Construction Zone! Obama Going Up!
March 15, 2007
Today I came across the following discussion about Barack Obama:
Perhaps, ultimately, this is his real value right now. Not as the perfect vessel for a shining new world order. Though, of course, he is just that: Who could better reassure a jittery and suspicious world that America is ready to resume global leadership than a new young president who is the son of a black African father and a white Kansan mother, with a Muslim middle name who grew up in Asia? Rather, Obama's value is as someone with the courage, independence, and basic common sense to declare, without equivocation, that America's loss of global leadership is a result not of the inevitable breakdown of the existing structure, but of the Bush administration's radical and disastrous policy decisions.
What interests me here is the whiff of character construction. Reading this is like peaking through the plywood boards to glimpse the foundations of a new building going up. Plainly Obama's self is in the process of becoming symbolic.
Just a few years ago Obama was probably a lot like the rest of us.. a product of a complex past that was hard to understand. He woke up and was perplexed as to how he fit in. The American political process can be understood as a process of character construction. Now he wakes up and his sense of self must be quite different. He finds his past no longer hard to understand, but symbolic of something greater.
This transformation is only partially the result of a candidate's individual imagination. We should understand a high profile candidate as a group-self. Advisors are always there to suggest to the candidate better ways of presenting oneself. Then there are the journalists and advocates who from a distance are squinting and imagining the candidate.. and if these opinions are read by advisors or by the candidate (and we know they are) then they will shortly be incorporated into the self presentation of the candidate.
It would be fascinating to get ahold of an autobiographical narrative by Obama dating from a few years back.. before the presidential race.. before the senate race. Plain Obama. The self would be more diffuse and unexamined.. without the symbolic values that begin to adhere to a candidate. This is not to be cynical about the authenticity of Obama.. it is to be cynical about authenticity itself. The presentation of self is eventually the self. If that presentation is aided by advisors and the media process, then that self is a group-self.
This is the heart of why I could never seriously run for political office. I value too highly the self-creation of my own imagination. It would bug me to start seeing myself through the eyes of advisors or bloggers.. even if they could create a more colorful and polished self for me. I just like my own versions too much. This is one advantage of spending one's life outside the great eye of mass media.
