This editorial in the Wall Street Journal…
…partially captures the disquiet I feel about the crowds Barack Obama draws:
My boyhood, viagra sale cheap and the Arab political culture I have been chronicling for well over three decades, help are anchored in the Arab world. And the tragedy of Arab political culture has been the unending expectation of the crowd — the street, cheap we call it — in the redeemer who will put an end to the decline, who will restore faded splendor and greatness. When I came into my own, in the late 1950s and ’60s, those hopes were invested in the Egyptian Gamal Abdul Nasser. He faltered, and broke the hearts of generations of Arabs. But the faith in the Awaited One lives on, and it would forever circle the Arab world looking for the next redeemer.
America is a different land, for me exceptional in all the ways that matter. In recent days, those vast Obama crowds, though, have recalled for me the politics of charisma that wrecked Arab and Muslim societies
Add comment October 31st, 2008