Obama winning praise from media pundits left and right

Washington: Barack Obama, now the media's odds-on favourite to win the White House, is drawing effusive praise from the chattering classes.

"You'd have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by this. ... This is a huge moment," one commentator wrote.

An unreconstructed liberal? An African American hungering for a racial breakthrough? No, it was David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist, and he's got plenty of company on the right.

The media overall are being swept up by a wave of Obamamania, in which normally hard-bitten journalists watch the orator in action and come away dazzled by his gifts. A New York Times piece on Saturday compared the Illinois senator to JFK and Martin Luther King in the same paragraph. A Newsweek cover story out on Monday gushed that Obama, "tall and handsome and blessed with a weighty baritone, knows how to bring along a crowd while seeming to stay slightly above it". The journalistic scrutiny usually visited on instant front-runners has been replaced by something akin to a standing ovation.

What's more, the applause extends even to pundits on the right, many of whom routinely denigrate Democratic politicians and yet are strikingly warm toward Obama.

"Who's not proud of this kid?" says Amanda Carpenter, national political reporter for the conservative site Townhall.com. "He has a story people feel good about."

In the wake of Obama's remarks about unity on the night of his Iowa caucus victory on Thursday, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman and self-described conservative, called it "one of the most remarkable speeches I've ever seen".

Bill Bennett, the conservative author, said on CNN that it was a "remarkable breakthrough" for "Barack Hussain Obama, a black man," to win in a "rural, white farming state".

The Weekly Standard called Obama "the classiest candidate on the Democratic side".