Obama as a drug.

The walking hallucinogen known as Barack Obama has been spreading atomized vapors of "hope" and "change" over the crowds swooning at his campaign rallies. Reportedly, he said in Lebanon, New Hampshire, on January 7, 2008, "A light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany ... and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Obama." After such a transcendent experience, will we ever find meaning in our lives again?

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The Obama-phied crowd craves the drugs of "hope" and "change" that he is peddling. However, the Obama campaign website makes it clear that "change" will not mean returning to a limited constitutional republic, but rather, it will mean growing government in every direction. And "hope" will not mean tax and spending relief for the poor and middle class, but huge new tax mandates.

The Svengali-in-chief is committed to policies embraced by every statist government in the 20th century. Nonetheless, his moonbat contingent remains entranced with his plans for state healthcare, state industrial armies, the state as parent, and the state as everything else. The cold light of the "morning after" would be a shock, should the real intent behind policies such as mandated visits by state nurses to homes of all pregnant women--insuring that the women will be fit mothers, and their homes fit homes, in the eyes of the state--become apparent.

Even the Democrat Party power brokers, who all lined up early with Hillary, seem taken aback with the Dr. Feelgood phenomenon. Some well-entrenched Hillary backers have even run over to the port side of the Democrat ship, where Obama will re-entrench them into new hack positions. That's how the game is played--politicians go with who has the power. Hillary's recent primary victories in Ohio, Texas, and Rhode Island (Obama won Vermont) may have interrupted the trend but were not sufficient to reverse it.

If Obama is elected, he will find that the cost of supplying the "hope" and "change" junkies will hit an iron reality that every tyrant faces: socialism does not work. The levers of power are actually operated by all those party hacks and cronies, and they are not much interested in perpetuating the illusion of "hope" and "change" once they are ensconced in their government positions. The government trains in Obama-nation won't run on time after this election, and the addicts won't get their promised drug. Despite demands that their pusher come up with the stuff, the chain of distribution will not work. No amount of chemical romance will transform gray, dreary apparatchiks into efficient agents of change.

Obama knows that most Americans worship a god other than the state, and don't need the state-god for inspiration, hope, or change. Thus, he has taken pains to assuage the religious-minded, those who "trust not in princes or the sons of men, in whom there is no salvation," as the Psalmist said. In a speech praised by the New York Times as "the most important pronouncement by a Democrat on faith and politics since John F. Kennedy's Houston speech in 1960," Barack delivered the rhetorical goods. But his words were bereft of an understanding of charity, real religious obligations, or even morality.

A believer in the god of government, Obama embraces abortion, high taxes, and policies that encourage family destruction and poverty, as religious duty. In his religion, tax cuts and government budget cuts constitute sin. He commended those who heed the "Biblical injunction to help the poor as a means of mobilizing Christians against budget cuts to social programs and growing inequality." To him, when the government steals a poor family's scant resources at gunpoint, to give to a different poor family, that is social justice.

The Times actually liked the speech, calling it "the first faith testimony I have heard from any politician that speaks honestly about the uncertainties of belief." Of course, the Times would like a speech about unbelief, and would never endorse one that spoke of true hope in God, or that rejected the god of government. The purpose behind Obama's speech--and the likely reason the Times applauded the piece--was to reassure the "class-conscious Social-Democrats, who are of course atheists," in V.I. Lenin's words, that Obama rejects religion except as a means to an end.

Obama's use of the quasi-religious imagery of "hope" and "change" is nothing more than a powerful, but short-lived "kind of spiritual intoxicant," as Lenin put it, so Obama can advocate statism while disguising it as religion. Should Obama become president, the fix will quickly wear off--and it will be government as usual, minus the hope, the change, and the good feelings.