On the cusp of the Texas and Ohio elections, Barack Obama is dangerously close to becoming a bona fide charismatic leader. .... I mean a charismatic leader in the tradition of saints and martyrs, who owe their larger-than-life personas as much to the imagination of their followers as to their own capabilities............Consider the phenomenon of Amadou Bamba, who lived a hundred years ago in Senegal, West Africa. ........ Bamba's message took hold not just among his disciples, but across the country. Bamba's reputation swelled. He was a holy man, an agent of salvation sent only once every hundred years. (One can almost hear the echo: "The one the Democrats have been waiting for.").......a moderately ambitious man meets a public's moderate appetite for leadership, and the two suddenly become larger than either would have expected. They feed on each other, spinning a narrative of a great man at a fateful moment. At some point the balance tips, and the crowd begins creating the character, endowing him with such esteem he starts to walk on water. Voila the charismatic leader.....what the public wants in these times is not a chief but a vessel. If Obama can channel the public's enthusiasm into even half the civic engagement and self-governance Amadou Bamba's brotherhood displays, he will indeed have what the Senegalese call "charisma"--a word that just happens to be baraka.
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