City Slickers 3: The Legend of Barack Obama

The Obama has been out of the news for the last couple days. I sure hope Anna Nicole Smith didn’t die again. The current media fawning over John Edwards' wife and his decision to continue to campaign is nothing less than I would expect from a lawyer of the lowest ilk. So The Obama Report looks back into the buildup of our subject's media platform.

Back in the 2004 Senate election, The Obama and Jack Ryan went head to head. The media remarked on how different the two candidates were. I don’t know what election they were watching, because Obama and Ryan were both Harvard lawyers who could have been on the cover of Men’s Vouge (which Obama was). The only real difference between the two men is in the fact that The Obama had a name that sounded a little too much like the FBI’s #1 and Ryan shared a last name with the most dispised Governor Illinois had seen in a long time.

I remember one particular picture of him that ran in the Sun Times or Tribune, where on the campaign trail, The Obama has stopped to use a pay phone at a roadside gas station. I thought to myself, "What a phony! I’m supposed to believe that this very money-laden candidate didn’t have a cell phone, and nobody else in his entourage had a cell phone, and the driver of his limo was without a cell phone! I bet the photographer used his cell phone right after that to tell his editor to hold the front page for him." Maybe this was his Adlai Stevenson moment.

In a November 1st Washingtonian article (two years from the next general election) Garrett Graff makes quite a buzz about the junior senator, and begins to set the stage for the media hype in a piece titled "The Legend of Barack Obama." There was one part of the coverage that reminded me of that phone booth picture.

As a member of the Foreign Relations committee, Obama is moving onto the world stage. An August trip to Africa found him visiting the cell where Nelson Mandela was held, talking terrorism in Djibouti, taking an AIDS test in Kenya, and visiting the rural village where his grandmother still lives...—it was Obama as beacon of American hope and optimism.

An AIDS test? So if he were visiting an inner-city Planned Parenthood, would he take a pregnancy test? (Good news Senator, the rabbit didn’t die.)

However the best line in the piece came in the form of a quote from The Obama’s own team.

Much of Obama’s allure is that he is new and exciting enough to be a sort of blank canvas onto which activists of all kinds can paint their aspirations. Says Chris Lu, his legislative director, "He’s like a Rorschach test——you see in him what you want."

Graff has hit the nail on the head. This mind-set is what fuels The Obama machine. When I look at The Obama, I see the new politician, a beta-tested Bill Clinton.