Harold Meyerson: The President-elect and The Chairman

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The President-elect and The Chairman
Like Sinatra, Barack Obama Is Hot and Cool Personified
By Harold Meyerson 11/6/08 12:45 PM


Sen. Barack Obama (Getty Images)


He burst into public attention as Abraham Lincoln did, with a speech. When he next commanded the nation’s attention, last winter in Iowa and New Hampshire, what was remarkable was not only the power of his speaking but the intensity of his audience’s response — and his young audience most of all.

So Barack Obama came to be compared not just to political leaders who were powerful speakers — Lincoln, Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King Jr. -– but also, inevitably, to rock stars. Who else could draw so many rapt young people to a hastily scheduled event? Who else could send them cheering into the night?

But the rock-star parallel always struck me as fundamentally off. Rock stars, since Elvis and Mick Jagger, have usually been demonstrative types. Their full-body excess is part of their appeal.

Not so Obama. He is cool where they are hot. He is precise and elegant and reserved. He knows he packs an emotional wallop, because he always understood that the success of his candidacy signaled, in itself, an astonishing historic transformation of the United States.

It was the latest in the chain of defining national events that began with the Declaration of Independence, was renewed at Gettysburg, given irresistible moral urgency at Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma and the Lincoln Memorial; and codified by Lyndon B. Johnson.

He knew his audiences understood this: You could not be an American and fail to understand it — whether you supported his campaign or opposed it.

Strategically, however, for Obama to have made this explicit, to have elevated it to the focus of his campaign, would have been a mistake. It wasn’t the focus in any event. It was its mythic foundation, but to speak of it directly would be to contravene his strategy.

We are not red and blue America, he would say, we are the United States of America, and the audience would shout its assent, understanding that he also had meant, we are not black and white America, we are United. Obama spoke in racial code, not to evoke bigoted rage, but a vision of multiracial harmony and national greatness.

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http://washingtonindependent.com/17291/the-president-and-the-chairman