Oh, the nausea . . .

I try to avoid commenting on politics on this blog. There are more than enough bloggers doing that, and besides, I'm fairly centrist on many issues, so I tend to offend those on both extremes when I point out the follies that both sides perpetrate.

However, there are times when I can't restrain myself. A column by Mark Morford in SFGate has absolutely turned my stomach.

Barack Obama isn't really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway.

This is what I find myself offering up more and more in response to the whiners and the frowners and to those with broken or sadly dysfunctional karmic antennae - or no antennae at all - to all those who just don't understand and maybe even actively recoil against all this chatter about Obama's aura and feel and MLK/JFK-like vibe.

To them I say, all right, you want to know what it is? The appeal, the pull, the ethereal and magical thing that seems to enthrall millions of people from all over the world, that keeps opening up and firing into new channels of the culture normally completely unaffected by politics?

No, it's not merely his youthful vigor, or handsomeness, or even inspiring rhetoric. It is not fresh ideas or cool charisma or the fact that a black president will be historic and revolutionary in about a thousand different ways. It is something more. Even Bill Clinton, with all his effortless, winking charm, didn't have what Obama has, which is a sort of powerful luminosity, a unique high-vibration integrity.

Dismiss it all you like, but I've heard from far too many enormously smart, wise, spiritually attuned people who've been intuitively blown away by Obama's presence - not speeches, not policies, but sheer presence - to say it's just a clever marketing ploy, a slick gambit carefully orchestrated by hotshot campaign organizers who, once Obama gets into office, will suddenly turn from perky optimists to vile soul-sucking lobbyist whores, with Obama as their suddenly evil, cackling overlord.

Here's where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare. And this why he is so often compared to Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., to those leaders in our culture whose stirring vibrations still resonate throughout our short history.

Oh, dear Heavens above . . .

Senator Obama may be appealing to many people on many different grounds, but he's nothing more or less than yet another professional politician. His track record of accomplishment is threadbare, to say the least: and he's never been seriously challenged by anything or anybody. To go overboard and gush about him in this way is puerile.

I don't say that because I'm anti-Democrat, either. As I said earlier, I'm a centrist. There are some Democrats for whom I'd vote in a heartbeat, and some Republicans also. I'm not thrilled with either Obama or McCain as a candidate for the Presidency. I think both carry significant 'baggage', whether ideological, historical or personal. I wish we had a better selection . . . but we don't, so we'll have to make the best of the candidates we have.

Morford doesn't do his credibility any good by exposing his obvious partisanship, either.

I'm also certainly not saying he's perfect, that his presidency will be free of compromise, or slimy insiders, or great heaps of politics-as-usual. While Obama's certainly an entire universe away from George W. Bush in terms of quality, integrity, intelligence and overall inspirational energy, well, so is your dog. Hell, it isn't hard to stand far above and beyond the worst president in American history.

But there simply is no denying that extra kick. As one reader put it to me, in a way, it's not even about Obama, per se. There's a vast amount of positive energy swirling about that's been held back by the armies of BushCo darkness, and this energy has now found a conduit, a lightning rod, is now effortlessly self-organizing around Obama's candidacy. People and emotions and ideas of high and positive vibration are automatically drawn to him. It's exactly like how Bush was a magnet for the low vibrational energies of fear and war and oppression and aggression, but, you know, completely reversed. And different. And far, far better.

I don't approve of what President Bush has done during his presidency, and I agree that he's been a major disappointment to many of those who voted for him. However, anyone who believes that our politicians are spiritual conduits for the undefined, nebulous, unquantifiable 'energies' of the world, whether positive or negative, is in serious need of professional help.

Peter