What's with this Obama Character?

Is there not something kind of fishy about the meteoric rise of Barak Obama? Just a few years ago he was a state senator in Illinois whom no one had ever heard of. I see one of two possibilites here, the second being most likely:

1) He is a fulfillment of the "end of days" prophecy that sees the return of both true and false messiahs, the false being deployed by Beelzebub to deceive the faithful. Obama is a false messiah/false prophet, on earth to do the work of the devil, and his rise is a harbinger of the final confrontation between good and evil.

Whew. Ya, I don't know about that one, but amazingly, there is a great deal of internet sentiment out there to this effect. Much is probably meant as slander, but it would appear that some is completely sincere. Perhaps people apparently take politics a little too seriously...

2) Obama's rise has been facilitated by powerful, monied interests for their own cynical, heretofore opaque purposes. It may be that those who desire another Republican administration have pushed him to win the the Democratic nomination because they believe he would be the easiest democrat to beat.

2a) A modified version of theory 2), though it seems unlikely to me, is that the interests backing Hillary have engineered Obama's popularity to peak early enough in the campaign season so as to be impossible to sustain, thus giving Hillary the long-run advantage.

I don't know enough about how elections work to know if it is possible for powers-that-be to exert such control over voting that such a ploy could be effective. Nevertheless, the level of election manipulation is widely underestimated in this country. It is kept secret because if the world knew that the largest democracy was so cynically controlled from above, the U.S. would lose its moral authority to demand "democracy" around the globe, in the strong-armed way that we do. The nation did however get a brief taste of just how few people can control an election outcome seven years ago, with the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision! Indeed.

If theory 2) proves correct and Obama's uber-appeal is an engineered sham, then once primary season is over, Republican interests will bring out the big guns and start tearing into Obama's seemingly unblemished record. With enough propaganda, I believe the Republican side will succeed in turning non-black Christian voters solidly against Obama. The level of demonization and negative advertising will reach record levels. Money will pour in to defeat him. We will begin hearing the nasty puns on his name (B-iraq Osama", etc.), and ethnic and religious aspects of Obama will emerge as a major weakness to be exploited among the white working-class and evangelical segments of the electorate. Barak Obama's Teflon-invincibility will be rapidly broached. I suspect when this happens, the black community will line-up behind Obama to an extent, and with a fraternal familiarity, that they so far have not. His great crossover appeal will also become a thing of the past.

I believe the red state/blue state divide is a crass simplification, but it does ring true in that the trend in this country is toward political polarization along ethnic and religious lines. If Obama emerges as the Democratic nominee, whatever the reasons behind his win, the resulting general election campaign will be the most divisive in U.S. history, and may well serve as a catalyst for further civil fracturing of a nation; a harbinger of future ethnic and ideological strife.