White Guilt and the Cult of Personality
The reasons for Obama's November, 2008 electoral victory are many, and complex. Here I want to address only two of such reasons, but these are what I believe to be the top two reasons: cult of personality and white guilt.
Historically personality has played an important role in the coming to power of leaders. The historical record includes such figures as Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and Constantine the Great. Julius Caesar would be on the list if he had not been assasinated. Marxist, Socialist, and Fascist leaders who had a cult of personality include Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro. Great American leaders whose personalities aquired a cult following to some degree may have included George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan.
My personal opinion is that Barack Hussein Obama is not, and never was, in the same league as the leaders in the previous paragraph. Nevertheless, Obama is definitely the leader of a cult following when compared to such lackluster presidents as George W. Bush and his father, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Calvin Coolidge, and James Garfield. Obama's soaring rhetoric about hope and change, and the teary-eyed adulation of his followers definitely put him in the cult camp. One of the most important aspects of Obama is that he had one white parent and one African parent, which concretely bridged the racial gap, if not in terms of racial politics, and, of course Obama was elected as the first African-American president. This brings me to the second of the top two reasons for his election, white guilt.
Credit is due to Shelby Steele, author of the book "White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era." Every American should read this book, several times if necessary, because it makes a very important point, which is not easy to grasp immediately. The gist of the point is this:
Whites (and American institutions) must acknowledge historical racism to show themselves redeemed by it, but once they acknowledge it, they lose moral authority over everything having to do with race, equality, social justice, poverty and so on. [...] The authority they lose transfers to the 'victims' of historical racism and becomes their great power in society. This is why White guilt is quite literally the same thing as Black power.
The role of white guilt in the election of Barack Obama cannot be exaggerated or overemphasized. It enabled his supporters, idealistic cult followers or hard-nosed intellectuals alike, to overlook many of Obama's flaws, such as inexperience, a mysterious background, and support of econonomically disastrous policies. Barack Obama is to be America's first, and probably last white guilt president.