300 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographystated, “The implication is, the people who’ve been voting for me or involved in my campaign
are somehow delusional.” Obama’s stump speech was revamped to include the same argument.
“Some of these folks make fun of y’all,” he told one audience. “They say, ‘Y’all look at these
folks who are being duped.’“ “However they’re characterized, they are certainly energetic,”
Cowan concluded, seeming uncertain just what to make of Obama’s supporters. “And the more
they are criticized for that enthusiasm, the more it just seems to galvanize their cause.”’ There
was talk of Hare Krishna and the Manson family. Obama was mentioned as both the Messiah
and the anti-Christ, with elaborate web sites devoted to both themes. A slate.com editor noticed
that Obama’s rhetorical style was similar to that of Mussolini: ‘The deputy editor of a major
online magazine spent time in a weekly podcast explaining how the style of Senator Barack
Obama shares much in common with the speech of fascist dictators like Benito Mussolini.
“That’s slightly fascistic,” David Plotz, the deputy editor at Slate.com said in the magazine’s
weekly podcast when one of his fellow editors brought up Obama’s style. “That’s a very, like,
let’s rally the nation. I don’t want to be rallied.” After his fellow Slate editors lightly gibed him
for his statement, he continued the point: “My brother who is an academic wrote this wonderful
book about crowds, and crowd theory. And one of the sort of lessons that he’s always imparted
to me is just that crowds are terrifying. Crowds are horrifying for the most part because they
have a will of their own, and they act independently of rationality. And I think that Obama
relies hugely on that. That’s not to say, I don’t, I still support him, but I don’t like that fascistic,
I like him not for the fascistic elements of his candidacy, which I think are profound.”’ (Michael
Roston, “Slate editor calls Obama speech style ‘fascistic,’” Rawstory, February 4, 2008)
Right-wing Fox News Radio host Tom Sullivan took a call from a listener who stated that when
listening to Barack Obama speak, “it harkens back to when I was younger and I used to watch those
deals with Hitler, how he would excite the crowd and they’d come to their feet and scream and
yell.” Sullivan then played a “side-by-side comparison” of a Hitler speech and an Obama speech.
Sullivan mimicked the crowd during both speeches, yelling, “Yay! Yay!” Radio reactionary
Michael Savage agreed. It would be easy to disregard these comments because the sources have
discredited themselves so thoroughly in their support of Bush and his lunatic foreign wars. But then
again, gold is sometimes where you find it.
IRRATIONALIST MASS MOVEMENTS TARGET WOMEN
No account of the success of Mussolini and his imitators as mob orators would be complete
without some mention of the special hypnotic power which fascist rhetoric and the personality of
the fascist leader exercised on women. Some of the most enthusiastic swooners at fascist rallies
were women, many of whom had a special devotion for Il Duce. Obama seems to have acquired an
instinctive awareness of this set of issues from his own mother. If we are to judge by the
prominence that this episode receives in Obama’s memoirs, we must conclude that one of the
formative experiences of Obama’s life was the moment when his mother revealed to him that she
found Harry Belafonte to be sexually attractive. This experience seems to have furnished Obama
with the belief that he is able to exercise an almost hypnotic appeal over middle-aged white woman,
and his campaign has tried very hard to play this card, including through the use of special focus
groups. Here is the episode in question, as described in a recent puff piece of adulation offered by a
popular magazine to the Perfect Master:
There is an amazingly candid moment in Obama’s autobiography when he writes of his
childhood discomfort at the way his mother would sexualize African-American men. “More
than once,” he recalls, “my mother would point out: ‘Harry Belafonte is the best-looking man