Free What the (Bleep) Just Happened? by Monica Crowley Page A

Woody Allen in the film Zelig . Zelig is an enigma, a curiously nondescript man who has a mysterious ability to transform himself to resemble those who surround him. In the movie, Zelig gains fame as a “human chameleon.”
    Obama needed to transform himself before he could transform America. In order to disguise his radicalism, he became whomever he was around. To folks like Peggy Joseph, for example, he was Santa Claus. If he were a Marvel Comics character, he’d definitely be the archvillain Chameleon, who did such dastardly deeds as disguising himself as Captain America in order to gain the trust of Captain America’s fellow Avenger, Iron Man. With each person Obama sat down with, from Rick Warren to Oprah Winfrey, he would put on a different face, tailor-made for that particular audience. Underlying every incarnation, however, was one theme: he would be their savior. As he indicated many times, he believes in “collective salvation,” by which he means salvation delivered by the state. But he made sure that when people looked at him, they saw only the concept of “salvation,” hence his deliberate use of Jesus/messiah imagery.
    The second thing the Obama inner circle needed to do was amp up the cult of personality begun in 1995 with the publication of Dreams from My Father and stoked in 2004 with his convention speech. If many Americans could be swept up in the carefully crafted Orwellian projection of the man, they would be less inclined to focus on what he actually intended to do. They needed to make each person feel as if their vote for Obama were their own personal success. The voters needed to be caressed and cuddled, told how enlightened and beautiful they were, taken dancing, and given endless cheap wine in the back of a limo. As Candidate Zelig charmed each audience, he dripped with charisma and flashed a 100-watt smile. He glided through crowds, getting people to lean in to try to shake his hand or touch him, like the sick woman who was healed simply by touching Jesus’s garment. He spoke in carefully modulated tones, often using hypnotic techniques such as repetition (“Yes, we can! Yes, we can! Yes, we can!”) and the “yes set,” which is an exchange that is intentionally set up to get a positive answer. For example, during the campaign he would ask the crowd if they were ready for “change,” and they would yell “yes!” Then he would ask them if they were ready for “hope,” and they would shriek “yes!” And then he would button it up by asking if they were ready to “fundamentally transform America,” and once again, they’d howl “yes!” He had them so hysterically riled up that nobody stopped to think. Do you want higher taxes? (Yes!) Do you want illegal aliens to vote? (Yes!) Do you want me to use the sauna alone with Hugo Chávez? (Yes!)
    Obama was also an adept “grievance identifier.” Merely by identifying your grievance, he’d suggest he’d fix it. To Peggy Joseph, who either didn’t want to or couldn’t pay her mortgage, he’d pay it for her. Your 401(k) down? No problem! Obama was going to take hold of the economy. Can’t afford a new car? No worries! Obama would take care of that. Jobs to the jobless! Health care to the sick! Apologies to the world! Free government-issued tighty whities, featuring Obama’s face sewn on the inside!
    Obama was ingenious at laying out the nation’s grievances, and soon enough he had millions of people nodding in agreement: “Yes, that’s right.” “Yes, I have that problem, and that one, and that one too!” Pretty soon, you were agreeing to problems you didn’t even know you or the nation had. This was one of the key essences of the redistributionists’ strategy: convince you of a set of problems and then tell you that only government can solve them. Why fix something yourself when there’s someone in front of you—Barack Obama—who is offering to fix it for you? In short order, Obama was riding the “hope and change”