THE TELEGRAPH: There is a video clip running on YouTube at the moment which shows a black woman moved nearly to tears at an Obama rally, telling a television interviewer that all her problems will be at an end when he is elected president. She won't have to worry anymore about putting gas in her car or paying her mortgage because "he will help me". It would be easy to find this absurd - the blind faith of an unsophisticated voter who has clearly mistaken Barack Obama for Jesus - but in truth it is both sad and alarming. I can understand the sense of the miraculous that Obama's likely accession to the presidency must involve for African-Americans: I grew up in the US at a time when even the cities of the northeast were almost entirely segregated. (It was called "de facto segregation" as opposed to the legally enforced version that prevailed in the South, and was even more pernicious and intractable in its way.) But this woman's testimony is a reminder of something deeply disturbing in the Obama phenomenon: the fact that his campaign has shifted its tone from his original "post-racial" stance to one that is subliminally evocative of black evangelism. Far from his earlier intellectually nuanced and racially neutral delivery, his cadences and his frankly inspirational stump speeches now have the unmistakeable ring of the black pulpit. Little wonder that his candidacy is being mistaken for the Second Coming. >>> Janet Daley | November 4, 2008
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Barack Obama: he’s Been Sent by God: Even by the feverish standards of US politics, the messianic fervour of Obama's campaign is disquieting, writes Mick Brown from Colorado. >>> By Mick Brown in Colorado | Novermber 4, 2008
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