Long-time journalist Barbara Walters commented on President Obama’s struggles Tuesday night on “Piers Morgan Live,” and it wasn’t even a Freudian slip when she invoked some messianic terminology to describe ‘our’ view of the once-hailed and now fading president.
“He made so many promises,” Walters told Morgan in response to his question about Obama’s difficulty in fulfilling ‘the great flame of ambition and excitement’ of 2009. “We thought that he was going to be — I shouldn’t say this at Christmastime — but the next messiah. And the whole Obamacare, or whatever you want to call it — the Affordable Health Act — it just hasn’t worked for him, and he’s stumbled around on it, and people feel very disappointed because they expected more.”
Walters didn’t say explicitly who the ‘we’ applied to, though the media has observed such hype for the president long before. From a 2007 Politico piece on the campaign stump in South Carolina:
In a giant Sunday afternoon rally suffused with Christian – and at times messianic – rhetoric, Barack Obama made his largest-scale pitch to black and white Democrats of South Carolina, the third and most devout presidential primary state.
…
Obama’s wife, Michelle, opened the rally with a description of her husband that could, at moments, have been a description of Jesus Christ.
“We need a leader who’s going to touch our souls. Who’s going to make us feel differently about one another. Who’s going to remind us that we are one another’s keepers. That we are only as strong as the weakest among us,” she said, echoing biblical passages.
Video of Walters’ segment last night below.
(h/t NewsBusters)
