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Monger Me, Obama!The mood in Texas.

By Meghan O'Rourke
Posted Monday, March 3, 2008, at 5:37 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

It's a common critique of Obama that his followers have become messianic—that the candidacy is built on little more than the man's Lincoln-esque charisma and the soft hucksterism of "hope." While a cult of personality clearly has sprung up around the guy—and watching him perform, you can see why—the irony is that Obama's actual message is more demanding (if not more detail-oriented) than that of any other candidate I can remember. What makes people excited, it seemed to me at the San Antonio rally, was the invitation Obama issued to the crowd to participate in what was to come. He wasn't telling them what he and Washington would do for them, and he wasn't complaining; he just said, we want you to think, we want you to volunteer, we want you to vote. What made folks go wild was the way that Obama demands something of his audience by reminding them that this is a bottom-up rather than top-down enterprise.

The most recent polls in Texas suggest that Hillary is closing the gap Obama had widened over the past few weeks in taking the lead. Over the weekend, the polls showed a dead heat, with both candidates at 47 percent of the votes. One thing that may work against Obama in a state like Texas, with a strong military presence where security matters to many of the independent voters, who can vote in the Democratic primary on Tuesday, is that it's actually very hard to convey with short quotes the breadths of Obama's speeches. The effect depends almost entirely on the nature of the relationship he develops with his audience. It's a lot like being in church with a smart, educated minister gently reminding you that it's possible to lead a richer and more generous life. What TV sound bites don't quite capture is the careful way Obama splices the measured rhetoric of a Harvard Law grad with the oratorical energies of the black church. The campaign speech (in its current incarnation) is not a frenzy-whipping peroration. On the contrary, it's a challenge to listeners to step up to the plate and to put aside tired oppositions that have bogged the nation down. Sure, it's short on specifics. But the way he calmly deconstructs old binaries is impressive. And it jolts you into thinking that sometimes a rut is just a rut, not a road.

The morning of the San Antonio rally, Hillary released her now-infamous "Red Phone" ad, and Obama responded during his speech by stressing that it was judgment, not just experience, that matters. By now, he'd worked the crowd not to a frenzy but to a place of calm empowerment (there's really no other word for it), mostly by seeming to talk to them about the choices they were going to make about their own futures, rather than by merely telling them to choose him. "Some people call us hope-mongers," he began, about to explain why this was a false charge, when the young black man next to me shouted out "Monger me, Obama!" And there it was: the power Obama has to speak to those who need hope more than they trust experience.

For all these reasons, though, Obama is susceptible to the larger counternarratives being used against him—that he is a Muslim, a Communist, and (with more grounding) that he has little practice at policy-making. In the coffee shop in San Angelo—a city anchored by its Air Force base—where I've been working, a conversation broke out about whether Obama is a Muslim, and, if so, whether it matters. Last night, lightning flickered along the edges of eastern and central Texas, bringing with it thunder and hailstorms.

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Meghan O'Rourke is Slate's culture critic and an advisory editor, and she is the author of Halflife, a collection of poetry.
Photograph of Obama rally by Ben Sklar/Getty Images.
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