Hi, Anjali. I think the way that you reframe Americans' intense interest in President Obama is really interesting--that this idolization is really a substitute (whether consciously designed or not) for getting over our apathy and actually educating ourselves about what policies Obama stands for. In many ways, fixating on Obama as a person is probably easier than actually learning about how his politics are relevant for the problems that America faces today. Personality cult is far from the idea that I'm comfortable associating with Obama's campaign, but I throw out that loaded phrase because I think it is important to recognize the many forces that have selectively amplified aspects of the "Obama package" (including his personality, background, constituency, and policies)--aspects that may not be so useful in assessing what Obama has and what Obama needs to have in order to actually fix the problems in our community. (And now to relieve my sense of guilt from associating Obama with a personality cult by way of elaboration, maybe we can take from this association that as dictator-designed media devices have served to elevate past leaders, Obama's image as this generation's new type of leader has been elevated by similarly powerful forces--and perhaps justifiably so.)

Maybe the driving force behind this process of idolization is Obama's symbolism--that is, Americans locate in the symbol of Obama many of the solutions to our community's problems without investing the necessary effort to discover whether there's more to the person of Obama than just the symbol. Certainly, the symbol carries with it things like hope, optimism, and maybe even the motivation to once again participate in political discussion. But if the symbol does not represent more concrete indications of how Obama will actually achieve his goals, then our captivation by the symbol may be misguided and even reckless.

I think Aaron's point fits well here--that it would be even more meaningful the day that a Bronx-raised black candidate becomes president. I wondered to myself why this would be, and I came up with some obvious points about the reality that race and economic and social capital have inextricably intertwined in our cumulative history of racial exclusion, and how an even more spectacular phenomenon than Obama would be a candidate who will have overcome all of these twines of disadvantage. But I think there might be a more subtle point--again, about the power of a symbol. I think that the symbol of Aaron's Bronx candidate would be meaningful not because the symbol primarily indicates a set of concrete policy goals and capabilities in a way that Obama's symbol primarily does not, but because the symbol of the Bronx candidate would be a symbol of our system actually changing. To piggyback on Aaron's point, then, the symbol of Obama is lacking in even another sense because his presidency tells a narrative that many black Americans do not share.

I think that this post has ultimately split into more than just a few tangents, but I'd just like to make the concluding tangent that maybe, in the end, I am suspicious of the symbol of Obama because I, like Walker, underestimate the power of the American--not in her capacity for apathy, but in her capacity to create meaningful change from hope alone. I remember a quote: "If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." Is this true?

-- JosephLu - 16 Feb 2009