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

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!

E-mail Timothy Noah at .

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
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