Slate‘s David Plotz once compared going to see Barack Obama speak live as a religious experience.
This would explain why talking to some Obama supporters is like talking to pushy born-again believers who desperately want you to know hear the good news. Fam, we get it: you’re fired up and ready to go. Now please shut up.
I’ve been reading and listening to many, many appeals by Obama true believers, and while I don’t think Obama is devoid of substance (as some of his detractors suggest), it’s amazing how so many of the arguments of Obamaphiles are rooted primarily in emotionalism: if they just show you the deepness of their feeling, you too may be converted. The very effective ‘Yes We Can’ video spread like wildfire — tellingly created by people whose political concerns centered around ‘hope’ for ‘good things’ — and sensible, otherwise rational people started sending out e-mails confessing that the video made them cry and how deeply they were moved.
There’s nothing wrong with Obamamania on its face. Yay for involvement and caring or whatever. But damn if some of the logic fueling it isn’t wild fuzzy-headed. Kim McLarin penned a toweringly cheesy column for The Root in which she cites Obama’s choice of a wife as one of her reasons for supporting him.
Of course, Michelle Obama is tall and regal and utterly self-possessed. She owns a smile to nearly rival her husband’s and waves those long, slender fingers about like a classical pianist. She carries more talent, clarity, deep self-knowledge, and openness of heart in the left eyelash she lost unnoticed yesterday than any woman on the trail…
But there you go. I look at Michelle Obama, and I see — at least not at first — not the strength of her character nor her fierce intelligence nor even her Ivy League degree, but the plain and plainly striking fact that she in no way resembles either Halle Berry or Heidi Klum. She more favors my friend Damita. She reminds me of my sister Michelle. She looks like me.
Uh, okay. (Obsidian Wings, she is not.)
The problem with hero worship is that it requires supplicants to discard the bits of fact that don’t adhere to the mythology o which they’ve chosen to subscribe. Wendi Muse, along with the rest of the gang over at Racialicious, endorsed Obama for president. In Muse’s explanation, she cited Obama’s vote against the Iraq war — that oft-repeated nugget that happens to be completely untrue. (How does a man vote against a war that began a whole year-and-a-half before he became a senator?) Muse and her cohort aren’t responding to Obama, they’re responding to the imagery and feeling surrounding Obama.
That also means valid critiques — like those of Obama’s deeply flawed health care plan —- get brushed off, or the motives of the person leveling the critique are questioned. JackandJill essentially called economist Paul Krugman of the New York Times, who has been (rightly) critical of it, a hater. Some of their commenters hinted that Krugman’s criticism was tinged with racism. (Word?) I recently sat through a conversation with an earnest Obama supporter who insisted that Obama, unlike the rest of Washington, was without ego — an assertion so ridiculous it borders on being funny. No one runs for president of the United States without massive self-regard. It just doesn’t happen.
The flipside to all this gooey Obama love is that Hillary Clinton must be evil incarnate. I’m not gonna ride for the cynical and disturbing way the Clintons played racial politics going to into South Carolina. But critiques of Senator Clinton’s policy positions necessitate critique of Obama’s (of the 267 measures on which they both cast votes last year, they differed on only ten). If Hillary Clinton is an establishment candidate, then so is Obama. If she’s an opportunistic triangulator, then so is Obama.
For all their high-minded talk of bringing the country together, Obama zealots seem to be suspicious of those folk who look at his policy positions and his record and come to different conclusions.
