music, the portentous narrator continues, And he has anointed himself ready to carry the burdens of the world. After the narrator quotes "Barack" an intertitle asks Have you seen the light? And we see Obama at a campaign rally saying, creepily, "A light will shine down, from somewhere, it will light upon you, 
you will experience an epiphany, and you will say to yourself, I have to vote for Barack." The ad goes on to show Charlton Heston as Moses parting the Red Sea, with Obama's a-little-too presidential campaign logo emerging from it, and ends, He may be The One, but is he ready to lead? (Watch it if you haven't recently eaten.)It's beyond icky. A few critics (like Bob Herbert in the brilliantly titled "Running while black") see the race card played in the "Celeb" ad mixing choice images from Obama in Berlin with images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, another masterpiece of misinformation ingeniously coopting and twisting Obama campaign images and sounds. But do they see what card is being played in the "Praise the One" ad? Secular naifs will think it's a witty (and even envious) response to idolatrous Obamaniacs, a gesture toward "The Matrix." No, the One has a name with 6 + 6 + 6 letters, and he's not just an overweeningly ambitious man headed for a fall, he's the false messiah who convinces the world he is the true one. Read the lines from it I just quoted, if the Biblical resonances didn't jump out at you the first time. "Anointed"? "Burdens of the world"? And why doesn't he admit where the light behind his mind-control is coming from - it's not coming from God, clearly.
I would be tempting just to laugh at these ads, acts of desperation of a campaign in its last throes. But they are incredibly well-made, and insidious as hell. They're not about what they seem to be about. They work at the level of images and individual words and phrases. And they will play in Peoria. I've been checking the internet periodically on "Obama + Antichrist" since last Fall, when a few of us in "Cultures of the religious right" were reminded of Obama by the description of Nicolae Carpathia, the Antichrist in the Left Behind novels (who exercises mind control in words like Obama's in the epiphany clip); he's also evoked by the opening line of the other ad, "He's the biggest celebrity in the world" (Carpathia is anointed "Sexiest Man Alive" by People Magazine in a special issue the same time the UN makes him its Secretary General.) Even without Carpathia as intermediary, the connection's been made by people who are actually looking out for Antichrist, too. Is this the McCain camp's way to get to the tens of millions of evangelical readers of Left Behind, the scores of millions who anticipate an end of days like that described in Revelations?
At first I was disgusted by the attack ads coming from McCain (and these all end with McCain's voice saying "I approved this ad"), but I'm starting to get worried. How naive of us liberals to think the Rove people just disappeared, had lost their edge, and their unscrupulosity. They're not going down without a fight, and they fight dirty. It makes me sick worried.
