NPR’s Frank James has a new twist on the creepy exchange President Barack Obama recently had with someone at a rally in South Carolina in which he suggested that people should prove their love for him by helping him pass the jobs bill.
James quotes a passage in the Bible from the Book of John in which Jesus Christ tells Peter to prove his love for him and “feed my lambs” meaning to spread the Gospel throughout the world.
It has been a long time, not since the campaign really, since Obama has been compared to a messiah. But one supposes that the meme must now be taken up, now that a new presidential campaign now approaches.
The comparison is hardly likely to work this time around. The actual Jesus performed miracles, healing the sick, raising the dead, multiplying the loaves and fishes, and turning water into wine. Indeed, were Obama actually the Second Coming, we would hardly have had to have health care reform passed.
Obama’s 2 3/4-year presidency has hardly been the Millennium as promised in the Book of Revelations. It has more resembled what has depicted as coming before that period of bliss and happiness.
One wonders how this kind of idolatry persists. Republican politicians, especially presidents, have often been accused of thinking that they take their marching orders from God. The implication is that reason and common sense would be trumped by religious faith in the case of a Republican administration. But no other president in the history of the Republic has actually been accused of being God. It is something that would cause Obama’s predecessors, from Washington to the second Bush, to blanch in horror.
One suspects that the motive is the will to believe, to think that a leader upon whom one is emotionally invested must be divinely inspired, if not having divine powers himself. But this suggests that there is an advantage to being a member of the religious right. No matter what their views are, an evangelical knows very well that there is but one God and he does not live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Sources: Obama: ‘If You Love Me, You Got To Help Me Pass This Bill’, Frank James, NPR, Sept, 14, 2011
Obama Lays Down Creepy Condition with Jobs Bill, Mark R. Whittington, Associated Content, Sept, 14, 2011