The Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and The Washington Post all praised Obama’s handling of the grueling presidential campaign…

“The excitement of Obama’s early campaign was amplified by that newness,” wrote the Times, which hasn’t endorsed a presidential candidate since 1972. “But as the presidential race draws to its conclusion, it is Obama’s character and temperament that come to the fore. It is his steadiness. His maturity. These are qualities American leadership has sorely lacked for close to a decade.”

Obama’s current strength is not, as many believe, drawn directly from America’s current economic weakness. It has more to do with the market’s terrifying instability. Last Monday, Wall Street skyrocketed an historic 900 points; on Wednesday, it plunged an historic 800 points. The market is simply hysterical; all of its operating registers are pushed up to the operatic. This situation is impossible because it has no future in it—no distance, direction, horizon. The only type of time that exists in the present market is the pure present of panic or intoxication. And what the general will (or the public—or “phantom public”) more and more longs for is a situation that is constant and steady. It is this that Obama precisely symbolizes. What we saw in the three debates was a person who gradually (not suddenly, not unexpectedly, not erratically) improved and never lost his sense of direction. We saw in Obama how a natural or normal temporal course could be restored, by way of his political steadiness, to our future-bankrupt, present-imprisoned economy.