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When I hear about how Sen. Barack Obama is going to "re-brand" America's image in the Middle East, I realize how naive, well-meaning, amateurish, Obama really is.

He seems convinced that everyone understands the goodness of U.S. intentions - that worries me again these days.

That's because a curious and dangerous consensus seems to be forming among the chattering classes, on both the left and the right.

That what the US needs in these troubling times is not knowledge and experience but a "fresh face" with an "intuitive sense of the world," and that the mere act of electing Obama will put us on the path to winning the so-called war on terror.

"Change" As a Marketing Tool

I understand that people wept while listening to Barack Obama's speech following his caucus victory in Iowa. I think he is a fine speaker.

The main theme of his campaign is the assertion that he will bring deep and significant change to American life and government. Indeed, he seems to say that he, himself, symbolizes that coming change.

The mainstream media droll over Obama. That's enough in itself to make one suspicious of him. The media, both liberal and conservative, have taken to rattling on about how well his election would "play" overseas where we Americans have come to be more than usually reviled.

They seem to be more interested in public relations than the expectation of revolution of some sort. They also don't seem to wonder what sort of president he would be. But, what else would you expect from most of them?

We have been listening to this "change" talk since the first Clinton campaign for president.

At that time the pop music of the 70s, was made into a clarion call for the realization of the supposed goals of the cultural revolution of the 60s.

Then there was much the same kind of talk in the election campaign that gave us GWB.

We were told that a revolutionary reversion to Christian morality and small town values would follow upon the election of George Bush.

What we got instead was the "K" Street Project and the Jacobin driven war for Westernization and security in the Middle East. Oh, yes. There was also Halliburton, etc.

Now we are called by this young man and his rivals to believe that he (they) will change the social and economic matrix in which we live.

Hope is a powerful aphrodisiac. America is falling for it again. Obama is another political hustler in a long line of snake-oil politicians. Why are Americans so gullible? Why are they so easily conned? Because they're still hoping for a savior?

I watched the beginning of Barack Obama’s victory speech and immediately dropped into deep cynicism.

Surrounded by supporters waving “CHANGE” signs, the Illinois senator went on for what felt like five minutes about how his success in the Iowa caucuses was a vote for “hope” and “change.”

Those are very nice sentiments, but without substance, they’re meaningless advertising slogans, the revolution of Chevrolet and the eternal youth of Mountain Dew.

At worst, Obama’s talk of “unity” and ending “division” is a naïve anodyne in a country ruled by a ruthless right-wing establishment.

At my most cynical, I suspect he’s running as a combination of John F. Kennedy and Tiger Woods, a charismatic, youthful signifier of idealism with just enough melanin so white people can feel good about not being racist.

The Obama Brand

The main issue in U.S. foreign policy that the next president will face is repairing our image in the world. But in foreign policy, unlike advertising, image is created through action, not branding.

Which is why one cannot help but sense a touch of shirking (not to mention a lack of short-term memory) in all this talk about "intuitive experience" and "re-branding images," particularly when it comes from those who began the "New American Century" as ardent supporters of Bush's wars and his self-advertised "gut" instincts.

It is as though, rather than accepting blame for the mess and taking responsibility for cleaning it up, they would prefer to slap a new coat of paint on the problem and declare it fixed.

It was "intuition" that made the mess in the first place. It will take more than intuition to clean it up. After all, we are not launching a new product. We are electing a president.

PCP: Pop Culture Politics

This country badly needs a decent president but Iowa voters went to their caucuses and selected instead two preachers, one ordained, the other self-anointed and both successful manipulators of cheap cliches purportedly leading us, in one case, to Christ and, in the other, to hope and change.

How Huckabee, a cruel purveyor of Christian heresies about women and gays, would bring us closer to the Lord is anyone's guess.

As for Obama, we noted some time back that "he's taken the easy way out and applied the marketing principles of Tony Robbins and Marianne Williamson to a political campaign.

Having gone through eight years of EST with Bill Clinton and almost that much of AA with George Bush, we should be burned out on psycho-therapeutics as opposed to physical reality but sadly many are taken in by Obama's covert message that if you trust in hope you don't have to worry about the details like pensions and health care."

Obama might turn out to be a decent president - he certainly would be better than Huckabee - but at the moment the evidence provides little support beyond factors that matter inordinately these days, such as that he is young, good-looking and half black.

This is the sort of thing music producers look for in boy bands. Choosing a president is supposed to involve some deeper concerns.

Besides, there is nothing about Obama that gives him a copyright on hope and, if you really want change, then logic would point you to John Edwards.

But our politics have been subsumed by the values of television and so we continue to look for an American Idol instead of an American President.

Watch Video: Barack Obama won the Democratic Iowa caucus with an inspirational message of hope and change. But US pundit Ken Silverstein says he doesn't hold out much hope that President Obama would be a change at all.

Obama: the Hype of Hope [Original]

by MAUREEN DOWD

The Hillary forces at the Plymouth Church caucus in Des Moines weren’t averse to bribes.

They were passing out See’s chocolates to Richardson supporters.

And they weren’t averse to threats. “My wife told me I’d have to join them or I’d be sleeping on the couch tonight,” said Ed Truslow, a compact 68-year-old manufacturing representative.

He was still wearing his Chris Dodd sticker when he lumbered over to his wife’s side. A Clinton organizer slapped a Hillary sticker over the offending Dodd sticker, and with a frantic cheeriness told him: “Hillary now, right? God bless!”

They weren’t averse to bending the rules. When they realized that they might not have enough people to get even one Hillary delegate, they sneaked out of their assigned room to Red-Rover their neighbors over, before they’d been officially counted themselves.

It was understandable that Hillary’s “Golden Girls” acolytes would freak out when they saw the throngs of young Obama hopemongers swarming the caucuses. As one Dodd supporter said, looking for her little Dodd corner, “I’m lost in the Obamas.”

A caucusgoer drily noted that it did not seem the most propitious harbinger for Hillary that the fateful evening began with a threat to withhold connubial bliss.

But that’s the way the tough cookie crumbled Thursday night. The Obama revolution arrived not on little cat feet in the Iowa snow but like a balmy promise, an effortlessly leaping lion hungry for something different, propelled by a visceral desire among Americans to feel American again.

The Bushes always self-consciously and swaggeringly put themselves “on the American side,” as Poppy used to say, implying that their rivals were somehow less American. But many Americans can no longer see themselves in the warped values of the Bush White House or the pathetic paralysis of Congress or the disapproving gaze of the world.

They want a different looking glass. So they rolled the dice and, as The Chicago Tribune’s Mike Tackett put it, “voted for a smile.”

I interviewed three Republicans in the Obama section of the caucus who were ready for the red state, blue state merger. They said they didn’t want Hill and Bill back in the White House, and that John McCain was too much of a yes man for W., who had betrayed Republicans with his handling of the Iraq war and his fiscal irresponsibility.

Hillary’s aides were grumbling last week that Obama had no rationale to offer but himself.

Perhaps that was true when he started. People usually run for president because somebody tells them they should and then graft on the reasons afterward.

But on Thursday, Obama’s vague optimism and smooth-jazz modernity came together in a spectacular fusion with the deep yearning of Democrats who have suffered through heartbreaking losses in the last two elections with uninspiring candidates.

Often unable to surf the electricity he sparked over the last year, Obama has now put on his laurel wreath and dropped his languid pose, tapping directly into what he calls the “fire burning” across the country — the dream of a cool, smart, elegant, reasonable, literary, witty, decent “West Wing” sort of president who won’t bankrupt us or endanger us or co-opt our rights or put a black hood on the Constitution.

“I want to go before the world and say, America’s back,” he told cheering Democrats in Milford, N.H., adding: “We are one nation. We are one people. And our time for change has come.”

Even though Obama was wooing the young demographic so coveted by Hollywood, he took a page from J.F.K. and avoided the casual look last week. There were no jeans or snow boots. Just dark suits, stylish ties and dress shoes.

By the time she got to New Hampshire, Hillary was reduced to urging voters not to buy into “false hopes.”

At a hangar in Nashua, with chatty Bill and chatless Chelsea, Hillary tried to purloin more of the Obama message. Besides saying the word “change” as often as possible, she said she was particularly reaching out to young people to help them “reclaim the future.”

She claimed that she disliked the red state, blue state terminology — “We are one country,” she said, echoing Obama — even as she added that she should be the nominee because she’s the best one “to withstand the Republican attack machine.”

What she doesn’t mention is that she knows how to fight off the Republican attack machine because she and her husband were so adept at revving it up.

Listening to Hillary and Obama evokes the famous scene in the classic “The Night of the Hunter,” when Robert Mitchum, whose fingers are tattooed with “LOVE” on his right hand and “HATE” on his left, has a wrestling match with his hands to see which emotion triumphs.

In the movie, love does, but it’s a close call.

tags: obama  savior  hustler  dowd  president  2008  

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