WHEN YOU START TO SCARE EVEN MOTHER JONES...:

Barack Obama's Messiah Complex (Jonathan Stein, 02/13/08, Mother Jones Blog)

This is our moment to do what? To march? To organize? No. To vote for Obama. As if simply by voting for one man, we make a mark upon this country as indelibly as those who fought the Nazis or sat at lunch counters.

But the easiness of Obama's movement isn't what bothers me most. I am profoundly troubled that any candidate would chart the course of American history as follows (and I'm rearranging Obama's history here to make it more chronological):

American Revolutionaries -> Manifest Destiny -> Slaves/Abolitionists -> Suffragettes -> the Labor Movement -> the Greatest Generation -> the Civil Rights Movement -> Himself.

MORE:
The Obama Mystery (David Ignatius, February 17, 2008, Washington Post)

"Why is the press going so easy on Barack Obama?" asks a prominent Democratic Party strategist, echoing a criticism frequently made by the Clinton campaign. It's a fair question, and now that Obama appears to be the front-runner in terms of his delegate count, he deserves a closer look, especially from people like me who have written positively about him.

The reason to look closely now, quite simply, is to avoid buyer's remorse later.

The Streets Are Alive with the Sound of Politics (Richard Reeves, 2/16/08, Real Clear Politics)

At my house a couple of nights before, someone said that if black people thought Barack Obama were cheated out of the Democratic nomination, they would boycott the election -- and that would be the end of the Democrats. "I'd boycott, too," said half a dozen people around the table -- and they were all white.

There are dangers in all of this, of course, as we learned in 1968. For those who have forgotten or never knew, the Democratic Party tore itself to pieces in battles in which young and often privileged students -- devoted to everything from love and peace to anarchy and war -- taunted policemen trying to make enough money to send their own kids to college, and the cops started swinging.

And middle America cheered.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 16, 2008 7:55 AM