Playing The Messiah Card

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Playing The Messiah Card

By Erv Bobo
June 6, 2008

Playing the race card almost worked for Barak Obama. Making much of the fact that his immediate ancestry was of mixed races, he convinced many he was therefore the only candidate who could bridge the racial divide and thus “bring America together.”

Not only did it almost work, it was a neat bit of legerdemain – perhaps the reason he was called “the magic Negro”. In a swift sleight-of-hand, he hid our crucial divide (the war in Iraq, which he can’t handle) and substituted a racial divide (that he thought he could handle) that’s been healing well for the past forty years.

It was the first time in my memory that any candidate tried to put race at the center of his campaign and the ploy drew a lot of support from those deluded people who think they bear the burden of their forefather’s holding of slaves – even though the majority of people alive today in America do not have ancestors who held slaves. (It is, they say, a collective guilt we all must share.)

That guilt nonsense aside, playing the race card was working well for Obama – until he was trumped by his own minister, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who proved to the world that you don’t have to be white to be a racist. In doing that, he also showed us on which side of the racial divide Senator Obama resides.

(Anyone who buys into the silliness that Obama sat in church for twenty years and heard not one word of Wright’s rants; who never read a word or even looked at the cover of “Trumpet”, the magazine published by that church; who sought the advice and consul of Rev. Wright without ever suspecting he both harbored and fostered a hatred of whites and a hatred of America, - that person is absolutely delusional.)

So the race card was trumped by the hatred card and no longer worked as well, although Obama did carry North Carolina by a wide margin..

(What the mainstream media fails to say about that primary is that 500,000 absentee ballots were cast before Reverend Wright’s live diatribe and before Obama’s “bittergate” remarks became public. Had it not been so, that race would probably have been much less a blowout.)

So what do you do when a hand on which you bet heavily comes a cropper? You double the bet in an effort to catch up. (Smart players don’t, but we’re talking about the Senator from Illinois.)

If Obama cannot be the “magic Negro”, he will become the Messiah.

Hence, a current campaign poster showing Obama standing at a pulpit, bathed in heavenly light, a Christian cross prominent on the wall behind him. And the caption has the audacity to change scripture from “faith, hope and love” to “faith, hope, change”. (Of course, if you truly are the messiah, I suppose you can edit the Bible as much as you wish.)

He is, according to another campaign poster “Doing the Lord’s work.” (In light of his statement that he was brought to and converted to Christianity by Reverend Jeremiah Wright, one wonders whether his conceptions of “the Lord’s work” have anything in common with the lessons of the New Testament.)

As soon as the messiah medicine wagon hit town, the mainstream press jumped aboard. No less than three national magazines ran cover pictures showing Obama surrounded by – drum roll, please – a halo! And another campaign poster – a drawing, this time – shows Obama wearing a white robe and apparently walking on water. (Perhaps next week he’ll show us the video.)

This is not something happening in a vacuum, not something the candidate can disavow, for in his own words to a crowd of prospective voters he said, “"My job this morning is to be so persuasive . . . that a light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany, and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Barack."

And don’t forget he has described himself as the one “…you’ve been waiting for.”

Now, it is one thing for his supporters to call him messianic, but when Obama himself starts thinking and acting like he is, indeed, divine… well, there’s a name for that. It’s called a Messiah Complex.

It’s easy to see the strategy behind all his messianic posturing: Obama wants and needs the evangelical vote. He wants the votes from the Bible Belt. He wants the votes of the people in flyover country, the very ones he denigrated by saying that, in hard times, they cling to guns and religion. (Too bad, Senator, that you derided religious leanings just as you were about to make a bid for the votes of those who have such leanings. But then, as Americans, we never insist our Senators show any real foresight or intelligence.)

Happily, those who lack foresight are the very ones whose grand schemes often circle around and bite them in the ass. That is what happened with playing the race card, that is what can happen with playing the messiah card.

No one can deny Barak Obama is a persuasive speaker. He has what was once called a silver tongue. It is this quality that makes his empty blandishments seem full of substance; that make some of his followers behave as if they are listening to the young Frank Sinatra or the forever Elvis Presley; that make some believe there really is pie in the sky and it is theirs for the taking – right here and right now.

And yet, we have only ourselves to blame for letting this moment come to pass.

We were warned one such as he would come: an attractive man who would gather all men together; who would bring a message of peace and hope and brotherhood. We were warned that millions would flock to him; be swayed by his blandishments; become devout slaves willing to do his every bidding. We were warned that he would be thought to be the Messiah.

In Revelations, he is called the anti-Christ.

Now, Senator, about those bite marks on your posterior…They do seem to be self-inflicted.

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About the author: Erv Bobo is a free-lance author. His current books THE VELVET BRAND, THE CHEYENNE BRAND and WESTERN STAR are currently available at Lulu.com.

Email: Dasher1945@aol.com

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