I think it’s fair to say that the promised miracles for Glenn Beck’s Right Power Rally failed to materialize. There were no sightings of the Virgin Mary in tea leaves and no healing of lepers. [FLASH: Beck announced a “miracle” that occurred at the rally. Some birds flew overhead. Yep, that’s it. Sends chills down your spine, doesn’t it?] It was less a turning point for America than a veering off into ditch. But there were a couple of things that deserve notice:

First, Beck appeared on Fox News Sunday the day after his revival meeting and walked back his famous assertion that President Obama is a racist, telling Chris Wallace that…

“You see, it’s all about victims and victimhood; oppressors and the oppressed; reparations, not repentance; collectivism, not individual salvation. I don’t know what that is, other than it’s not Muslim, it’s not Christian. It’s a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it.”

Well, that clears that up. Obama isn’t really a racist, he just believes in oppression and is perverting the gospel. That’s much better. Thanks for the clarification.

Secondly, prior to Beckapalooza, he appeared with Bill O’Reilly to hype the event. In the course of their discussion O’Reilly bet Beck that there would not be more than 100,000 people at the rally. If there were, O’Reilly promised to give Beck his primetime spot on the Fox News schedule. Crowd estimates have varied widely from an expert’s analysis at CBS of 87,000, to Beck’s own guess of between 300,000 and 600,000. Since O’Reilly would never concede that CBS would get anything right, it leaves us with a figure that was certainly in excess of 100,000. So I’m wondering when O’Reilly will step down and let Beck move into his studio.

Finally, it should be noted that Beck’s sermon about how it is now time to “concentrate on the good” didn’t last even 24 hours. He was already bashing the President the next day on Fox News Sunday. So I wouldn’t get too excited about a new, positive Beck. In fact, I would expect his petulant tirades to continue into the foreseeable future