Barack The Magic What?

Who the hell knew who Barack Obama was before July 27, 2004? Certainly not my co-worker this summer. She asked me: “Isn’t he some sort of ghetto guy?”

“About as much as Lil Jon,” I responded.

Columbians bitch nonstop about Obama’s refusal to plug his alma mater, but where did he go to high school? The answer is more Gossip Girl than Stand and Deliver. The Punahou School is the Horace Mann of Hawaii, and it was here—as a scholarship student—that Obama first exemplified both privilege and an outsider status within it. Accordingly, following Columbia and Harvard Law, he moved to Chicago to start a career in politics the old-fashioned way: at the bottom. By 1997 he was a state senator, and seven years later, he was hand-picked to be “thrust into the national spotlight.” And the rest is shoddy journalism.

Much of political appeal is a visual reaction later intellectualized, and Obama’s visual appeal is prodigious. He is seen as handsome and youthful, impressions which the mind turns into “charisma” and attraction.

So what was presented before the American public in 2004 was someone with charm, good looks and good elocution, who was not only “streetwise” but “a Harvard man”: he bridged the positive stereotypes of both “black” and “white.” Beyond that, who the hell knew who he was?

Over the last 50 years, American oratory has been decaying faster than political discourse at Christmas dinner with extended family. Robert F. Kennedy quoted Aeschylus, Ronald Reagan recycled religious rhetoric, and George W. Bush uttered nostrums that were vapid yet memorable. “I’m a uniter, not a divider”: Obama’s convention speech was the logical conclusion of this kind of palaver.

Wooing the electorate is like seducing first-years at Cannon’s—it’s best to say nothing and let your prey’s imaginations run wild, and the speech’s genius was exactly that: Obama had no past and no personality, such a divisive thing in politics. The media and electorate could then project onto him what they wanted to see: the visual appeal, intellectualized.

And what they wanted to see was this: a “uniter, not a divider”; someone who bridged binaries—scholarship and Punahou, Republican and Democrat, red and blue, “black” and “white”—the melting pot, personified.

The last (false) binary is worth considering because not only is it the crux of Obama’s physical appeal, it’s also symbolic of an unattained ideal (until now, kind of) and therefore the crux of his intellectualized appeal. Obama’s magnetism was as skin-deep as the persuasive powers of his speech, and so he emerged at once as a symbol of all the meaningless ideals he alluded to in his posters and pabulum—“Hope,” “Change,” “Progress”—and the man with the power to enact all these things, instantly, if he were elected.

In some Hollywood movies—that most visceral, superficial and visual of art forms—there is an archetype, formulated by Spike Lee, called the “magic Negro” (cf. The Shining, The Green Mile, The Matrix). The “magic Negro” is wise and kind; he has no past; he comes out of nowhere to save everyone from themselves using his numinous powers. With his powers of self-mythology, then, Obama became a sort of “magic mulatto,” someone not only capable of bridging binaries but embodying them within his single self.

This kind of thing has happened before, with Colin Powell; his character in the movie W. is a parody of the real man warped into the fictional model. “Colin is a good man,” many people have told me, even though all their rationales could have been used to defend McCain, whom they hated as much as I did.

So that is Powell: a complex man warped into a simple parody. Yet there is nothing parodic and everything serious about Obama; his political persona is always more a totem than a person. Most supporters of his I talked to only thought as much as he encouraged them to. “These people have no sense of irony!” lamented a friend of mine, and it was true. The attraction was idealized in intellect but physical in basis, and all the stronger because of it.

Some were afraid the Bradley effect would torpedo Obama; it didn’t. As in his career, his appearance proved, overall, to not be a limiting factor; at the polls, it was, at least, a wash.

The best argument against religion is its adherents. The best argument against Obama was, to me, his supporters. On Nov. 5, 2008, more than 150 of my Facebook friends changed their profile pictures. The images ranged from a black fist upraised against red, to a headshot of the candidate cracking a bottle of valedictory champagne. Idolatry was not taboo to the Cult of Obama, it was the Cult of Obama— and now I see his likeness everywhere.

For those of us who voted for Obama anyway, his saving grace was that he was right. I voted for him because rationality supported him, even if his appeal was religious.

To expect Obama to become a “magic mulatto,” suturing all gashes in Washington as he did within himself, fixing everything like some film’s deus ex machina, would be the soft bigotry of ludicrous expectations. Maybe to millions he’ll be as faultless as Powell, ineffectual but “right.” Nobody—not even the masses shouting the mantra “Obama!” to the same lame speech on Tuesday—knows who the hell Barack Obama is, but maybe it doesn’t matter.

Chris Morris-Lent is a Columbia College junior majoring in English. Chris Shrugged runs alternate Thursdays. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com">Opinion@columbiaspectator.com