“‘In many ways, he’s sent from God,’ he joked in an interview, ‘because the world’s a mess.’

“But Sting is serious in his belief that Obama is the best leader to navigate the world’s problems. In an interview on Wednesday, the former Police frontman said that he spent some time with Obama and ‘found him to be very genuine, very present, clearly super-smart, and exactly what we need in the world.’…

“‘It’s aggressive and violent and full of fear,’ he said of the [conservative] backlash against Obama. ‘They don’t want change, they want things to feel the same because they feel safe there.'”

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“They came of age during the great abundance, circa 1980-2008 (or 1950-2008, take your pick), and they don’t have the habit of worry. They talk about their ‘concerns’—they’re big on that word. But they’re not really concerned. They think America is the goose that lays the golden egg. Why not? She laid it in their laps. She laid it in grandpa’s lap.

“They don’t feel anxious, because they never had anything to be anxious about. They grew up in an America surrounded by phrases—’strongest nation in the world,’ ‘indispensable nation,’ ‘unipolar power,’ ‘highest standard of living’—and are not bright enough, or serious enough, to imagine that they can damage that, hurt it, even fatally.

“We are governed at all levels by America’s luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they’re not optimists—they’re unimaginative. They don’t have faith, they’ve just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don’t mind it when people become disheartened. They don’t even notice.”