More on Obama Construction

April 5, 2007

An article by Ben Wallace-Wells in last week's New York Times Magazine proved to be a timely confirmation of my recent post "Construction Zone! Obama Going Up!" In that post I tried to point out the way high profile politicians inevitably have a lot of people writing about them and helping to construct a narrative that makes sense of their past. Such high profile politicians inevitably come to have group-authored identities as they try out and adopt new ways of talking about themselves.

How this process works was given a little more clarity in the New York Times Magazine article. One of Obama's closest advisors, David Axelrod, is the focus. The topic in the following passage is the creation of a video to showcase Obama:

There was a clip he found from the early stages of the 2004 Senate campaign of Obama, microphone in hand, introducing himself to a small group of voters at a coffeehouse on Chicago's North Side; when the candidate told them about his work in the early 1990s as a community organizer, there was a spontaneous, sustained applause. "I remember that!" Axelrod told me a few days later as we watched the finished product in his office the morning it was released to the public. "You know, we hadn't thought that was an important part of his bio, but people really responded to the fact that Barack gave up corporate job offers to work in the community."

That is as clear a statement of group biography creation as I can imagine. Parts of the past that Obama by himself might have missed suddenly get spotlight attention. After about the 50th time Obama has narrated this fact about himself it will be internalized as a canonical part of his personal story.

How do moments like this turn up and get crowd tested? We get a clue about that:

In the 15 years since [their meeting], Axelrod has worked through Obama's life story again and again, scouring it for usable political material, and he believes that some basic themes come through...

And what would it be like if we all had very smart people combing through out past to make sense of it?

I am not trying to pick on Obama.. I just think he is a spectacular example of this group identity creation. Right before our eyes we get to see the hopes of diverse groups get read onto the handsome features of Mr. Obama.. but maybe we should call him Mr. Obama, inc.