Le Monde, France

Obama – The Savior Superstar

By Corine Lesnes

Translated by Noga Emanuel

February 13, 2008

France - Le Monde - Original Article (French)

What started as a trickle, with an application for candidature, in Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln’s hometown, then turned into a flowing river in the Large Plains, fed by the thawed snows of Iowa. And the overflowing stream swelled into a tidal wave in the Carolinas, Georgia, Missouri, Idaho, and lifted up into a great collective foundry of all races and ages, white mammies, black mamies, trade unionists, rap singers, latte drinking Leftists... Nonetheless, some people found themselves cast off this great centrifugal movement and landed on the wayside… Well, then…

The United States is a country that prides itself on its insistence on the merits of individualism. Nothing is more embarrassing to this country than these great moments of collective obsession (shared, of course, with Superbowl frenzy), where every critical faculty appears to have been abandoned in the service of a universal pursuit. Some blogger compared the Obama phenomenon with the political media rollercoaster, which preceded the war in Iraq. If blindness has struck us, it is only for color, which was transcended in this presidential race.  But the media give the same impression of inexorable momentum, as if they knew the end of film before its screening ended.

This "Letter from America" is privileged to have escaped from the constrictions of objectivity. A divergent note, therefore, in the concert of Obama super-star. To clarify, finding criticisms of Obama requires certain doggedness. Even the Republicans have only praises. Never mind the neoconservatives, who seem to see in Obama’s international declarations a revalidation of their theories about  democratizing the world.

Sceptics can be found among the blogosphere analysts or in the Leftist economist Paul Krugman, who estimate that the senator is deluded in thinking that he will be able to negotiate amicably the price of healthcare with insurance companies... Or in the writings of black intellectuals who rebuke Barack Obama for allowing the idea that racism is no more than one problem in a society that had transcended it on the collective level.

The writer Kai Wright, for example, is  unaffected by Obamania. For him, Obama has contracted the White man’s malaise, which sincerely desires equality. But "the true fairy tale", is the belief that whites would be "ready to give up their privileges” in order to attain that equality.  Glen Ford, co-founder of the “Black Commentator”, does not understand how Barack Obama could say that Blacks already covered  "90% of the way to full equality" when the average income of a black family is a tenth that of a white family. "There are two places where one finds a 90% equality: in Basketball and in the prison system."

 The left, the “true Left”, is not duped. One of the anti-war main activists, Markos Moulitas, supports Barack Obama, but without the effusions.  "His speeches are beautiful, but, an hour later, one wonders whether he said anything substantial. And generally the answer is, not."

The anti war activists welcome his anti war positions in 2002, but, once he was elected, they cannot say that he stirred up much debate in the Senate by his speeches on Iraq. He voted for the ratification of the Patriot Act, for the law to build a "wall" at the Mexican border, and chose as mentor the hawkish Joe Lieberman. To the pacifists’ consternation, he wishes to increase the American army by 100 000 soldiers.

And finally there are the disbelievers, the political atheists. They are disturbed by Obama’s linguistic references to scriptures, which adorn his speeches. Joe Klein, of Time Magazine, called it the "mass messianism", that typifies the oratorical style of the televangelist: "WE are the CHANGE that we SEEK"... "Our time has come"... In the meetings, the politically "born again" activists await the invitation “to believe”, and they describe how they “came to” Obama. "When two activists rang my doorbell, I wondered whether they had taken “Ecstasy”, recently joked Joel Stein in the Los Angeles Times, “I was afraid that they might hug me."

Two days before super-Tuesday, in Los Angeles, Maria Shriver, the wife of the Republican governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger, explained how she had woken up one morning and heard a "call" which had impelled her to go to the general meeting with Barack Obama. "Excuse me, wrote Kathleen Geier, a supporter of the young senator. “But this language is more suited to a cult than to an election campaign."

In volunteer preparation courses for Obama, the acolytes are repeatedly directed not to speak about political issues  ("Go the Website"), but to share their experience. The idea is to recruit adherents by appealing to their emotions. Not for nothing was Barack Obama was a " community organizer".

Barack Obama can bring together stadiums packed with 20,000-strong crowds. He fascinates. According to author Shelby Steele, Obama offers White masses the possibility of redemption. "With Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the Whites felt white.  Obama cures them of the anxiety of being white."

Saviour, redeemer. America asks a lot from him.  Even the feminist Gloria Steinem needed to fictionalize him as a woman in order to demonstrate what she sees as gender bias (Achola would be her name)*.

This is much too much.  Barack Obama is but a human being, after all.

* [Translator’s Note: Steinem observed that unlike Obama, a fictional Achola Obama has been unable to achieve more than state legislator and would not be deemed electable. Senator Barack Obama could make that progress because of his gender, says Steinem.]