Time Mag: Obama a 'Prince' Like Jesus Born of 'Imagination, History and Hope'

Change font size:  A |  A

Warning its readers to “be prepared to gag,” the “Scrapbook” page of this week's Weekly Standard magazine recited “some of the worst over-the-top reactions to The One's ascendance,” starting with Time's Nancy Gibbs who opened this week's cover story by comparing Obama with Jesus: “Some princes are born in palaces. Some are born in mangers. But a few are born in the imagination, out of scraps of history and hope...” In the November 17 issue, she heralded (citing his full name) the greater meaning of Obama's victory:

Barack Hussein Obama did not win because of the color of his skin. Nor did he win in spite of it. He won because at a very dangerous moment in the life of a still young country, more people than have ever spoken before came together to try to save it. And that was a victory all its own.

She gushed over how “an election in one of the world's oldest democracies looked like the kind they hold in brand-new ones, when citizens finally come out and dance, a purple-thumb day, a velvet revolution.”

Gibbs also trumpeted:

He let loose a deep blue wave that washed well past the coasts and the college towns, into the South through Virginia and Florida, the Mountain West with Colorado and New Mexico, into the Ohio Valley and the Midwestern battlegrounds: you could almost walk from Maine to Minnesota without getting your feet wet in a red state. After months of mapmaking all the roads to 270, Obama tore right past with ease. The victory poured down the ballot, bringing along a larger Democratic majority in both houses...

Online, the story is headlined “How Obama Rewrote the Book.” The actual November 17 edition of the magazine doesn't have that headline and instead just has an Obama quote by a big smiling photo of him from election night: “This Is Our Time.”

Her entire lead paragraph:

Some princes are born in palaces. Some are born in mangers. But a few are born in the imagination, out of scraps of history and hope. Barack Obama never talks about how people see him: I'm not the one making history, he said every chance he got. You are. Yet as he looked out Tuesday night through the bulletproof glass, in a park named for a Civil War general, he had to see the truth on people's faces. We are the ones we've been waiting for, he liked to say, but people were waiting for him, waiting for someone to finish what a King began.

Back in 2003, Gibbs asked Hillary Clinton: “Is the 'vast, right-wing conspiracy' bigger than you thought?” The June 9, 2003 MRC CyberAlert recounted:

An actual question from Time magazine's Nancy Gibbs to Hillary Clinton in an interview for this week's issue which accompanies the magazine's cover story excerpt of her new book: “Is the 'vast, right-wing conspiracy' bigger than you thought when you brought that term into our vocabulary?”

So much for any notion that maybe the VRWC doesn't exist or that Hillary might owe an apology to those she smeared with the charge when the Lewinsky story turned out to be true.

But that wasn't the only question from Gibbs which presumed conservatives were in the wrong. Gibbs wondered: “In the book you have a lot to say about forgiveness. Have you forgiven Ken Starr?”

And before asking about letting a President run for a third term and if she plans to make a presidential run, Gibbs queried: “Would you call Bush a radical?”

The second entry in the November 17 Weekly Standard's “The Courtier Chronicles” (registered users) came from former New York Times reporter E.J. Dionne Jr. in his Washington Post column the day after the election:

Yes, it is time to hope again.

Time to hope that the era of racial backlash and wedge politics is over. Time to imagine that the patriotism of dissenters will no longer be questioned and that the world will no longer be divided between 'values voters' and those with no moral compass. Time to expect that an ideological label will no longer be enough to disqualify a politician.

Above all, it is time to celebrate the country's wholehearted embrace of democracy, reflected in the intense engagement of Americans in this campaign and the outpouring to the polls all over the nation. For years, we have spoken of bringing free elections to the rest of the world even as we cynically mocked our own ways of conducting politics. Yesterday, we chose to practice what we have been preaching....