Matt Bai makes a great "primary argument" today about how Obama's "glamour politics" are starting to turn some of his past followers into Hillary Clinton partisans, once they snap out of it! Obama, he says, has become "a chic cause."
After Super Tuesday, I was surprised to find that a friend of mine, a lifelong Democrat who had been pledging his allegiance to Barack Obama all year, had stepped into the voting booth and suddenly changed his mind. He voted, instead, for Hillary Clinton, and here’s why: he’d watched that video online —you know, the one starring celebrities like will.i.am, Scarlett Johansson and Herbie Hancock—and he thought it made Obama look Hollywood smug, as if supporting him were this year’s version of wearing an AIDS ribbon on your lapel. My friend didn’t want anything to do with the latest chic cause.
Obama, Bai says rightly,
symbolized the things he liked least about Democratic politics, starting with all those stars who think they know more about America than the people who live in it.
This, Bai says, is one of "the limits of his appeal."
Link: Trending Obama
For most the past year and two months, Obama, Bai says, was more interested in branding himself, and in pumping up and selling his own brand of himself, than in presenting plans for the country:
Obama talked so much about his candidacy in terms of a “movement” that he sometimes seemed more interested in organizing the country than in governing it.
Although he did give an economic address this week - which in an act of grand theft and lack of originality took all of its ideas straight from Hillary Clinton - it may be too little too late. Voters who may at this point be interested in the stolen specifics he is offering may be too repulsed by his glamour politics to care:
And yet, several times during the campaign, he has seemed to be on the verge of putting Mrs. Clinton away only to come up short in larger or industrialized states like California and New Jersey, undone by the kind of white voters (mainly those lower down the income scale) who instinctively recoil from what you might call glamour politics.
The Obama campaign has become a "glamorous social cause," which, bai argues, is one of the great laughable ironies of the primary election:
The morphing of the Obama campaign into this year’s glamorous social cause has created one of strangest ironies of the election. Mr. Obama sees himself as the harbinger of post-Boomer politics, the first of the next generation of less partisan problem-solvers. And yet, somehow, he has become, over these last several weeks, the Democrats’ nostalgia candidate.
Obama is a candidate of the past, not of the future; and his followers have filled him with their own nostalgia for a past that never was:
Those [followers] and celebrities who perennially long to reawaken the spirit of the ’60s, or who regret being too young to have lived through that turbulent period, seem to have adopted Mr. Obama as their connection to the past, whether he likes it or not.
To repeat, Obama is a nostaliga candidate who as turned his campaign into a glamourous social cause.
In contrast, Hillary Clinton has become, says Bai, the "the candidate of uncool, post-’60s pragmatism," she has become the bearer of "a strain of technocratic liberalism," which works. She is the roll-up-our-sleaves and let's get to work candidate who can and will deliever solutions to America's problems, instead of just disseminating music videos with celebrities in them to obfuscate the problems in glamourpuss chic.
If Obama were to become the nominee, Bai arguees, his chances against McCain were would severly limited by the very glamour politics he celebrates:
No matter which candidate ultimately lands the nomination, he or she will probably need to recalibrate—and quickly—to go up against a formidable opponent in John McCain. American voters have never been big on putting technocrats in the White House. But most of them, like my friend, probably won’t be looking to relive the Summer of Love, either.
As Tina Turner sang, "we don't need another hero."
The presidency is not a logo. And America is not a brand.
And to all the Obamacensors and Politburo-wannabes: nice try! go troll yourself.