The glamour of Obama

Virginia Postrel warns of the lack of substance beneath the undeniably glamorous style of Barack Obama:

Glamour is more than beauty or stage presence. You can’t generate it just by having a wife who dresses like Jackie Kennedy. Glamour is a beautiful illusion—the word glamour originally meant a literal magic spell—that promises to transcend ordinary life and make the ideal real. It depends on a special combination of mystery and grace. Too much information breaks the spell. So does obvious effort. That’s why glamour is so rare in contemporary politics. In post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America, skeptical voters demand full disclosure of everything from candidates’ finances to their medical records, and spin-savvy accounts of backstage machinations dominate political coverage.

Obama’s glamour gives him a powerful political advantage. But it also poses special problems for the candidate and, if he succeeds, for the country.

Problems for the candidate, Postrel explains, include the fact that people project onto him their own fantasies and desires, including making him into something that he isn't, and can't be. This is problematic when facts reveal that he's not got it in him to be President Cliff Huxtable (as Steve Sailer, who actually read Obama's autobiographies, picked up on earlier than most). Besides, Obama has encouraged people to fantasize, either positively or negatively, about him by keeping his actual philosophy vague.

As for perils for the country:

To rely on illusions is to risk disillusionment. If Obama the dream candidate becomes Obama the real president, he’ll be forced to pick sides, make compromises, and turn “hope” and “change” into policies some people like and some people don’t. Or, like the movie star governor of California, he might choose instead to preserve his glamour by letting others set the agenda. Either way, his face won’t make America’s worries disappear, and his cool, polite manner won’t eliminate political disagreements. Some of his supporters will feel disappointed, even betrayed. The result could be a backlash, heightened partisan conflict, and a failed presidency. George W. Bush ran as a uniter, and Jimmy Carter promised national renewal.

In light of this analysis, the fact that Obama stayed in TUCC for 20 years and can show no evidence that he challenged the racism or conspiracy-nut crackpottery coming from the pulpit suggests that he might be psychologically vulnerable to figures who assuage his anxiety over his own racially complex biography. Also, that Obama's record, as far as I can tell, indicates that no matter how appealing he is to independents and even some conservatives ("We've got to get the Republicans out," a pro-Obama, anti-war conservative friend sick of our party's leadership told me over lunch recently), Obama can be counted on to take the leftmost political position in most cases.

The glamour of McCain was a big thing eight years ago, and I do remember that it was hard to reconcile some of his less attractive beliefs and qualities with the pleasure one took in having a presidential candidate who was hard-ass who'd suffered torture for his country and returned with honor, and who didn't seem like he was assembled in the basement of the RNC. There's not much McCain glamour left, so it's easier to see the real man, both his good parts and his bad parts. If not for the Iraq War, for which he is so stalwart, he'd still have a lot of that glamour, don't you think? (Keeping in mind Postrel's understanding that glamour is an illusion.)