rhetoric of the sacred

Barack Obama's oratorical style is widely commented upon. Some view it as inspirational; others view it as empty rhetoric. A simmering mistrust of his oratory has bubbled to the surfaced of the campaign; criticisms of his followers, apparently seized by a new messiah, are likely to become more mainstream if Obama's success continues. One pundit thinks the magic has faded. The bloom is off the rose, the Obama bubble has burst.

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Without resorting to the crudities of crowd psychology and the innate American fear of anything resembling the collective, it is possible to analytically parse the Obama effect. One good place to start is the work of Emile Durkheim on religion. One paragraph from his book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) is particularly relevant.

...we can also explain the curious posture that is so characteristic of a man who is speaking to a crowd -- if he has achieved communion with it. His language becomes high-flown in a way that would be ridiculous in ordinary circumstances; his gestures take on an overbearing quality; his very thought becomes impatient with limits and slips easily into every kind of extreme. This is because he feels filled to overflowing, as though with a phenomenal oversupply of forces that spill over and tend to spread around him. Sometimes he even feels possessed by a moral force greater than he, of which he is only the interpreter. This is the hallmark of what has often been called the demon of oratorical inspiration. This extraordinary surplus of forces is quite real and comes to him from the very group he is addressing. The feelings he arouses as he speaks return to him enlarged and amplified, reinforcing his own to the same degree. The passionate energies that he arouses reach in turn within him, and they increase his dynamism. It is then no longer a mere individual who speaks but a group incarnated and personified.*

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Those who lack this capacity to incarnate a group (which is especially important for a modern politician) resent those who can. Presumably, this capacity is one crucial characteristic of leadership, which is what Durkheim describes in the preceding paragraph. To lead is to move people, both as an act of following but also on a mental level; to coalesce a social consciousness that carries the force of opinion. This could be why Hillary Clinton's impressive resume does not suffice to overwhelm her putatively inexperienced opponent.

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*Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: The Free Press, 1995), 212.