From the perspective of Oscar Sunday, Thursday's Democratic debate seemed to offer up exactly the kind of psychologically complex narrative relished by the Academy. Clinton would get the award nomination this year for something like "powerfully dramatizing the muted emotional depths of a long closing act, for bringing to the screen a not entirely likable character that audiences came to feel compassion for nonetheless." Clinton's much-talked-about final soliloquy-- "We're gonna be okay," etc-- was one of those scenes where the "fourth wall" falls away and the audience shares a sudden realization with the characters on the screen about what's actually been happening all along.
Throughout the campaign, the topic of the Obama cult of personality mostly has been relegated to the comments section of the blogosphere or waved at with humorous feelers in the mainstream media. Obama-mania has been treated as a measure of both the candidate's personal charisma and the flightiness of his fans. In Texas, however, it was the ghost haunting the stage, waiting in the wings for the thunderous round of applause that would serve as its cue. Clinton has tried and failed time and again to address the ghost in her own way. "Let's get real," was her latest attempt. Problem is this ghost is real. You can't fake fandom anymore than you can wish or reason it away.
Ironically, this same issue is what still divides Americans when it comes to discussing Hillary's other favorite ghost, the legacy of Ronald Reagan. It was during his presidency as it is still: you either love him or you just don't understand. College Republicans in the 80s sprang up everywhere, real-world Alex P. Keatons who embraced supply-side economics for life before earning a penny themselves just because they loved the way Reagan talked about it. As with Obama, none of the Hillary-style regular messy business of Washington would stick to Reagan, even though as president he was supposed to be at the heart of it. His perpetual lack of besmirchment enraged people who saw him fumbling this and that policy, taking this wrong turn and that wrong turn, running up the deficit, trading arms for hostages, spotlessly bungling his way through the middle of the mess he seemed to be making all around.
Obama is increasingly drawing the same variety of frustrated comments that Reagan drew. ChaunceyGardiner, the simple-minded Peter Sellarscharacter in the movie Being There who rises to fame and fortune on a wave of mediated adoration, has re-entered the cultural discourse. As even the Clinton team is admitting, everything they throw at Obama either slides off or comes back at them. Obama mania, like Reagan love, has to do with faith in the person, the way ideas manifest in the personality, which is why the matter of "issues" and "experience" is read so differently by supporters and detractors. This is why it makes perfect sense to both sides that an Obamatron state senator, for example, can find himself on a television news show surprised to be asked about the candidate's legislative accomplishments. "You don't understand," is the basic response, "Obama's a different kind of person than all of that and thank God for it." When such incidents fail to translate to a dip in Obama's and a boost in Hillary's popularity, Clintonites' eyes spin in their heads. Fact is, all along the Clinton camp has been taking a mis-measure of the man.
The question since Iowa for the Clinton camp has been how to recast the narrative of the campaign. Clinton has dramatically failed to so because she hasn't fully understood it. While he is stirring people's weary hearts, she is repeating accusations, talking about plagiarism-- and getting booed for doing so. Her advisors have been entreating her to strongly answer the question about how exactly a President Clinton would be different that a President Obama-- a simple question with no right answer, it turns out, for it goes to the heart of the whole campaign and why it has impossibly run away from her. Clinton defines herself through her dedication to the mainstream Democratic vision of our country and the policies she believes will realize that vision. As has been clear in debate after debate, however, Obama shares her dedication to the vision and has put forward nearly identical positions on most all of the policies that matter. The only difference she can rightly emphasize between the two of them is that she has supporters but that he somehow has followers; that she can make policy but that he somehow has made a movement. No wonder her team has been flummoxed in the quest to draw distinctions.
None of this bodes well for McCain, the political maverick and product of the west, the strong and comparatively silent type. McCain has long impressed but never for his adeptness in the realm of philosophical nuance, never for argumentative lyricism, never for the ability to articulate that which is difficult to articulate. Indeed, so far in approaching Obama, he's merely using Clinton's failed feints. Thrown alone into the colosseum with Obama at last, McCain may find the empire is turning-- red state, blue state, white men, independents, fiscal conservatives, young people, black folks and soon the Latinos ("Si, se puede!")-- large swaths of the crowd suddenly cheering the side they for so long have either jeered or ignored. Obama has said he's not in this to represent 50 percent of the population, to win the support of a slim majority of American voters and then pretend that's a mandate for anything but continued division. No, he says he wants to bring us all on board. The Obama message is of political peace and productivity and it's a message that only resonates the more people sing it out. In other words, the Obama campaign more openly than any campaign since Reagan's, or before that, Kennedy's, is not about the issues--not about health care and stem cells and recession and Iraq-- that will all come later. The campaign is about winning people over to a new way. That it has caught on to the extent that it has is unquestionably due to Obama and, in that respect, he has already succeeded in demonstrating his "qualifications" in the minds of his supporters. Thanks to him, they can believe again in something new, which is a kind of miracle after the beating the country's collective faith has taken by the gladiator "liberals" and "conservatives" lo these many years.
All of this is now beyond worrisome to the Clinton camp, as it should be to the McCain-aanites. But in an era when late-model supply-siders have destroyed the economy and Cold War warriors have latched on to a new worldwide threat to our physical security and way of life, the question is: Should it be worrisome to all of the rest of us as well?