a culture-war campaign

Note: I’m in a rush and don’t have time to add the links required to document my assertions; I’ll fill them in later.

Shelby Steele gets at the essence of Obama’s profound appeal: he’s running on culture (i.e., as a celebrity, as I have noted many times over the last six months) rather than on his politics (which are all over the map, as has been well documented all over the interwebs, if not in the MSM (as noted by Pew) in the last two months:

[W]hite Americans have also been tormented by their stigmatization as moral inferiors, as racists. An Obama presidency would give them considerable moral leverage against this stigma.

So it has to be acknowledged that, on the level of cultural and historical symbolism, an Obama presidency might nudge the culture forward a bit — presuming of course that he would be at least a competent president. (A less-than-competent black president would likely be a step backwards.) It would be a good thing were blacks to be more open to the power of individual responsibility. And it would surely help us all if whites were less cowed by the political correctness on black issues that protects their racial innocence at the expense of the very principles that made America great. We Americans are hungry for such a cultural shift.

This, no doubt, is what Barack Obama means by “change.” He promises to reconfigure our exhausted cultural arrangement.

The McCain campaign is obviously aware of Obama’s cultural appeal, and it is seeding a “False Messiah” counter-culture campaign against him:

The important thematic part of the ad is not the gas prices, but the explicit, if still subtle, use of the False Messiah argument, which McCain’s senior staff has been talking privately about for months.

At first it sounds like the rush of a river, then the chants become clear. They are Obama’s minions, chanting his name in a kind of creepy, almost Orwellian repetition. Watch this theme develop over the coming months. As it stands, the McCain campaign already likes citing Oprah Winfrey’s claim that Obama is “The One,” like Keanu Reeves in a trench coat. The McCain campaign is trying to turn Obama’s enormous enthusiasm and crowds against him, to find a kryptonite for his superpowers. This is an arrogance argument, like the one made last week by Charles Krauthammer, but it is also a cultural argument. Subcultures are inherently insular. They have rules, customs and assumptions of their own. They tend to embrace lofty, abstract rhetoric. They also exclude. And in a political campaign, you do not want to exclude. In this spot, McCain is not just campaigning against Obama the man, but Obama the movement and Obama the subculture. He is trying to convince regular voters that Obama supporters are not regular. They are true believers, even worshipers. And it could be an effective attack, for at least two reasons.

1. America has a tradition of seeking out regular people as presidents, not demigods.

2. The conventional wisdom in politics today is you win by tearing down your opponent’s strengths. [e.a.]

Shelby Steele notes a further chink in Obama’s armor:

But here lies his essential contradiction: His campaign is more cultural than political. He sells himself more as a cultural breakthrough than as a candidate for office. To be a projection screen for the cultural aspirations of both blacks and whites one must be an invisible man politically. Real world politics, in their mundanity, interrupt cultural projections. And so Mr. Obama’s political invisibility — a charm that can only derive from a lack of deep political convictions — may well serve his cultural appeal, but it also makes him something of a political mess.

Already he has flip-flopped on campaign financing, wire-tapping, gun control, faith-based initiatives, and the terms of withdrawal from Iraq. Those enamored of his cultural potential may say these reversals are an indication of thoughtfulness, or even open-mindedness. But could it be that this is a man who trusted so much in his cultural appeal that the struggles of principle and conscience never seemed quite real to him? His flip-flops belie an almost existential callowness toward principle, as if the very idea of permanent truth is passé, a form of bad taste. [e.a.]

I can tell you that this appeal to the culture is working on the under-30 set (the part of that set which I see, at any rate). They don’t care about Obama’s policy ideas. They like the guy.

And they’re not the only ones. Why, on American Morning just today Kiran Chetry reported on the media’s pro-Obama’s bias, then her interview subject Rudy Giuiliani confirmed that pro-Obama media bias, and then moments later Chetry—with no apparentrony—reported the BREAKING NEWS: “any minute now! Barack Obama’s plane  will arrive in Amman, Jordan!!!”