The sad reality is that his family's image had to be carefully managed order for Obama's presidency to become a reality. It would have been very difficult for anything less than Huxtable-like perfection to keep the Obamas palatable to middle America. Even with the Obama family's nearly sterling image, Obama smears still got some traction in the sticks amongst those who think he's some sort of sinister, un-American, terrorist fist-jabbing secret Muslim who's not even an American citizen.
I guarantee you that if the Obamas looked like a black version of the Palin family (with questionable intellectual pedigree, teenage pregnancy, an uneducated spouse in a radical secessionist party, and close in-laws with predicate felonies and drug problems), the electorate would not have let Barack Obama anywhere near a major party nomination, let alone the presidency.
All politicians have to control their image. Mudslinging and character assassination has become so widespread that a tight control of all images are necessary. Negative campaigning continues to be used because it is far more effective than positive campaigns. Hillary has never really recovered since her Tammy Wynette remark back in 1992: it was the beginning of the right wing campaign to attack her [1].
Image control is critical because it shapes how people remember you (as a candidate). Not your issues. Not your positions. Not your history. Your image. All that left-brain/right-brain stuff can, and does, get used against you. It is identical to how words get manipulated - words like freedom and terrorism get used to control how you think and ultimately, prevent you from thinking at all [2].
I ran for election myself in 2008. I had never done so before, not even in college. I learned a lot, and managed to make just about every mistake possible [3]. In the end, I came in dead last.
After last year's experience, I now have a brand new answer for the null-question: "what is your greatest weakness?" My answer is that I discovered "I interview poorly."
1 - It is my opinion that if she got the presidential, or even vice presidential nomination in 2008, then McCain would have won because the vast majority of the GOP have been trained to loathe her, and there would have been zero GOP voters staying home that day.
2 - I'm reminded of one of PG's essays where he says: Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. By now these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they're mostly used ironically. But in their time, they had real force.
The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotations now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. At the start of World War II it was used extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence their opponents. In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 19.5 ms ] threadI guarantee you that if the Obamas looked like a black version of the Palin family (with questionable intellectual pedigree, teenage pregnancy, an uneducated spouse in a radical secessionist party, and close in-laws with predicate felonies and drug problems), the electorate would not have let Barack Obama anywhere near a major party nomination, let alone the presidency.
Image control is critical because it shapes how people remember you (as a candidate). Not your issues. Not your positions. Not your history. Your image. All that left-brain/right-brain stuff can, and does, get used against you. It is identical to how words get manipulated - words like freedom and terrorism get used to control how you think and ultimately, prevent you from thinking at all [2].
I ran for election myself in 2008. I had never done so before, not even in college. I learned a lot, and managed to make just about every mistake possible [3]. In the end, I came in dead last.
After last year's experience, I now have a brand new answer for the null-question: "what is your greatest weakness?" My answer is that I discovered "I interview poorly."
An example of defining images, some very staged, some spontaneous: http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/mirror-mirror-on-...
Notes:
1 - It is my opinion that if she got the presidential, or even vice presidential nomination in 2008, then McCain would have won because the vast majority of the GOP have been trained to loathe her, and there would have been zero GOP voters staying home that day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_Clinton#cite_not...
2 - I'm reminded of one of PG's essays where he says: Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. By now these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they're mostly used ironically. But in their time, they had real force.
The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotations now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. At the start of World War II it was used extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence their opponents. In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that.
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
3 - Without getting arrested, or in some sex scandal. I'm rather boring IRL.