Is Barack Obama The Messiah?

Jonah Goldberg ponders the ineffable:

Is Barack Obama the Messiah?

Before we answer that question, let me vent for a moment. In 2000 I was
cruelly denied the Pulitzer despite being the only columnist in America to ask
the pressing question: Is Al Gore an alien? The evidence was there for all to
see. He was born nine months after the mysterious alien sighting at Roswell,
N.M. His weird syntax and verbal rhythms are otherworldly. He often refers to
“earth” or “this planet” as if he’s just passing through, and he once angrily
complained to the Washington Post that it had printed a picture of the earth
from outer space “upside down.”

There is no “upside down” in space — unless Gore had his childhood view in
mind.At least I’m not in the wilderness this time. Lots of people have pondered
the possibility that Barack is our Divine Redeemer. There are websites dedicated
to the question “Is Barack Obama the Messiah?” Google that question and you’ll
get more than 35,000 hits. (Enter just the words “Messiah” and “Obama” and
you’ll get nearly 10 times that.)

But there’s more concrete evidence. Since Obama declared his candidacy,
there have been remarkably few biblical plagues. And lions and lambs seem open
to bilateral negotiations.

Obama’s apostles are hard to dismiss. Oprah simply calls him “The One,”
because “we need politicians who know how to be the truth.” (Jesus says in John
14:6 “I am the way, the truth ...”) Oprah goes on to say Obama will help us
“evolve to a higher plane,” which would put Obama in the role of our Intelligent
Designer.

According to the New York Times, Obama’s volunteers are taught to eschew
discussions of the issues and instead “testify” about how they “came to
Obama.”

Oh sure, Jonah may joke about it. But, it is a possibility:

Is Obama an enlightened being?

To them I say, all right, you want to know what it is? The appeal, the
pull, the ethereal and magical thing that seems to enthrall millions of people
from all over the world, that keeps opening up and firing into new channels of
the culture normally completely unaffected by politics?

No, it’s not merely his youthful vigor, or handsomeness, or even
inspiring rhetoric. It is not fresh ideas or cool charisma or the fact that a
black president will be historic and revolutionary in about a thousand different
ways. It is something more. Even Bill Clinton, with all his effortless, winking
charm, didn’t have what Obama has, which is a sort of powerful luminosity, a
unique high-vibration integrity.

Dismiss it all you like, but I’ve heard from far too many enormously
smart, wise, spiritually attuned people who’ve been intuitively blown away by
Obama’s presence - not speeches, not policies, but sheer presence - to say it’s
just a clever marketing ploy, a slick gambit carefully orchestrated by hotshot
campaign organizers who, once Obama gets into office, will suddenly turn from
perky optimists to vile soul-sucking lobbyist whores, with Obama as their
suddenly evil, cackling overlord.

Here’s where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people I know
(not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a
Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not
merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can
actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and
connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of
people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very
high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a
brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why Obama is
so rare. And this why he is so often compared to Kennedy and Martin Luther King
Jr., to those leaders in our culture whose stirring vibrations still resonate
throughout our short history.

Are you rolling your eyes and scoffing? Fine by me.