From Joan Didion:

Yet. The expectations got fueled. The spirit of a cargo cult was loose in the land. I heard it said breathlessly on one channel that the United States, on the basis of having carried off this presidential election, now had “the congratulations of all the nations.” “They want to be with us,” another commentator said. Imagining in 2008 that all the world’s people wanted to be with us did not seem entirely different in kind from imagining in 2003 that we would be greeted with flowers when we invaded Iraq, but in the irony-free zone that the nation had chosen to become, this was not the preferred way of looking at it.

There was a recent Times article about this quote.  There is actually a lot here, so I don’t want to try to talk about all of it, but this will have to suffice for now: Didion is right that some people are way too excited about Obama as a transformational figure.  But I’m not sure that a. this is anything new (see Weber’s stuff on charisma) and that b. anyone (including Obama) who’s in a position of power is as taken by this as were folks who were taken by Bush’s democracy.  One is blind belief in a person who is not blindly confident in himself; the other (Bush) was a very, very different (and much more frightening) matter.