[roni]

The cult of personality question is easy to answer.

The campaign's main and most important narrative, I think, is this:

Follow me and I will lead you out of Egypt, through the desert to the land of post-partisan bliss (the land of milk and honey).

Some (Joel Klein, for example- "There was something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism — 'We are the ones we've been waiting for' — of the Super Tuesday speech and the recent turn of the Obama campaign.") have written about it as a movement with messianic tendencies - and I did for awhile, but now I think the Moses story is a better analogy.