Obama’s image under question

The News Virginian
Published: April 23, 2008

Coinciding with Democratic presidential aspirant Barack Obama’s rapid descent from the realm of messiah is the demise of the phenomenon of swooning women at campaign rallies. Bodies no longer tumble to the floor, but poll numbers are headed toward that destination, an occurrence of little consolation to the fresh-faced senator from Illinois. This is clearly not the change for which he had hoped.

Obama instead must take heart in the fact that Hillary Clinton’s rousing victory Tuesday in the Pennsylvania primary appears to change little. To lose the Democratic nomination would require of Obama a seismic cataclysm sufficient to make even Gary Hart wince. Still, Obama’s words have taken on a distorted Midas effect, transforming his once glittering image into a heap of junk metal. Forgive Clinton if she can’t stop thinking about tomorrow, and the allure of another Obama misstep.

Where the real intrigue develops is among the superdelegates who must determine in short order who will challenge Republican John McCain in the fall. The remarkable achievement of Obama’s famed reference to keystone state bumpkins clinging to guns and religion is that it allowed Clinton the political luxury of linking arms with blue-collar voters, a group she had previously known only from a safe distance.

But the impact of Obama’s words is, of course, deeper. At the urging of Obama and his assembled allies in television punditry, many Americans brushed aside concerns over the senator’s long association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the hypocrisy of the minister’s race-hustling hate. That, we suspect, is largely because Wright’s incendiary folly did not come from Obama’s lips.

Proof of Obama’s elitist bias came straight off the cuff in a San Francisco speech during which he made the disparaging remarks about gun toters and Bible thumpers: Because of job losses, “it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

After this, some began considering more seriously questions that should have been raised all along. Why would a man who aspires to be president of this country refuse to wear an American flag on his lapel? Free speech rights mean that Americans can toss flag pins into the sewer if they choose, but such behavior doesn’t match what we seek in the one who would lead us.

It leads us to wonder, at what point does Obama object when his minister of 20 years calls on God to damn America? And should that objection take the form of a shrug of the shoulders and more flowery speeches about all of us just getting along, or should it be expressed in a movement of the feet to another place of worship?

Campaign rigors have peeled away the layers of an Obama persona built on the myth that apart from all others he stood as a leader who could stretch America beyond ordinary partisan politics. Beneath stands a man of extraordinary contradictions with which Americans are growingly uncomfortable. We never sided with Obama’s policies, which in those rare instances when they appeared to us in the form of actual ideas rather than melodious maxims proved almost identical to her Democratic opponent’s, oriented around expansion of an already massive government. Still, the spirit of his oratory, at least, seemed commendable.

Until we learned more about the man behind words.

Those whose allegiance to Obama already has been won have awakened too late to the reality that the fiction of their candidate’s identity is significantly more alluring than the facts of it.