I’ve been telling you, dear readers, that Obama is a zero to whom people apply whatever they wish to believe about him:
How’s Barack Obama’s narrative going?
Journalists used to tell stories, now they plumb narratives. Narrative is a pretentious borrowing from the abstraction-clotted world of academic criticism, where texts are interrogated, authors are dead and high-toned fatuousness is king. I’ll see your postmodern and raise you a meta.
Mr. Obama’s campaign, however, has renewed narrative’s trendy fizz. It is the very Perrier water (or is it San Pellegrino now?) of the better campaign reportage. Take no hike up Pundit Mountain without it. From the moment, the Obama surge took forceful shape, everyone – reporters, the scholars of blogland, the partisan howler monkeys of cable-news cage matches – has chattered on about Mr. Obama’s narrative.
Trouble is, most of the story of the campaign isn’t so much coming from the candidate himself as it is created by all those who, most in worshipful terms, have talked, written and reported on or about him. The Obama campaign is one great text generator, the grand fable of his fans.
In one sense, this is not surprising. He has a quicksilver quality. Even after two autobiographies, Mr. Obama remains something of a floating, uncrowded presence. His story (and he is so impressively self-aware as to have made the most acute comment on it) is temptingly open-ended, very much a page to be written on. He himself has written, most memorably: “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”
There is very little to Barack Obama – he’s glided through life without making much of an impact. One of the recent Obama ads I’ve seen (and we here in Nevada are bombarded with McCain and Obama ads – the perils of being in a Battleground State!) has Obama ernestly telling viewers that he wants to change and that change has to be more than just a slogan…as if Obama’s campaign has ever been anything other than a slogan. He offers nothing specific in the ad – though he does say he hopes people will read his plan…and, naturally, when you do go and read his plan you find it thin on details, but that isn’t the point…the sort of people who will be impressed by Obama are people not at all curious about what is really going on, but are very much interested in projecting on to Obama’s blank slate whatever they feel is best.
As I’ve pointed out before, Obama is the “Un-Named Democrat” – the stealth candidate who can be all things to all men without being anything concrete to anyone. You want someone who will heal racial divisions? Obama. Re-unite the people of the United States? Obama. End the campaign in Iraq? Obama. Reverse global warming? Obama. Make foreigners love us? Obama. If there’s something about the past 8 years which has gotten on your nerves, Obama is the guy to fix it…not that he’s told you how he’ll fix it, but by speaking in grand themes and having nothing solid you can point to and either agree or disagree with it. That Obama has given zero indication that he can so much as change a light bulb without assistance is neither here nor there – for the Obamaniacs, he’ll get the lightbulb screwed in just by being there.
Another thing I’ve said is that if Obama can keep his fairy tale out front, then he can win – only if he makes people believe he is Prince Charming come to rescue us does he have a shot at this…unfortunately for Obama, a lot of people have got a good, long look at him and found him lacking. Pity none of his boosters can see this. We’ll have to see how it all comes out, but if Obama loses the hope will be that the Democrats will conduct a purge and get rid of the kooks who have taken Democrats for a ride.
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