This past September, I pondered if Michelle Obama was the next Teresa Heinz, whose soundbites would cause much damage control for her husband's presidential campaign. To her credit though, Teresa never said, "we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation."

As Ed Morrissey writes:

But it's the notion that only Barack Obama can save our souls that is the most offensive part of the speech, by far. Government doesn't exist to save souls; it exists to ensure domestic tranquility and provide for the common defense. If I feel my soul needs saving, the very last place I'd look (in the US) for a savior would be Washington DC or Capitol Hill. I'll trust God and Jesus Christ with my soul, and I'm not going to mistake Barack Obama for either one.

This, though, is the religion of statism distilled to its essence. Only a government can rescue people from the consequences of their own decisions. Only government programs can provide for your every need, and only government can use your money wisely enough to ensure that your needs get covered. Individuals cannot possibly manage to help their neighbors through their churches or community organizations, let alone encourage people to do for themselves.

And all you need to enter the statist Utopia is to sell your soul. So that it can be fixed.

We know what at least one Obama supporter imagines that statist Utopia looks like. And that at least is not an eschaton I'd like to see immanentized.

Update: Mark Steyn looks at an even creepier side-pocket element of Obama worship.

More: As Orrin Judd writes, "When You Start To Scare Even Mother Jones", you know you may have problems.

Jonathan Stein writes on the Mother Jones blog:

This is our moment to do what? To march? To organize? No. To vote for Obama. As if simply by voting for one man, we make a mark upon this country as indelibly as those who fought the Nazis or sat at lunch counters.

But the easiness of Obama's movement isn't what bothers me most. I am profoundly troubled that any candidate would chart the course of American history as follows (and I'm rearranging Obama's history here to make it more chronological):

American Revolutionaries -> Manifest Destiny -> Slaves/Abolitionists -> Suffragettes -> the Labor Movement -> the Greatest Generation -> the Civil Rights Movement -> Himself.

But isn't that the logical outcome of a solipsistic generation that believes that playing the right music, or going on "a rolling hunger strike", or changing a light bulb is all that's necessary to change the world?