A recent Barack Obama campaign email carried the tag line "We are the change we've been waiting for", drawn from a speech he made after the February 5th primary extravaganza. The line leaves me cold because my resistance to Obama arises in large part from his inflationary rhetoric, but it nagged at me for several days for reasons beyond that. I finally realized that it reminded me of Walt Kelly's famous "We have met the enemy and he is us" line from a Pogo strip on pollution; it's sort of the flip side.

Obama is at pains to simultaneously demythologize himself and cast himself as the harbinger of deep political and cultural change in this country. "I don't want to present myself as some sort of singular figure" is fundamentally at odds with "We are the change we've been waiting for"; there is no "we" in his movement without him. He's the walrus. Goo goo g'joob.