This diary is posted with all due respect to - and, in fact, piggybacking on - Kagro X's insightful diary "Please buy my brand of stupid", describing the typical election year creation by every and any pundit of a cure-all new class of voters, this time the so-called "restless and anxious moderates," or "RAMs."
Now comes David Brooks, diagnosing the afflicted suffering from "Obama Comedown Syndrome." But Brooks takes this well-trodden story of "Obama-mania" too far. (I'd say he's jumped the shark, but lately I feel that using that turn of phrase is in itself jumping the shark.)
More below the jump.
Brooks writes:
The afflicted had already been through the phases of Obama-mania — fainting at rallies, weeping over their touch screens while watching Obama videos, spending hours making folk crafts featuring Michelle Obama’s face. These patients had experienced intense surges of hope-amine, the brain chemical that fuels euphoric sensations of historic change and personal salvation.
But they found that as the weeks went on, they needed more and purer hope-injections just to preserve the rush. They wound up craving more hope than even the Hope Pope could provide, and they began experiencing brooding moments of suboptimal hopefulness. Anxious posts began to appear on the Yes We Can! Facebook pages. A sense of ennui began to creep through the nation’s Ian McEwan-centered book clubs.
Up until now The Chosen One’s speeches had seemed to them less like stretches of words and more like soul sensations that transcended time and space. But those in the grips of Obama Comedown Syndrome began to wonder if His stuff actually made sense. For example, His Hopeness tells rallies that we are the change we have been waiting for, but if we are the change we have been waiting for then why have we been waiting since we’ve been here all along?
Patients in the grip of O.C.S. rarely express doubts at first, but in a classic case of transference, many experience slivers of sympathy for Hillary Clinton. They see her campaign morosely traipsing from one depressed industrial area to another — The Sitting Shiva for America Tour. They see that her entire political strategy consists of waiting for primary states as boring as she is.
Really David Brooks? Is that how it works? Tell me more about my affliction by O.C.S.
Ridiculous.