It still fascinates me how support for Obama among his ardent followers is not informed by his performance as president - when people who admire him extoll his putative virtues and qualities they do so as if how well he has done the job is beside the point - of course they will toss off excuses, rationalizations, they'll blame Europe and Bush and the Tea Party and racism etc etc - but as they speak you can tell these Maenads don't even care why or even if things are bad because for them the celebration is about something else - in other words, Obama is the point, the man himself and not the country per se - he is the manifestation, the embodiment of every naive, sentimental, speciously argued ideal they've ever held dear - he completes them, he is the dream they dreamt themselves to be - and what is reality compared to that?
Many times I've gotten into heated arguments with the true believers and always it ends with them spitting venom at me in an incoherent rage - and you begin to see why, for if Obama is a reflection of them, an emanation of their deepest faith and convictions, and he fails, is shown to be hollow or rotten or an insubstantial bauble or an incompetent pretender draped in the outlandish raiment of the fool, then what are they? Believers are not wont to imagine their gods as small and foolish and so when one comes along and is exactly that it's hardly surprising that denial becomes the currency of choice - not a coincidence, faith being as fragile as it is, that religions tend to be a wee bit intolerant of objective truths or facts.
The objective fact of the Obama presidency is one of failure. If he was CEO of a public company there'd be a strong consensus among shareholders for his removal. And yet the shareholders in the Obama presidency act as if the bottom line is meaningless, an illusion, as if true value existed beyond the facts - they act as if survival of the company itself is not particularly relevant when measured against the sanctity of their faith in the ideal of the CEO remaining inviolable.
