Sunday, June 15, 2008
News, In this Issue...

Obama™

He’s a brand, he’s a star, and he’s running for president

Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/GettyImages

By Chuck Stanley

It’s a stiflingly hot Tuesday afternoon, and tourists taking shelter in the cool recesses of Underground Atlanta stroll past a line of kiosks displaying souvenirs of the jewel of the South. Among the stands of merchandise, Heritage, a kiosk operated by Malkia Jackson, stands out. The semi-portable shop deals almost exclusively in Barack Obama T-shirts.

This has not always been the case. Jackson has been operating in Underground Atlanta for nearly a decade, long before Obama was even a blip on the political radar. She began selling the shirts shortly after Obama began winning Democratic primaries, and since then they have been her most sought-after and most heavily stocked item.

“People are highly fascinated and interested in Obama,” Jackson tells me while holding a black T-shirt that reads “Barack Star.”
 
“People who can’t even speak English will say ‘Obama shirt,’” she mimics them, pointing to the shirt. “And that’s what they want.”

It is her single most popular item.

“They love Obama,” she says. “I’ve never seen such a love [for a politician].”
 
Barack Obama, on his road to the Democratic nomination, has sold out arenas and appeared before thousands of adoring fans. The excitement generated by his candidacy is sometimes more reminiscent of the kind that surrounds a touring pop icon than the kind that surrounds a political candidate. He has been referred to as a rock star in the pages of Newsweek and by media mogul Rupert Murdoch. His face has graced the covers of Esquire, Rolling Stone, Time and GQ magazines. For a grossly unscientific illustration of how heavily merchandised Barack Obama is, type “Barack Obama merchandise” into a Google search, then replace his name with Hillary Clinton’s or John McCain’s. Obama’s results are roughly five times those yielded by Clinton and McCain combined.

America has become accustomed to people like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura cashing in on their celebrity status to become political successes. Barack Obama seems to have done it the other way around, though. His political success has catapulted him into the public eye in a way that is distinct from even the most popular political figures in recent history. With the media attention and cheering supporters comes the risk that undecided voters may  view the junior Senator from Illinois as having more style than substance. Most experts agree that Obama’s celebrity status will do him more good than harm, as long as he can maintain an air of authenticity. Nobody, though, seems able to pinpoint how Obama has gained the kind of fame that goes far beyond the political sphere, the kind that lands one on a teenager’s T-shirt.
     
Jackson’s Underground kiosk specializes in Afrocentric merchandise, and she admits that many of her customers are interested in her wares because of the historic impact of a biracial candidate’s competitive run for president. However, people of all colors from around the world come to her looking for T-shirts bearing Obama’s face, which has been good for her.

“His running has been a spiritual and economic boost,” she says.

Obama Mania

If votes were granted on the basis of exuberance, Obama might already be forwarding his mail to Pennsylvania Avenue. But that’s not how the electoral process works. At the time of this writing, Obama and his Republican opponent, Sen. McCain, have nearly equal support among prospective voters. Recent polls by CNN, CBS and Gallup show Obama leading McCain with an edge as low as 3 percentage points or as high as 6 percentage points, but how many of those respondents will show up to vote five months from now is anybody’s guess.

And there is no guarantee that Obama can parlay his marketability into a successful presidential bid, and although Mick Jagger, Elton John and Paul McCartney have all been knighted by the queen of the United Kingdom, no rock star has ever been elected president of the United States.    

Darrell West, a political scientist at Brown University, says there is a very clear and obvious upside to Obama’s celebrity. “That has helped him raise an incredible amount of money and attract an incredible amount of media coverage,” he says. “Somebody [who is] a political celebrity has a great advantage. It allows them to bridge the gap between politics and popular culture.”

West, whose work has focused on the relationship between Hollywood, fame and politics, says there are no direct parallels to the political stardom Obama has achieved. He refers to former actor-turned-politician Ronald Reagan as a charismatic figure who was able to mobilize a grassroots support system, in much the same way Obama has. Even Reagan, though, didn’t generate the fan mentality found amongst Obama’s supporters. “I don’t think there’s really anyone else who comes close to what Obama’s done,” he says.

There is no foolproof recipe for political celebrity. However, certain ingredients are helpful. West says that to become such a celebrity, “It takes somebody with an unconventional background and a compelling life story.”

Obama’s life story is certainly compelling. But so is John McCain’s. He’s a war veteran who survived being held prisoner by the North Vietnamese to become a maverick Republican Senator in a highly polarized political landscape. Tom Clancy could make a book, movie and video game out of McCain’s life. Yet McCain doesn’t get the same celebrity reception as Obama does.
   
Barack Obama has served in the Senate since 2005, while McCain has represented Arizona in the Senate since 1987. Over two decades in the public eye, John McCain has given voters ample time to get to know him and, inevitably, find something they disagree with him about. Supporters of Barack Obama, on the other hand, have the luxury of being able to fill in what they don’t know about him with projections of what they would like him to be.

“In a situation where three quarters of the people are not happy with the direction of the country, experience is not a good thing. Experience is what has brought the country to where it is,” notes West. 

Robert Denton, who teaches political communication at Virginia Tech, cites the past two presidents as evidence that the importance of experience has dwindled among American voters. Both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton first moved into the White House after defeating opponents with much longer and more impressive public resumes. They did this by portraying themselves as outsiders bent on changing Washington. Obama has made the same argument for his candidacy.

Denton sees the Obama phenomenon as symptomatic of a trend that has coincided with the dawn and ascendance of television. Candidates today, he say, are judged far more by their persona than by their credentials.

“Television is a very personalizing medium,” says Denton. “We hear [since the ’50s], rather than ‘experience’ and ‘ability,’ terms like ‘likeability’ and ‘charisma’ … When was the last really ugly president we’ve had?”

It is possible that seemingly blind enthusiasm on the part of Obama’s supporters will turn off undecided voters. Denton notes the negative correlation between the media's expansion and voter turnout over the past half century. If Obama’s campaign becomes more about his persona than his policies, Denton argues that it could exacerbate a sentiment among voters that the civic duty of choosing a president has been cheapened.  

Taking Sides in History

 
In front of her kiosk at Underground Atlanta, Jackson says that Obama’s success in the Democratic primaries would have inspired her even if she was not an Obama supporter. The promise of an America that can vote with a blind eye toward race gives her hope. “I’m 48 and I never thought I’d see this in my life,” she says. “It makes me so proud of the country, because I know that Obama could not have won the nomination if it was not for the support of white voters.”

John Lewis, a leader of the Civil Rights Movement and current representative of most of Atlanta in Congress, said that he wanted to be “on the right side of history” when he switched his endorsement from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama earlier this year.
 
But Hillary Clinton’s entirely viable bid for the Democratic nomination was no less historic. The 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, was passed half a century after blacks, at least officially, had been granted it. Women have faced discrimination in all facets of American life. Yet Clinton’s campaign for change was not greeted with the same fervor as Obama’s. Simply being a historic candidate does not create celebrity.

Joshua Gamson, a sociologist at the University of San Francisco who has penned a number of books on celebrity and fame in America, disputes the notion that Barack Obama has become a celebrity in the pop-culture sense of the word.

“Any public figure is more well known than the rest of us,” he says. Instead, he gravitates toward thinking of Barack Obama as a symbol of change. “That’s different than someone that you absolutely adore and you can’t explain why. … If Barack Obama started talking about his underwear, or what he ate last night for dinner, I think people would start to lose interest in him.”

Gamson cites Obama’s own description of his campaign as a “Rorschach test” for Americans. When people look at Obama, says Gamson, they see a reflection of themselves.
 
Part of that may be due to the bottom-up nature of how Obama has been marketed. Much of his funding has come from small donations. His supporters create their own ads for him to post on YouTube. The notion that Obama has been promoted by ordinary people helps give the sense that he belongs to them.

“If it feels real, then you have a sense of ownership,” says Gamson.

Therefore, when Obama won a primary, his fans felt empowered by the victory. This is not only someone they supported; this is something they have accomplished.

    P. David Marshal, a communications professor at Northeastern University, says that supporting Obama has become “a personal statement in a political and cultural cluster.”

The communications guru Marshall McLuhan once said the medium is the message, a maxim ably demonstrated by Obama. He is what he is saying.

“The Obama brand is transcendent,” says David S. Meyer, a political sociologist at the University of California at Irvine. “That is his brand. He is biracial, therefore he transcends race. He reaches out to those outside the party, therefore he transcends partisan politics. That’s his brand.”

Meyer notes that this has happened before. He points to Lyndon B. Johnson’s criticism of John F. Kennedy—that JFK was all style and no substance.

“None of this is new,” says Meyers. “We have seen the charismatic politician before. But what is new is the degree.” SP