The Amazing Oprama Brings In a New Age

Without Oprah, Obama would still be playing second fiddle to Hillary, forced to dream of a 2016 comeback. Barak owes Oprah. There could be no better vice president in the Obama administration, than Oprah. With that much goodness and charisma controlling the US ship of state, surely a new age must be dawning?

...the striking thing about [a] charismatic leader is the extent to which his followers regard him as a healer of wounds, an alleviator of pain. In this sense, surely, Senator Barack Obama is charismatic. The carefully knotted ties and the dark, conservatively tailored suits only accentuate the exoticness of his shamanism; he has entered the American psyche not as a hero but as a healer....He is not the first politician to argue that politics can redeem us, but in posing as the Adonis who will turn winter into spring, he revives one of the more pernicious political swindles: the belief that a charismatic leader can ordain a civic happy hour and give a people a sense of community that will make them feel less bad.

...Obama’s charisma...is closer to what critic Camille Paglia has identified with today’s television talk-show culture, in which admissions of weakness are offered as proof of empathetic qualities. Talk-show culture is occupied with the question of why we feel so bad, when it is our right under the liberal dispensation to feel eternally good. The man who would succeed in such a culture must appear to sympathize with these obscure hurts; he must take pains, Paglia writes in Sexual Personae, to appear an “androgyne, the nurturant male or male mother.”

Obama, in gaming this culture, has figured out a new way to bottle old wine....Studiously avoiding the tough-hombre style of earlier charismatic figures, he phrases his vision in the tranquilizing accents of Oprah-land. His charisma is grounded in empathy rather than authority, confessional candor rather than muscular strength, metrosexual mildness rather than masculine testosterone. His power of sympathetic insight is said to be uncanny: “Everybody who’s dealt with him,” columnist David Brooks says, “has a story about a time when they felt Obama profoundly listened to them and understood them.” His two books are written in the empathetic-confessional mode that his most prominent benefactress, Oprah, favors; he is her political healer in roughly the same way that Dr. Phil was once her pop-psychology one. The collectivist dream, Obama instinctively understands, is less scary, more sympathetic, when served up by mama (or by mama in drag).

...the very images of frailty that undermine the masculine leader’s pose of strength help the practitioner of the new post-masculine charisma, whose object is to appear human—all too human. Softness has become an asset for candidates who have molded themselves on the exhibitionist model of the Oprah matriarchy. _CityJournal

Obama has tapped into the essence of Opravity. But he is, after all, just a man. He is bound to stumble from time to time. Who better to stand behind him, to make sure his Opravity remains pure, than Oprah herself? If the public begins to doubt Obama's sincerity, Oprah herself can look America in the eye to assure them that Obama is still the one.

It is difficult to comprehend the qualitative change in the nature of government that is approaching. Obama is a community activist and community healer at heart. He will be the first US President who comes to power with that approach. His new community will be not only America, but the entire world. By himself, the challenge to heal the world might prove too daunting. But with Oprah by his side, they become the amazing Oprama. Once the world's pains are soothed by Oprama, there is simply no going back.