Thoughts from beyond the grave of H.L. Mencken on Obama:

The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

(Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.L._Mencken

Update - 21 May 2009: I did some further reading up on this H.L. Mencken, and interestingly enough, he was something of a forerunner of today’s modern liberal secular-humanist elitist (and very likely a godless atheist) who had a bit of an affinity for the authoritarian model of Otto von Bismarck’s Prussia, or any of the other less than libertarian governments of Old Europe.

Not a bit at all unlike many of the far-left of the Democratic Party, whose somewhat ironic name betrays its true bent toward European style Democratic Socialism, where the central government and its many agencies have attempted - with much success - to supplant the Creator (His Name is Jesus) as the granter of rights and liberties, while very successfully relinquishing the electorate and the common citizen of his role as both guarantor and holder of those same liberties and rights.