Obama sells same old stuff
Terence Corcoran, National Post Published: Saturday, February 16, 2008
Somewhere and sometime between now and the Democratic convention, populist glamour boy Barack Obama's charisma can be expected to run out of candlepower. Not totally, of course. He'll always be able to raise a crowd to its feet and bedazzle some people -- like the sensible-looking thirtysomething woman interviewed last Tuesday by the CBC at a Washington pub after Mr. Obama swept the Potomac states. Suspending rational judgment, she said: "Are you kidding me? I'd walk over hot coals to vote for this man. I mean, oh, he's just ... he's a man that can change not our country, but the world."
Maybe she would walk on coals for Mr. Obama, but she should know that it's gonna hurt. Whatever the undeniably mesmerizing, ga-ga-inducing qualities of Mr. Obama's speechifying technique, at some point these skills are going to wear thin as people begin to spend a little time thinking about what he's saying. Although thinking apparently isn't something that's necessarily top of the Obama agenda. Michelle Obama reportedly advised her husband to suspend cerebral activity during political debates. "Feel--don't think," she said.
That advice is strangely similar to the advice Chris Rock received in Head of State, a very bad comedy about a black guy -- played by Mr. Rock -- who runs for president of the United States. Just before delivering a pre-set text from a Teleprompter, Mr. Rock is taken aside by his semi-violent and near-pathological brother and told to ignore the set speech and speak what he really feels -- from the heart. Which Mr. Rock promptly does, and instantly turns himself into a wildly popular man of the people with a speech that includes such Obamaish lines as: "You know what you need. Better schools, better jobs, less crime. How many of you, right now, work two jobs just to have enough money to be broke?"
An Obama speech is the work of much better screenwriters, even though at last count Mr. Rock's effort had grossed $38-million. Mr. Obama is expected to raise that much this month alone. How long can this go on? Recent polls suggest Hillary Clinton is well ahead of Mr. Obama in Ohio and Pennsylvania, although Texas is close. Is Ms. Clinton about to turn the corner against Obama?
If primary voters actually spent time with Mr. Obama's speeches and ideas rather than react to his oratorical skills
and rhetorical devices, some might begin to wonder what all the fuss is about. Mr. Obama can deliver rhythmic cadences and rolling repetitive references to "change" and "dreams" and "hope." As he said: "No dream is beyond beyond our grasp if we reach for it, and fight for it, and work for it."
When it comes down to content, however, an Obama speech is not about change at all. It's about more of the same, more of the same old anti-corporate demagoguery, more of the same old attacks on CEO bonuses, Exxon, gouging businesses. There are ritual panderings to big labour and populist notions of free trade and NAFTA and China -- as he did in a speech on Tuesday night to an arena crowd in Madison, Wisc. (See right).
On NAFTA and trade, under which businesses "ship jobs overseas and force parents to compete with their teenagers to work for minimum wage at Wal-Mart," Mr. Obama is playing on the same old populist mythologies that have driven political debate in America for more than a century -- the little people versus the wealthy, the lobbyists, the powerful, profits, special interests, the privileged.
How many proud Wal-Mart workers would find that demeaning reference offensive? Mr. Obama plays off such corporate images. After mentioning Exxon's record profits and high gasoline prices, he later introduces the teacher who works at the night shift at Dunkin Donuts. Will hard-working two-job-holding Americans really take kindly to a politician who tells them their effort is an unnecessary and even futile one that can only be fixed by going after excessive CEO bonus payouts?
When it comes to policy and prescriptions, the grand calls for change and hope soon spiral down to endless lists of tired and familiar programs and payments and promises. In another speech on Wednesday at a General Motors plant in Janesville, Wisc., Mr. Obama ran through thousands of words proposing enough initiatives to keep the same old Dem.-Rep. congressional crown busy for half a decade of the same old political games he says he wants to get rid of -- from universal health care to minimum wage increases to doubling the number of low-income people receiving an earned income tax credit, worth $1,000 a year.
What Barack Obama offers is more, much more, of the same old politics jazzed up by a dazzling salesman with a great big smile. For how long will Americans buy it?
