by Norman Kelley

Created on: December 23, 2006   Last Updated: April 19, 2007

The New JFK?: Barack Obama, or
The Politics of Charismatic Vagueness

With less than two years under his belt as a United States senator from the Land of Lincoln, Barack Hussein Obama is viewed by many as presidential material. Such a view has probably increased exponentially in the aftermath of the Democrats' triumph over the Republicans in the recent congressional midterm elections. Very few people will deny that junior Senator Obama is an attractive prospect as a potential presidential candidate: He's light, bright, and half white, and possesses telegenic charisma, which makes him appealing to some who don't like squirming before the demands or accusations of black politicos such as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton or, God forbid, Louis Farrakhan.

There hasn't been this much excitement about a politician in the last forty, fifty years, Bill Clinton notwithstanding. Described by John McCain's senior adviser, Mark McKinnon, as a "walking, talking hope machine" who "may reshape American politics," Obama may well be this era's John F. Kennedy, a man who personifies hope, renewal, reconciliation, dynamism, and the willingness to go beyond slash-and-burn politics.

The child of a white mother and Kenyan father, Obama doesn't have the same African American pedigree as most blacks in the United States; he's not seen as weighted down with the social baggage of racial "grievances" attributed to other blacks and their political representatives in the post-civil rights regime where racism is of a bygone era. He transcends race by not reminding white Americans of that troublesome and unfinished business of race.

Or, as political commentator Harold Meyerson noted, Obama is "post-racial."

"For many people Obama symbolizes a kind of break through, in that he's not merely a crossover African-American politician, but also kind of 2.0," observes Meyerson, who writes for the Washington Post and acting editor of the American Prospect. Obama is also developing a "different emerging politics." (In Kenyan parlance, the senator would be known as a ".5" because of mixed heritage)

People relate to him, Meyerson thinks, because Obama's "post-racial identity" makes him a "Rorschach test" in which "people project onto him certain hopes for where America is headed."

The senator himself is aware of this projection, noting in his latest book: "I'm new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views."

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