The political Messiah of the early 21st century, a cross between John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr

Obamania has gripped most of Europe writes Katrin Bennhold. But the enthusiasm is particularly striking in France.

…"He inspires different people for different reasons, but he inspires most people," said [Samuel Solvit, president of France's support committee for Barack Obama], whose 2,000-person-strong committee is the biggest in Europe and includes prominent members like Axel Poniatowski, president of the foreign affairs commission at the National Assembly, and Mayor Bertrand Delanoë of Paris.

…Several opinion polls have suggested that if Europeans could vote on Nov. 4, they would cast their ballot for Obama, who is admiringly described as a cross between John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

…Indeed, as the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung warned Friday, European enthusiasts have elevated the senator to a role he will find hard to fulfill — "a savior of mankind, a sort of political Messiah of the early 21st century."

Speaking of messiahs and JFK, Jonah Goldberg says in his Liberal Fascism that

we must ask, what made his administration so popular? What made it so effective? What has given it its lasting appeal? On almost every front, the answers are those very elements that fit a fascist playbook: the creation of crises, nationalistic appeals to unity, the celebration of martial values, the blurring of lines between public and private sectors, the utilization of mass media to glorify the state and its programs, invocations of a new "post-partisan" spirit that places the important decisions in the hands of experts and intellectual supermen, and a cult of personality for the national leader.

…John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson represented the continuation of the liberal quest begun by Woodrow Wilson and his fellow progressives — the quest to create an all-caring, all-powerful, all-encompassing state, a state that assumes responsibility for every desirable outcome and takes the blame for every setback on the road to utopia, a state that finally replaces God.

Which is why Barack Obama is so enormously popular everywhere else in the world, i.e., in the places where the flame of liberty has never taken root as deep as (despite all the leftists' attempts to root it out) in America (and where it never will)… When you read the following paragraph, note that Jonah Goldberg wrote it before (long before) Obama became the Democratic Party's main contender (and before "hope" and "change" became his rallying cry).

[FDR's] New Deal gave Americans "hope" and "faith" in a "cause larger than themselves." Hope for what? Faith in what? What "cause"? The answer: the liberal God-state or, if you prefer, the Great Society — which is merely that society governed by the God-state in accordance with the general will.