Obama and the Golden Fleece: Mo Dowd Gets it Wrong.

Jason bringing Pelias the Golden Fleece, Apulian red-figure calyx krater, ca. 340 BC–330 BC, Louvre

Mo Dowd conflates the legends of Jason and Oedipus in a stunningly bad bit of writing.

The Illinois senator doesn't pay attention to the mythic nature of campaigns, but if he did, he would recognize the narrative of the classic hero myth: The young hero ventures out on an adventure to seek a golden fleece or an Oval Office; he has to kill monsters and face hurdles before he returns home, knocks off his father and assumes the throne.

If I were Maureen Dowd, I'd avoid any reference to Jason and the Golden Fleece. To those who know the legend, Jason's mighty deeds were mostly the doing of Medea, the sorceress who loved him. When Jason returned to Corinth, he arranged to enter into a political marriage with the daughter of the king of Corinth.

Medea angrily confronts Jason with her long history of working on his behalf. Jason cruelly tells Medea she only loved him because Aphrodite had cast a spell upon Medea. In a fury, Medea kills her children by Jason and his bride-to-be, then rides away on a dragon chariot.

Jason loses favor with the gods and the people of Corinth. He wanders alone for some years. Returning to the rotten hulk of the Argo, he falls asleep in its shadow. The ship's stern falls on him, crushing him to death.

The gods closely observe those who climb to the top of the pile on the backs of others. While Rev. Wright was a mover and shaker, lending cred to Obama's political ambitions, Obama was proud to have it known. Obama needed the authenticity only a Rev. Wright could provide, for Obama was not exactly a product of the American Black Experience, whatever that may mean in these confusing times where suburban white kids shave their eyebrows to match the thugly couture of Solja Boy.

Obama is a chameleon, and that is no disparaging comment. A politician must adapt to his constituency. When it suited his purposes to assume a Black Demeanor, lo, was he not a member of Rev. Wright's congregation? When Whiteness was called for, Obama could produce his mother's side of the family. And to lend additional credence to his pastiche of pseudo-authenticity, like a movie costumer picking out a few stitches in a uniform to produce the effect of much wearing, Obama would do so to the point of saying his saintly white grandmother secretly harbored old racist thoughts. He was and remains an amorphous, billowing cumulus cloud of Jungian archetypes: all may project their hopes and dreams upon him.

Perhaps, like Medea, Obama's followers are fated to love this man. Throughout Greek tragedies of this sort, we expect the politically grasping Jasons of our world to right all the wrongs with the aid of gods and heroes. It never quite works out that way: the gods and men who love the Jasons and Obamas have their own ends in mind. When all is said and done, we forget these people are mere men, fallible, greedy, selfish and grasping for power. Love deludes men and gods alike, and these stories never end well.

In most cases, it's the unlikely, stammering Claudius-es and Lincolns and Trumans, the meek who survive the political intrigues: they serve us best. Lincoln was wildly unpopular among the great and powerful: even his own cabinet called him The Great Baboon. Claudius was supposed to be the creature of his Praetorian Guards. Lincoln was a compromise candidate, very much a dark horse. Truman timidly emerges from the shadow of Roosevelt to shoulder the burdens of dropping two nuclear bombs on Japan and a terrible war in Korea. The meek will inherit the earth, but not before the earth has been torn to pieces by the proud.

The shape-shifting sorceress of race politics has served Barack Obama faithfully and well until now. Obama held out the glamorous promises of redemption and hope, a transcending step forward into a world where race and creed would become hateful archaisms. Yet he clung to Rev, Wright until the last drop of usefulness had been wrung from him, made excuses for him, again playing all sides against each other until at last Wright's contempt became too obvious for even Obama to tolerate.

I will say this, knowing it is sure to arouse much nay-saying: Barack Obama has played with fire, taking credit for triumphs others won for him. Obama is a political tabula rasa who marched in lock step with the contemptible do-nothing Democrats now in power. Proof of this statement is the statistical tie between all three major candidates: nothing of substance separates them. Any differences exist only in our minds. None of them have distinguished themselves, rising to any great moral challenge. All three issue mushy feel-good statements, discreetly avoiding references to the pernicious assaults on our rights, the bloated power of the Executive, (powers they seek), the gargantuan failure to effectively counter manifest threats to democracy and the right of man.

All three candidates are beholden to sorcerers who alternately charm and terrify us with bogus non-issues. Like Jason abandoning the sorceress Medea in favor of a politically convenient marriage, Obama now faces an unlikely enemy in the form of his own pastor, a man who will not be silenced. Rev. Wright, like Medea, is perfectly willing to sacrifice her children to be revenged. We have not yet heard the last word from this vengeful bigot, and he may yet drag down his onetime protégé.

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