There’s truth in these four-year-old assessments, to be sure. Obama is extraordinarily charismatic, and his message of hope and change, whatever else you might want to say about it, resonates—and not just among young people—in an era of acute frustration with and mistrust of government. As John Zogby argued in the Huffington Post, “the threads of Obama’s appeal and inspiration, woven together, spring from a powerful philosophy of change that has resonated across generational lines.” Even Leon Wieseltier, by no means an Obamaniac, admits, “Obama’s popularity is owed in no small measure to the charisma of his confidence in himself. He has a redeemer’s gait, and enters a hall like he has come to save it.”

But de-facto deism comes at a cost. Idealization leads, almost inevitably, to disappointment. That rather obvious point takes an even sharper cast given that politics, and primary politics in particular, are almost wholly about Expectation: crafting it, calibrating it, managing it. Expectation is a double-edged sword, and Obama has felt both sides. He has benefited from the press’s general (though by no means total) admiration of him, and yet, in that awkward arena where the audacity of Hope meets the even greater audacity of Political Reality, Obama has fallen victim to the fact that, at the end of the day, he’s just a politician. A politician who, after he’s done thrilling the legs of his legions with the lofty lines of his rhetoric, goes back to a hotel room to pore over delegate tallies and plan how, the next day, he’ll pander to polling numbers.

His is the classic story of the ideal confronting the reality—and to the extent that he is the one as much as he is the other, Obama has been a victim of his own good press. (See “Hampshire, New,” and the melodrama with which the press treated Obama’s loss there. Indeed, you could almost see the Greek masks of tragedy hovering over the faces of TV pundits as they analyzed The Setback.) For all that his insurgent campaign has accomplished—for all that is remarkable about its achievements—it has fallen short of the expectations the press have cast for it. (See “Carolina, South,” et al, for which the general assessment of Obama’s victories has been some derivation of: “he won…but we already knew he would.”) In the calculus between Expectation and Enthusiasm, the latter can only exist when the former is, somehow, confounded. There are few things duller than met expectations.

Which brings us back to February 12, 2008. Tuesday marked a turning point: the pundits were finally willing, it seems, to legitimize Obama with that most precious of political commodities: Momentum. “You have to have a dynamic analysis,” said CNN political analyst Bill Schneider. “It can’t be static. And the reason why this works is that most Democrats like both Obama and Clinton. And if he’s starting to win, they can easily shift from one side to the other. And in this case, all the shifting is from Clinton to Obama.”

And here’s Gloria Borger, another CNN analyst:

I think, this whole question of momentum, we’ve been wondering about it during this whole campaign: when does it kick in? Well, now we’re in the home stretch, we’ve got sequential primaries and caucuses, one right after the other, and I think anyone who continues to win, for an entire month, you could say, has got to have some kind of momentum going.

You can almost hear the reluctance in her voice. For all the loose-lipping that has come to characterize punditry, Momentum is still, somehow, sacred. But Obama, it seems, finally confounded enough of the expectations imposed on him that he has won the battle for Momentum. (For now, at least.) That great instigator and indicator of victory in the race toward Inevitability seems now to be on Obama’s side. If you believe the pundits.

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