Barack Obama could be a poster child for the social prejudice lookism. He owes everything to his appearance – and to his diction, of course. He’s the proverbial smooth-talker. No one can name a single thing the man’s actually done or wants to do. Nothing. He’s clean, to borrow Sen. Joe Biden’s amazing campaign-killing epithet. A clean-cut clean slate. That’s Obama’s candidate profile in its entirety.
Of course the resume of his chief rival also contains only one essential hallmark: female. None of Hillary’s supporters can catalog much else, other than that she stoically endures a philandering husband, and thus knows the evil men can do, and once voted for Iraq, which they hold against her. She too has good hygiene, though nobody mentions it.
A country that would elect its leader based solely on looks, race or gender gets what it deserves, and no doubt we will. In our defense, however, we’ve tried everything else. Heredity sure doesn’t work. Having actual delineable ideas is political suicide, and, as we’ve seen with Republicans, largely irrelevant. Rudy Giuliani is a front-runner only because we’re so hungry for leadership we’ll ignore what he thinks, at least for the time being.
Unfortunately for Obama we’ve already tried inexperienced no-nothingism and found it wanting. His name was Jimmy Carter, and he was running for president. And he grew peanuts. Now he’s a candidate for worst president ever and a favorite nominee in the ex-presidents category as well.
Obama tried his best to channel the spirit of Abe Lincoln when he announced his candidacy in Springfield earlier this month, but if you’re going to pull that off you’d better have something to say, and he didn’t. Nada. The country didn’t turn to Lincoln because of his inexperience or his looks. He was hideous. But he had something to say.
“People don’t come to Obama for what he’s done in the Senate,” says Bruce Reed, president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. “They come because of what they hope he could be.” That’s audacious hope, folks. And it’s scary.
It’s also largely untrue. Most people turning to Obama right now are white women. They’re not attracted to this good-looking, charismatic black man because of hope, at least not political hope. It’s something else, something more disturbing.
But that’s America politically these days. The campaigns of Hillary and Obama are signposts on Multicultural Way, where race and gender are the only addresses that matter. Ideas are just annoying speed bumps. Thus Obama can run a campaign solely of hope – as opposed to the hopelessness of the others – and claim to be the candidate of inexperience andleadership, which isn‘t audacious so much as ludicrous.
Leadership emerges from experience, of course, not looks. Obama may be understandably confused about that since looks are all he‘s ever needed, and racial ideology asserts that skin color is in fact the actual determinate of everything in America. And soon it will be.
But perhaps not just yet. A pretty face might get an actor a tryout on stage, but at some point even the prettiest actor has to prove he can actually act. Obama isn’t showing he has the chops for this particular gig. Even his wife, channeling the spirit of Teresa Heinz “Get My Pills Now” Kerry, is starting to get snippy with questioners. “Just look at him and shut up, okay? Bigots.”
The mainstream press has begun to moderate its hero worship ever so slightly. Obama’s been a little snippy himself, and journalists don’t like that. The New York Time’s Maureen Dowd penned an especially wicked column from “extremely white” Iowa last week. Yes, Obama has a “smooth-jazz façade,” but for Dowd he just wasn’t the man Hillary was. But then who is?
Rolling Stone just published a surprisingly revealing piece on Obama, a fellow leftist who, according to the magazine, is the subject of an upcoming biography entitled The Savior by a Chicago Tribune reporter (what liberal bias?). A year or two from now he‘ll publish the sequel, The Crucifixion.
The most revealing element of the article was an examination of Obama‘s affiliation with the black separatist church Trinity United Church of Christ and the radical Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The magazine found that the relationship was not just “incidental” in Obama‘s life, and concluded, “This is as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much Malcolm X as Martin Luther King Jr.”
In other words, straight-shooting, authentic, Honest-Abe Obama is really someone quite different from the public persona he knowingly projects – someone his adoring millions might not find so smooth and comforting (though to many of them it probably won‘t matter). Lincoln never told us exactly how long “some of the time” is that you can fool all of the people, but we should all hope, audaciously hope, that it’s less than the year and nine months remaining until the election.
“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”