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Michelle Obama's Reuters Halo!The Obama Messiah Watch, Part 9.

By Timothy Noah
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2008, at 5:50 PM ET

Is Barack Obama the Nazarene? To answer this question, Slate has periodically gathered gratuitously adoring biographical details from newspaper, television, and magazine profiles of the U.S. senator from Illinois, best-selling author, Harvard Law Review president, Men's Vogue cover model, two-time Grammy winner, efficient note-taker, physics wunderkind, descendent of George Washington's great-great-great-great-great grandfather, teenage jazz enthusiast, possible telepathic communicator with space aliens from distant galaxies, improvement on all civil rights gains since 1957, calmer of turbulent Iownas, and front-running candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

In the Feb. 13 Financial Times, Edward Luce suggests that the candidate's Sancha Panza of a wife, Michelle Obama, keeps her man from developing a Messiah complex, and scolds this column for not recognizing that. Actually, I never suggested Obama had a Messiah complex (though others have). I merely suggested that a few excitable souls in the media bear the apparant conviction that Obama is the Redeemer. To this growing list we must now add the Reuters photographer who snapped this Annunciation-style picture of … Michelle Obama!

Obama Messiah Watch archive:

Jan. 29, 2007: Took very few notes in class!
Feb. 5, 2007: Mastered laws governing universe!
Feb. 7, 2007: Shares ancestor with George Washington!
Feb. 9, 2007: Dug jazz when he was still a middle-schooler!
Feb. 13, 2007: Communicates (possibly) with space aliens!
Feb. 14, 2007: Better than civil rights!
April 4, 2007: Accept no substitutes.
Sept. 12, 2007: Calms turbulent Iowans!

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
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