Is this the kind of thing some of you are talking about when you worry that Barack Obama isn't a politician, he's a Sun Myung Moon-like cult figure? (Which is ironic, considering how many Republican candidates have, in fact, been backed by Reverend Sun Myung Moon, his Unification Church that practically defines a cult, and his cult-owned newspaper.) Is this what makes you see people waving their fists in the air and chanting "Yes We Can!" and instead of seeing happy, cheering people, you see Hitler's Nuremberg Rallies? The end of his victory speech in St. Paul last Tuesday night:

"America, this is our moment. This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past. Our time to bring new energy and new ideas to the challenges we face. Our time to offer a new direction for the country we love. The journey will be difficult. The road will be long. I face this challenge with profound humility, and knowledge of my own limitations. But I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment - this was the time - when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals. Thank you, God Bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America."

Or, as Chris Muir parodied it:



But it really loses something, both the emotional impact for his supporters and the fear it engenders in his opponents, without his ringing tone and the cheering, crying, screaming mass of tens of thousands of fans, with another ten thousand and more outside wishing they could get in:



Is that what you're afraid of? Is that what scares you so much?

Then you've forgotten your own history. Because what I thought when I was listening to that speech, at least what the analytical part of my mind was thinking and saying was, "That man's been studying his Reagan." Specifically, three words: "Morning in America," quite possibly the best damn political speech of the entire 20th century. Because Ronald Reagan, and his speech writers, knew that trying to make the conservative case to America in 1979 and 1980 was an uphill battle. Nobody trusted the Republicans, not just because they'd screwed up the country so badly in the past (that was over a generation before, who was thinking about that?) but because conservatives had a reputation, already by 1979, of being nothing but haters. Bitter, angry, hate-filled harridans and mugwumps, viciously foaming at the mouth about everything that was wrong with America. And it wasn't an unfair characterization, nor is it one still: almost without much exception, nearly every conservative hates America, even still, even after so many years of conservative rule, for not living up to their post-WWII "Return to Normalcy," "Father Knows Best" fantasy of America. And you know what? The American people (quite rightly) fear and despise and loathe haters.

But Ronald Reagan had a very unique biography, for a conservative. For decades, he'd been a moderate-liberal anti-communist labor leader, and a washed-up 3rd rate character actor. Then his second wife converted him to conservative Republicanism, and through her family connections, General Electric hired him to go out and give anti-communist speeches ... and something nobody expected, something magical, happened. Ronald Reagan fell in love with his live audiences. And through them, he fell in deeply, rapturously, sensuously, palpably in love with America, and for it, America, even so many Americans who knew better, loved him back. And from then on, it came through in everything he said; he could say the most hateful or spiteful or stupid things, but you knew, you just knew from the sound of him the sight of him, that even though he meant every word, he still loved America, he still loved Americans, and he still believed in America. Hence, the single most reliable applause line of so many Reagan speeches: "There is nothing wrong with America! that cannot be fixed! by what is right with America!"

And so it is with Barack Obama. His bizarre family story and unusual upbringing sheltered him from so much of the things that turned other men and women of his generation, myself included, so bitter and cynical. And through the power of his religious faith, the man has truly fallen just as deeply in love with the American people as Reagan did -- and even more than Reagan did, he's done so without losing his mind, without losing his skills. The generation after mine, the Millennial generation, finally old enough to vote in large numbers, are lapping this stuff up; it's what they've been raised from birth to look forward to, to hope for, to believe in. If the Republicans had even one candidate with Obama's defining features, his love of the words "us" and "we," the humility (real or faked) with which he entrusts himself to his young campaign staffers, his ringing call to band together and make the world a better place than the ideologues and the cynics have made it (again, a generational call to the Millennials, the DARE generation, who've grown up hearing that just this was their eventual mission), and above all, that bright, shining love for America that is all over his face every day? Then we'd be the ones who were in big trouble.

When Obama speaks, it's not for nothing that you see people in their 30s and 40s openly weeping. I know how much that scares you, how cultish and freakish and messianic religious it looks to you, but you've misread it. What you're seeing is the generation that Strauss and Howe called "Generation Thirteen," the groups that advertisers and demographers called Gen X and Gen Y, the people born between 1960 and 1980 or so, whose life experience as the most Aborted, Retried, Ignored, and Failed of all American generations has made us almost entirely bitter and cynical to a man and to a woman, of every race ... being dared to hope. Being dared to believe that the fascist nightmare of post-9/11 America is temporary, being dared to believe that we are not going down together inevitably to the darkness, being dared to believe that Karl Rove's bitter and vicious "50%+1 vote" divide and conquer strategy for keeping all Americans angry and at each others' throats can and will end. And I know what those crying people at the Obama speeches are crying about, because sometimes, I cry too, for the same reason I cried a little in my seat at the end of Avenue Q when people and muppets of my own generation tried to reassure me that just like the good things in life, everything disappointing or scary in life, including George Bush, is also only "For Now."

We cry because we're not like the leading-edge Boomers who rushed to embrace Reagan's similar promises that the stagflation and rampant crime and racial rioting of the 1970s were not an inevitable slide into oblivion for America. (Little-known fact: ex-hippies gave Reagan his single largest generational majority.) Boomers are idealists. Boomers want nothing more dearly than to be told that all that's necessary to change the world is to find the right ideas and cling to them no matter how much evidence piles up. (And don't think for a second that the next generation after you doesn't blame you for that sickness of the mind.) So when Reagan appealed to your idealism, when he begged for you to hope and to believe again, it wasn't terrifying to you, it was affirming. You could reassure yourself that it wasn't your idealist mindset that was the problem, only that you'd been trumpeting the wrong ideals. But when Obama offers us hope, offers it to those of us who lived through the wreckage of the "consciousness revolution" and then the "Moral Majority" and the "Campus Crusades," and then Reaganomics' union-busting and deliberately engineered high unemployment that exactly coincided with our generation's graduation from college? And when Obama makes us, by the sheer force of his own belief he makes us want to believe in the same "promise of America" that he believes in, the same American Dream? Damn right we cry. We cry, "You, you, you motherfrakker. You had better not be lying to us. You had better not make a wise old bitter cynic like me believe when I know better. If you're going to tell me that everything I've felt and everything I've believed my entire life was a lie and make me believe it, you had better the hell be the one of us that's right." Asking us to dare to hope that George Bush hasn't wrecked America permanently, it hurts.

But that's not a cult. That's a national transformation. Don't fear it as a cult. Although, if you are a Baby Boomer conservative, especially if you're a fundamentalist Republican or a conservative "Democrat for the Leisure Class"? You can fear it as maybe the end of your day. Because with the Millennial Generation's hope and sunny optimism and generational bent towards teamwork, and our generation's savvy rules-lawyering and our wary eyes watching out for them, and a few Boomers who've found something new to believe in watching over them? We're going to try our damnedest to bring an end to the nastiness, the American-on-American hatred that has been your generation's legacy for the last almost 50 years. And with a man who loves America and who believes in America and who truly loves the American people as our standard bearer? That's not a cult. That's change, baby, change you better believe in. Because it's going to happen, whether you believe it now, or not. Not believing that the American people are going to fall in love with Obama isn't going to do you any more good than not believing the American people could be stupid enough to fall for Ronald Reagan did me back in 1980, so you might as well start getting used to it now.