The Rock Star Candidate

I watched Barack give his speech in Berlin this morning. He was careful not to pander to his German audience, or to invite comparisons to John F. Kennedy's speech at the Brandenburg Gate, by using German phrases or greetings. Anway, it's not really necessary to speak German to the usually trilingual Berliners, who are in general educated to a level far beyond their American counterparts. This is especially true among German youth, who seemed to dominate the crowd in the Tiergarten.

The speech itself, of course, was mostly content-free. Barack actually seemed a little off his game; the rigors of a long trip were taking their toll. Missing a few words here and there, stumbling, his energy level a little low. It lacked the soaring oratory and accelerating finish his speeches usually feature. Still, it's hard to go too far wrong with anodyne tales of the Berlin airlift or the defeat of Communism when you're speaking to Germans in modern Berlin. Barack reaffirmed his commitment to good things, like international cooperation and an end to oppression. I'll go out on a limb and say I'm for those things too. He took a few swipes at the American unpopularity caused by Bush's intransigence on global warming, the war in Iraq and the torture regime, but they were mild and elliptical. Obama is always a smooth operator; he's more Sugar Ray Robinson than Joe Louis. Beats you on the accumulation of points rather than the knockout punch.

I recall, long ago, an interview with Peter Yarrow, the Peter of Peter Paul & Mary, who has always been a very thoughtful (and talented) singer/songwriter/musician. He was comparing the standing of PP&M to such super-groups as the Stones or the Beatles. "Let's face it," he said, "their magic is bigger than our magic." Gracious and simple in the admission of the obvious. That's the deal with Obama; his magic is bigger than your magic, bigger than John McCain's, bigger than Hillary Clinton's. It doesn't really matter whether he says anything substantial; Bush, with one or two tweaks, could have given the same speech today, or could if it were not inevitable that boos would drown him out. It isn't difficult to be for good things like justice and freedom. You're for 'em, right? Yeah, me too.

I think it's telling that modern campaign honchos use the word "brand" now to talk about candidates and political parties. While it's meant to be hip, I'm sure, it's also a recognition that anything sold by means of mass media winds up subject to the invariant laws of mass marketing. Obama's a product, in this sense, and his style (in some ways connected to his "issue positions," but not essentially) is his "brand." His brand can take a hit when he seems to take a position a little off the public grok of his persona - such as on telecom immunity in the FISA debate, for example. It would be like Pepsi-Cola claiming to be the "Real Thing." Or Avis shouting, "We're No. 1!" A carefully developed marketing campaign can go off the rails with too many variations. Hillary thought she should win by dint of her policy positions and wonkish presentation of detail, and indeed I don't know too many people in American politics with her command of the specifics, or who has such a carefully designed set of solutions to real problems. Thing she never figured out? Her brand's kind of, you know, so '90's, and she never got how much things have changed since 1992 (neither did Bill). That grasping for the job, that trying so hard. Not rico-soave like O.

Obama's brand is cool, hip, smart, young, in touch with the modern world and its problems, connected, multi-cultural, intermarried, integrated, inclusive. That's the way things are moving, in the global village of the Internet and television. That's what his speech was about, this sense of international nexus and breakdown of barriers (his coolest rhetorical flourish was to compare the breaking down of the Berlin Wall to these modern trends). His brand makes a fascinating contrast with John McCain, who is old-fashioned (in fact, old), out-of-touch, unconnected (it's here where his incompetence with a computer is most telling - he really doesn't know what's going on out there), corny, belligerent, fearmongering, us vs. them, reactionary, and with his major issue continuation of a war which most Americans and almost all of the world see as a mistake from the beginning.

One of these two brands will carry the day in November. I suspect that if Obama does not win, it will be simply because he arrived on the scene a little too soon, a bright star who went supernova in a country not ready for him. There is an old, crotchety, out-of-it America which clings desperately to ideas about the country which have come and gone, and there may be enough of them left to determine the outcome: racists, homophobes, religious zealots, xenophobes, those who think the world can still be kept at bay by bombing the hell out of it. Obama represents what the rest of the world hopes America has become. Maybe. There's no question he could be elected Mayor of Berlin, but here on Main Street, USA, it's still very hard to tell.