R e-entry after a longish vacation is always a disorienting time. You turn the key and have to push the door hard to get past the drifts of unopened mail. Most of the mail is bills, of course, and that brings on its own sense of delirium.
But for me what’s made the past few days especially bizarre is to find that, after two weeks of avoiding the news cycle, I return to discover that Barack Obama has become my president, prophet and anointed philosopher king — all without an election!
While dumping out heaps of sandy vacation laundry, I learn from NPR that “Barack Obama has left Jordan and is on his way to Israel,” as if his movements are already of such national import that we all need to know what he said before he got on the plane, at what time he’ll be airborne, and what he’s expected to say when he lands.
NPR believes I wish to know these things. I don’t, really. What I’d like to know is why nobody makes a fuss when John McCain goes overseas. We are a politically divided country, after all; half of us, give or take, vote Republican, and you’d think that broadcasters might remember those of us in the Other America.
In the past few days I’ve been repeatedly assured that our new leader-apparent is “burnishing his foreign policy credentials” (rather than creating them) on his fly-past of exotic distant locations.
And that is so much more interesting than the boring fact that Obama’s unsung rival already has foreign policy credentials. When Barack Obama was a callow teenager, John McCain had already seen the world; over 30 years he’s repeatedly visited Europe and Asia and Latin America and the Middle East. If any candidate knows foreign affairs, McCain does. And the world knows him — and likes him, too.
Even McCain’s old torturers in Vietnam are so impressed by his mettle that the chief Hanoi Hilton hotelier told the BBC he’d vote for him if he could. I guess we’d hear more about that if he weren’t merely an aging pretender to the throne.
I’m chopping tomatoes for dinner the first night back when C-SPAN tells me that Barack Obama has decided to give his coronation speech in an outdoor Denver venue vast enough to seat 81,000.
Why? One reason is, of course, to remind us all of the similarities between the dauphin and Camelot’s venerated dead king. JFK also gave such a speech, in such a place.
Another more cunning reason: The dauphin knows that he has only a few more courtier-delegates than the still-dangerous usurped Queen Hillary.
Put all their courtiers in one room, and the people might notice just how narrow his victory was. Drown the queen’s minions in a sea of tens of thousands of Obamaniacs, however, and the optics will delude.
Obama is the man who will be king, he is a foregone conclusion — and his noble visage is everywhere. As I’m throwing shoes into bins in our mud room, Obama’s face looks out from seemingly every one of the newspapers piled high in our absence. He’s always shot slightly from below, his eyes narrowing under the weight of his intelligence and his jaw jutting handsomely.
Having been away from Obama’s images in the media and the image-making around him for two weeks, I’m struck afresh with the way it all looks like propaganda. His photos seem straight from the pages of Pravda, as reprinted by The Washington Post and The New York Times. Even that astonishing New Yorker cover, which came out while we were at the beach, seems not to have dented Obama’s pixilated halo.
At last, though, some prominent journalists are getting queasy. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell expressed disquiet this week with the controlled footage from Obama’s trips to Iraq and Afghanistan, where he gave what she said “what some would call fake interviews,” to non-journalists. Of Obama’s message management, Mitchell said, “We’ve not seen a presidential candidate do this in my recollection ever before.”
But surely only a docile press lets a candidate get away with tactics like these. Is it any wonder that in a Rasmussen poll earlier this week, 49 percent of voters said they think reporters favor Obama in their coverage, and only 24 percent trust the press to report the election without bias?
