Obama: What Really Grates Is His Cockiness
Because he’s loose on the stump,
self-deprecating yet cocky,
Obama gets away with appropriating
the language of his own deification
He mocks it, but at the same time reinforces it
It’s hard to be humble when
your overflow room is overflowing
The Cocky Messiah [Slate]
There was a moment during Barack Obama’s rally at Nashua North High School on Saturday when I thought, Wow, Iowa has gone to his head.
Inside the gym, packed to capacity with 2600 people, Obama was describing to the crowd how his speeches generally work:
“At the end—or maybe somewhere in the middle—a shaft of light comes through and hits you and you experience an epiphany: I have to vote for Barack.”
Obama has attracted Jesus comparisons since announcing his candidacy. He’s been described as the party’s savior. A Chicago art gallery displayed a sculpture depicting Obama crowned with a neon halo.
Slate’s Timothy Noah kept tabs on these and other revelations in the "Obama Messiah Watch."
But now, with Iowa as his witness, Obama is he starting to sound like he believes the prophecies, too. The “epiphany” line was a joke—but he also kind of meant it.
Because he’s loose on the stump, self-deprecating yet cocky, Obama gets away with appropriating the language of his own deification. He mocks it, but at the same time reinforces it. It’s hard to be humble when your overflow room is overflowing.
There were other moments of self-puffery. At one point, he introduced a volunteer as the chair of “Obamans for—” He caught himself. “Nashuans for Obama.”
However innocently, Obama had just bestowed himself with fame’s highest honor: his very own adjectival form.
Obama’s speaking style, with its preacherly repetitions and rhythms, is nothing new. But the content of his speech—if you stop and actually listen to it—is aggressively vapid.
“This change thing is catching on,” he told people. He’s running, as he always says, because of “what Dr. King called the 'fierce urgency of now'.”
Here’s the closest he came to defining “hope”: It’s “imagining, then working for, then righting for what didn’t seem possible before.”
In other ways, Obama doesn’t act messianic—just cocky. He laughs at his own jokes, a staccato “heh” that sounds naked when spoken into a mic in a large auditorium.
He strays from the script as other candidates never would. A quip about “my cousin Dick Cheney” turns into a tangent about how, “When they do these genealogical surveys, you hope they say you’re related to somebody cool. Abraham Lincoln or Willie Mays or something. But Dick Cheney: That’s a letdown.”
But the driving message of his speech was, See what Iowa did? You can do it, too. By the end, the crowd was erupting, signs were waving, and if you looked real close, you could see the ceiling windows emitting a thousand little golden shafts of light.
Obama: Why Are Pundits So Easily Deluded? [HNN]
Every now and then in American politics, normally balanced people get swept up by delusions of greatness about a presidential candidate, based on an emotional attachment to the candidate's oratory or image.
Political journalists have never been immune to the delusional style. But editorialists and pundits are supposed to be skeptical experts, who at least try to appear as if they base their perceptions in facts and reality.
Enthusiasm for a candidate because of his or her "intuitive sense of the world," "intuitive understanding," and discovery of "identity"--the favored terms in some recent press endorsements of Barack Obama--is presented as the product of such discerning, well-considered thinking.
But it is in fact nothing more than enthusiasm, based on feelings and projections that are unattached to verifiable rational explanation or the public record.
In recent years, pundits from across the political spectrum--and not just in politics--have denigrated informed and reasoned decision-making in favor of hunches, snap judgments, instincts, and what the upscale middlebrow's favorite trendspotter, Malcolm Gladwell, defends as "instant intuition."
The political pundits have praised candidates based on their projections about the candidates' characters, personalities, and inner lives--and what they imagine about the candidates' instincts.
Possessed by a will to believe in somebody, the pundits intuit intuition. It is the delusional style in American punditry.
The style was particularly prominent during George W. Bush's rise to the presidency.
Although Bush had a thin record on domestic matters as governor of Texas, no record whatsoever on foreign policy, and things to hide about his past, none of it mattered.
As president, he has asked the American people to trust him because of his faith in himself and his God-given instincts--what he calls his "gut."
For years, the Washington press corps was bowled over by such self-assurance. Having decided that the wonkish, reasonable Al Gore was boring and inauthentic, reporters covered Bush as a centered man with superb intuition.
Bush has governed in much the same way, with harrowing results. Shortly after the invasion of Baghdad in 2003, Senator Joe Biden raised serious questions at a meeting in the Oval Office.
Bush serenely pushed aside Biden's concerns about rising sectarian violence, the disbanding of the Iraqi army, and the growing problems of winning the peace. "Mr. President," Biden finally said, "How can you be so sure when you know you don't know the facts?"
Bush stood up and placed his hand on the senator's shoulder. "My instincts," he said meaningfully. "My instincts."
Biden, who had never been mesmerized by Bush's manufactured mystique, was incredulous. "Mr. President," he said, "Your instincts aren't good enough."
Yet today, after seven disastrous years of the Bush experience, otherwise rational editorialists and commentators are insisting that instincts basically are good enough--and are actually more important than what they consider prosaic credentials such as knowledge, experience, and sound policy proposals.
The pundits have vaunted good vibes and gut-thinking as the crucial qualifications for the nation's highest office. They have turned the delusional style into a rallying cry--in support, at least for the moment, of the candidacy of Barack Obama and his allegedly superior intuition.
The Boston Globe, in an ideal specimen of the delusional style, ran an editorial that endorsed Obama because he is biracial and grew up in "multi-ethnic cultures"--adequate substitutes, by the editorial's lights, for serious background and expertise in foreign affairs.
Obama, according to the Globe, has engaged in "a search for identity" and taken "a roots pilgrimage to Kenya," all of which supposedly displays a "level of introspection, honesty, and maturity" that the newspaper longs for in a president.
"Obama's story is America's story," the Globe intoned--a sentence that comes as close as any distinguished newspaper ever has to perfect emptiness.