Deliverance

Photo: Pete Souza/White House.

The visual allusion drawn by the White House, the President stumping the country for most of the week, is that Obama is having a glowing effect from the bully pulpit — emphasis on “pulpit.”

The shot currently leading off the WH slide show could easily be accused of playing the “Obamessiah” card. Black and white, young and old, these residents of St. Charles, Missouri are not only backlit by an almost heavenly light radiating toward the stage and adorning several of them with halos, but the good folk (except for the prayerful-looking woman, front left) gaze up in reverence, as if lined up in church pews, giving formal thanks, no less, to and for the President as he fights to bestow health (care reform) on them.

(Playing Obama as this transformational and awesome is one reason why the WH is inclined, more often than not, to frame it the other way.)

Before anyone accuses me of ripping on the White House, however, I should add I’m just as much in awe of O’s capacity to inspire — in those instances where, usually coming from behind, he finally gets out of his head and nails the popular rhetoric.