Buying Brand Obama

Barack Obama is
a brand. And the Obama brand is designed to make us feel good about our
government while corporate overlords loot the Treasury, our elected
officials continue to have their palms greased by armies of corporate
lobbyists, our corporate media diverts us with gossip and trivia and
our imperial wars expand in the Middle East. Brand Obama is about being
happy consumers. We are entertained. We feel hopeful. We like our
president. We believe he is like us. But like all branded products spun
out from the manipulative world of corporate advertising, we are being
duped into doing and supporting a lot of things that are not in our
interest.

What, for all our faith and hope, has the Obama brand given us? His
administration has spent, lent or guaranteed $12.8 trillion in taxpayer
dollars to Wall Street and insolvent banks in a doomed effort to
reinflate the bubble economy, a tactic that at best forestalls
catastrophe and will leave us broke in a time of profound crisis. Brand
Obama has allocated nearly $1 trillion in defense-related spending and
the continuation of our doomed imperial projects in Iraq, where
military planners now estimate that 70,000 troops will remain for the
next 15 to 20 years. Brand Obama has expanded the war in Afghanistan,
including the use of drones sent on cross-border bombing runs into
Pakistan that have doubled the number of civilians killed over the past
three months. Brand Obama has refused to ease restrictions so workers
can organize and will not consider single-payer, not-for-profit health
care for all Americans. And Brand Obama will not prosecute the Bush
administration for war crimes, including the use of torture, and has
refused to dismantle Bush's secrecy laws or restore habeas corpus.

Brand Obama offers us an image that appears radically
individualistic and new. It inoculates us from seeing that the old
engines of corporate power and the vast military-industrial complex
continue to plunder the country. Corporations, which control our
politics, no longer produce products that are essentially different,
but brands that are different. Brand Obama does not threaten the core
of the corporate state any more than did Brand George W. Bush. The Bush
brand collapsed. We became immune to its studied folksiness. We saw
through its artifice. This is a common deflation in the world of
advertising. So we have been given a new Obama brand with an exciting
and faintly erotic appeal. Benetton and Calvin Klein were the
precursors to the Obama brand, using ads to associate themselves with
risque art and progressive politics. It gave their products an edge.
But the goal, as with all brands, was to make passive consumers mistake
a brand with an experience.

"The abandonment of the radical economic foundations of the women's
and civil-rights movements by the conflation of causes that came to be
called political correctness successfully trained a generation of
activists in the politics of image, not action," Naomi Klein wrote in
"No Logo."

Obama, who has become a global celebrity, was molded easily into a
brand. He had almost no experience, other than two years in the Senate,
lacked any moral core and could be painted as all things to all people.
His brief Senate voting record was a miserable surrender to corporate
interests. He was happy to promote nuclear power as "green" energy. He
voted to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He reauthorized the
Patriot Act. He would not back a bill designed to cap predatory credit
card interest rates. He opposed a bill that would have reformed the
notorious Mining Law of 1872. He refused to support the single-payer
health care bill HR676, sponsored by Reps. Dennis Kucinich and John
Conyers. He supported the death penalty. And he backed a class-action
"reform" bill that was part of a large lobbying effort by financial
firms. The law, known as the Class Action Fairness Act, would
effectively shut down state courts as a venue to hear most class-action
lawsuits and deny redress in many of the courts where these cases have
a chance of defying powerful corporate challenges.

While Gaza was being bombarded and hit with airstrikes in the weeks
before Obama took office, "the Obama team let it be known that it would
not object to the planned resupply of 'smart bombs' and other hi-tech
ordnance that was already flowing to Israel," according to Seymour
Hersh. Even his one vaunted anti-war speech as a state senator, perhaps
his single real act of defiance, was swiftly reversed. He told the
Chicago Tribune on July 27, 2004, that "there's not that much
difference between my position and George Bush's position at this
stage. The difference, in my mind, is who's in a position to execute."
And unlike anti-war stalwarts like Kucinich, who gave hundreds of
speeches against the war, Obama then dutifully stood silent until the
Iraq war became unpopular.

Obama's campaign won the vote of hundreds of marketers, agency heads
and marketing-services vendors gathered at the Association of National
Advertisers' annual conference in October. The Obama campaign was named
Advertising Age's marketer of the year for 2008 and edged out
runners-up Apple and Zappos.com. Take it from the professionals. Brand
Obama is a marketer's dream. President Obama does one thing and Brand
Obama gets you to believe another. This is the essence of successful
advertising. You buy or do what the advertiser wants because of how
they can make you feel.

Celebrity culture has leeched into every aspect of our culture,
including politics, to bequeath to us what Benjamin DeMott called "junk
politics." Junk politics does not demand justice or the reparation of
rights. Junk politics personalizes and moralizes issues rather than
clarifying them. "It's impatient with articulated conflict,
enthusiastic about America's optimism and moral character, and heavily
dependent on feel-your-pain language and gesture," DeMott noted. The
result of junk politics is that nothing changes - "meaning zero
interruption in the processes and practices that strengthen existing,
interlocking systems of socioeconomic advantage." It redefines
traditional values, tilting "courage toward braggadocio, sympathy
toward mawkishness, humility toward self-disrespect, identification
with ordinary citizens toward distrust of brains." Junk politics
"miniaturizes large, complex problems at home while maximizing threats
from abroad. It's also given to abrupt unexplained reversals of its own
public stances, often spectacularly bloating problems previously
miniaturized." And finally, it "seeks at every turn to obliterate
voters' consciousness of socioeconomic and other differences in their
midst."

An image-based culture, one dominated by junk politics,
communicates through narratives, pictures and carefully orchestrated
spectacle and manufactured pseudo-drama. Scandalous affairs,
hurricanes, earthquakes, untimely deaths, lethal new viruses, train
wrecks-these events play well on computer screens and television.
International diplomacy, labor union negotiations and convoluted
bailout packages do not yield exciting personal narratives or
stimulating images. A governor who patronizes call girls becomes a huge
news story. A politician who proposes serious regulatory reform,
universal health care or advocates curbing wasteful spending is boring.
Kings, queens and emperors once used their court conspiracies to divert
their subjects. Today cinematic, political and journalistic celebrities
distract us with their personal foibles and scandals. They create our
public mythology. Acting, politics and sports have become, as they were
during the reign of Nero, interchangeable.

In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant
emotional gratification, we do not seek reality. Reality is
complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle
its confusion. We ask to be indulged and comforted by cliches,
stereotypes and inspirational messages that tell us we can be whoever
we seek to be, that we live in the greatest country on Earth, that we
are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities, and that our
future will always be glorious and prosperous, either because of our
own attributes, or our national character, or because we are blessed by
God. Reality is not accepted as an impediment to our desires. Reality
does not make us feel good.

In his book "Public Opinion," Walter Lippmann distinguished between
"the world outside and the pictures in our heads." He defined a
"stereotype" as an oversimplified pattern that helps us find meaning in
the world. Lippmann cited examples of the crude "stereotypes we carry
about in our heads" of whole groups of people such as "Germans," "South
Europeans," "Negroes," "Harvard men," "agitators" and others. These
stereotypes, Lippmann noted, give a reassuring and false consistency to
the chaos of existence. They offer easily grasped explanations of
reality and are closer to propaganda because they simplify rather than
complicate.

Pseudo-events-dramatic productions orchestrated by publicists,
political machines, television, Hollywood or advertisers-however, are
very different. They have, as Daniel Boorstin wrote in "The Image: A
Guide to Pseudo-Events in America," the capacity to appear real even
though we know they are staged. They are capable, because they can
evoke a powerful emotional response, of overwhelming reality and
replacing reality with a fictional narrative that often becomes
accepted truth. The unmasking of a stereotype damages and often
destroys its credibility. But pseudo-events, whether they show the
president in an auto plant or a soup kitchen or addressing troops in
Iraq, are immune to this deflation. The exposure of the elaborate
mechanisms behind the pseudo-event only adds to its fascination and its
power. This is the basis of the convoluted television reporting on how
effectively political campaigns and politicians have been
stage-managed. Reporters, especially those on television, no longer ask
if the message is true but if the pseudo-event worked or did not work
as political theater. Pseudo-events are judged on how effectively we
have been manipulated by illusion. Those events that appear real are
relished and lauded. Those that fail to create a believable illusion
are deemed failures. Truth is irrelevant. Those who succeed in
politics, as in most of the culture, are those who create the brands
and pseudo-events that offer the most convincing fantasies. And this is
the art Obama has mastered.

A public that can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction is
left to interpret reality through illusion. Random facts or obscure
bits of data and trivia are used to bolster illusion and give it
credibility or are discarded if they interfere with the message. The
worse reality becomes-the more, for example, foreclosures and
unemployment skyrocket-the more people seek refuge and comfort in
illusions. When opinions cannot be distinguished from facts, when there
is no universal standard to determine truth in law, in science, in
scholarship, or in reporting the events of the day, when the most
valued skill is the ability to entertain, the world becomes a place
where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to
believe. This is the real danger of pseudo-events and why pseudo-events
are far more pernicious than stereotypes. They do not explain reality,
as stereotypes attempt to, but replace reality. Pseudo-events redefine
reality by the parameters set by their creators. These creators, who
make massive profits peddling these illusions, have a vested interest
in maintaining the power structures they control.

The old production-oriented culture demanded what the historian
Warren Susman termed character. The new consumption-oriented culture
demands what he called personality. The shift in values is a shift from
a fixed morality to the artifice of presentation. The old cultural
values of thrift and moderation honored hard work, integrity and
courage. The consumption-oriented culture honors charm, fascination and
likability. "The social role demanded of all in the new culture of
personality was that of a performer," Susman wrote. "Every American was
to become a performing self."

The junk politics practiced by Obama is a consumer fraud. It is
about performance. It is about lies. It is about keeping us in a
perpetual state of childishness. But the longer we live in illusion,
the worse reality will be when it finally shatters our fantasies. Those
who do not understand what is happening around them and who are
overwhelmed by a brutal reality they did not expect or foresee search
desperately for saviors. They beg demagogues to come to their rescue.
This is the ultimate danger of the Obama Brand. It effectively masks
the wanton internal destruction and theft being carried out by our
corporate state. These corporations, once they have stolen trillions in
taxpayer wealth, will leave tens of millions of Americans bereft,
bewildered and yearning for even more potent and deadly illusions, ones
that could swiftly snuff out what is left of our diminished open
society.