (I am an ordained minister), I'm envious of Obama. Billy Graham needs weeks of preparation by local pastors beating the hustings on his behalf to fill a stadium. Obama has been doing it overnight. I don't think Ronald Reagan could do that.

And how have the media "talking heads" responded? Just as you would think jealous people would respond: by twisting the phenomenon to look like something else than the curiosity, appreciation, and hope that it is.

Instead of realizing that Obama has real class, good manners, and a way with words, they say he is "all words and no substance." They obviously have not looked at his website where there are all the details of his current proposals.

Instead of seeing the obvious enthusiasm for a politician who actually knows something and who speaks with much more respect of his opponents than they do of him, the "wise ones" now think he is some kind of mystical cult figure.

The point of their jab is to put down something they cannot engender with their own public speaking. They explain away something they cannot do themselves, get large numbers of people excited and moving into the political process.

They want to turn a political movement into something lesser, a "quasi-religious" movement.

Now they are trying to discuss something I know a little about.

A cult is a closed movement surrounding a manipulative personality. A cult has a central character who is the father-figure for the followers. That central person has to control how his followers will behave and will try to separate them from the real world where the cult's ideas would not stand up to scrutiny. The leader of a cult takes on almost divine traits. He wants to be the center of his followers' lives.

Do any of those characteristics sound like they are true of Barak Obama?

The ones who are trying to strike at Obama's vulnerabilities now are attacking those who come and end up cheering him on.

I don't think that strategy is going to work. It just offends me.

There are even worse things that are happening. In particular, someone has said he is like Adolph Hitler in his charisma. Hitler used the brownshirts, youth willing to do violence in his name, to get support. And Barak's middle name (Hussein) is used to try to associate him with Iraq's dictator and with terrorists in general.

Such nastiness revs up more than the partisans who want to win by any means. It revs up those who think they should cleanse the earth of such people. It provides a culture that is so poisoned that it allows people to feel they are serving the common good by assassinating the Obamas of the world.

It reminds me of how it was in Dallas in the early 1960s after John Kennedy became President. I was in Seminary there at the time. It was so bad that when one of the area's major high schools put on SOUTH PACIFIC, the most crucial song in the whole musical, "You Have to be Carefully Taught," was edited out of the performance.

Just after I left, Kennedy was assassinated. Students in many of the schools in Dallas heard the news and cheered.

Is the political atmosphere becoming that bad? Will it be that deadly?

Whether or not we prefer Barak Obama as our candidate for the Presidency, a whole lot of us are holding our breath and hoping the Secret Service is completely successful.