I thank everybody for the wonderful reader response to my little poll the other day. Accordingly, I announce that I will cast my vote in the Media Research Center contest, for worst quote of the year, for this astonishing piece of smoke-up-Obama’s rear end puffery:

1) “Can we just enjoy Obama for a moment? Before the policy choices have to be weighed and the hard decisions have to be made, can we just take a month or two to contemplate him the way we might contemplate a painting by Vermeer or a guitar lick by the early-seventies Rolling Stones or a Peyton Manning pass or any other astounding, ecstatic human achievement? Because twenty years from now, we’re going to look back on this time as a glorious idyll in American politics, with a confident, intelligent, fascinating president riding the surge of his prodigious talents from triumph to triumph…. ‘I am large, I contain multitudes,’ Walt Whitman wrote, and Obama lives that lyrical prophecy…. Barack Obama is developing into what Hegel called a ‘world-historical soul,’ an embodiment of the spirit of the times. He is what we hope we can be.” — Esquire’s Stephen Marche in a column for the magazine’s August 11 issue, “How Can We Not Love Obama? Because Like It or Not, He Is All of Us.”