The casting of votes is still four months away, but we can already see a certain pattern and detect a certain narrative developing regarding the presidential race. The first and most obvious element in this pattern is that Barack Obama is benefiting from a level of media adulation that perhaps no contemporary American political figure or public figure of any kind has received. Pundits, who tend to be more skeptical, have continued to question his singularity, but the reporters and television news producers who tend to have far greater impact on election outcomes by virtue of their greater impact on modestly attentive voters seem to have abandoned any pretense of objectivity and embraced the “Barack as history” theme. Second, a striking similarity has emerged not so much between the Obama candidacy and that of an earlier purveyor of cool, John F. Kennedy, but between those of Obama and Jimmy Carter. Like Carter, Obama was a relatively unknown figure who managed to capture the Democratic nomination with an only slightly more substantial résumé and while offering a quasi-religious form of redemption. For Carter, it was the prospect of purification after Vietnam and Watergate; for Obama, it is the idea of racial reconciliation within the broader context of an end to the bitter partisanship of the Bush era. In both cases, a messianic claim to transcend politics and heal a nation is offered. Third, a growing similarity has emerged on the other side as well, between this year’s presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain, and the doomed GOP nominee from 1996, Bob Dole. Apart from suffering from a similar charisma deficit vis-à-vis a younger, more nimble opponent, McCain’s campaign, like Dole’s 12 years ago, also lacks any unifying theme and thus far consists of an equally random search for issues and positions, none of which seems seriously considered or sincerely held.
That McCain’s campaign is incoherent is a direct and perhaps uncorrectable consequence of the fact that the candidate himself always has been even more so. To define your opponent, you must first define yourself, a likely impossibility for someone who, at 71, remains very much a work in progress.
McCain’s instincts are largely conservative, but it is a kind of conservatism of the heart rather than the mind that leaves him incapable of effectively explaining his principles or resisting ill-considered forays into populism and politically correct liberalism. The result will likely further confirm one of the key principles of American politics in the post-Reagan era—that a conservative will always beat a liberal unless the conservative runs as something other than a conservative and allows the liberal to run as something other than a liberal.
In the end, one suspects that even if McCain could somehow figure out what he stands for and how it all fits together, i. e., become someone other than McCain, it would still be unlikely to undermine Obama’s progress toward the White House because Obama’s candidacy has never had anything to do with politics or ideology or public policy. Obama’s recent, exquisitely calculated policy shifts won’t hurt him much because what Obama mania represents is not a traditional political movement per se but the injection of the concept of celebrity culture into the political realm. The end result is an eerie kind of personality cult in which form substitutes for content and style and persona become ends in themselves. Fashion and that crucial element that supports it, mindless conformity, have been what Obama has been about from the beginning. The happening known as Obama has thus put into abeyance the usual rules for presidential campaigns; a failure to cast a vote in his direction this fall is already being presented less as a reasonable assessment based on ideological preference or respective qualifications than as the arrival of the skunk at the picnic. Politics as traditionally understood is a largely useless reference with which to understand the fervor that Obama has created. Better places to look are American society’s increasingly perverse infatuation with celebrity and the deep need to find heroes in an age when heroism has been otherwise debunked. G. K. Chesterton’s famous observation—that “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything” —also comes to mind. McCain isn’t just ineptly fighting history, he’s also up against a new political concept—the politician as rock star.
—–––––•–––––—Free-lance columnist Bradley R. Gitz teaches politics at Lyon College at Batesville.
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