Obama on the Trail

Here in Chesapeake, Barack Obama offers up the same milky hodgepodge of middle-class tax cuts, investment in alternative fuels and consequences for job exporters and terrorists. And rhetorically, he uses the same old magic trick for his main theme, talking about how all Americans want is to leave a better world for their children.

"That's the essence of the American Dream," he tells the crowd, echoing his predecessors. He goes on to tell the already-famous story of John McCain's seven houses, then explains that someone who has seven houses can't possibly understand what the middle class is going through. "You need a president who's going to be fighting for you," Obama says, to thunderous applause. He concludes by declaring, "We are going to fundamentally bring about change in America" — a message punctuated by the huge banner hanging behind him, emblazoned with his infuriatingly omnipresent campaign slogan: "Change We Can Believe In." Obama has even taken to borrowing some of his theme music from other candidates: I was mortified when his rallies began to feature the worst of the Hillary standbys, the excruciating "I Won't Back Down" by Tom Petty. The painful predictability of it all was summed up by a front-page headline in The New York Times after the first day of the Democratic convention: "Appeals Evoking American Dream Rally Democrats."

All of this saccharine talk of "change" is so transparently a mechanical come-on that if it were anybody but Barack Obama uttering the word, you'd want to throw up at the very sound of it. And yet, as I watch Obama deliver the same hackneyed act I've seen hundreds of times before, I feel against my will that I am actually watching something different at work. After Kerry and Dean speeches, I often heard people say things like, "At least he's not as dumb as Bush." But after Obama speeches, I see audience members stumbling around in all directions with orgiastic smiles on their faces, as though they've been splashed with gallons of magic pixie paint. In Raleigh, North Carolina, where Obama knocked dead a massive town-hall crowd at a local fairgrounds with a speech that said almost nothing at all, I ask a woman named Melanie Threatt why she thinks her life would improve under an Obama presidency. "It just will," she says. When I press her for specifics, she says, "I just think doors are going to open." You hear stuff like this a lot on Planet Obama, and it makes you wonder just what it is you're encountering. Obama's followers implicitly believe in the things he says, and the fervor of their belief is more religious than intellectual, closer to faith than to reason. Watching him at work, you realize that Obama's remarkable success has almost nothing to do with the same-old product being marketed by the same-old political machine, and almost everything to do with the specific qualities of the individual who is selling it. The same stuff that sounded like hollow, invidious horseshit coming from Kerry and Gore sounds, as dispensed by Obama, like nothing less than a clarion call to collective action. And every time you feel his pitch working, you wonder: Is this some chat-room robot I'm falling in love with? Or is this an actual human being on the line, offering me an opportunity at last to fulfill my deepest desires?

Such, it seems, are the pitfalls of both love and politics in the Internet Age. Too many embarrassing false steps make it hard to take that leap one more time.

One thing that makes the cult of Obama difficult to dissect is the method of its dissemination. The technology of campaign propaganda has advanced to such a degree that the concept of campaign-trail "journalism" is now indistinguishable from corporate PR. The wall that once separated campaign staff from the press corps has broken down completely; those paid by the candidate and those covering him might as well be two different shifts on the same factory ship, working together to bring the world frozen fish patties by the ton. On the shimmering 757 that Obama uses to jet around the country, reporters have plastered the press section in the rear of the plane with cheery, offbeat photographs of themselves captured with campaign staffers in various goofy scenes (clowning with boom poles, quaffing beers, drooling while asleep on buses). The collage seems lifted straight from a high school yearbook; the press might as well have titled it "Our Cool Campaign."

Maybe it's natural that a certain camaraderie would develop between staffers and the press, given that the two groups are prisoners in the same campaign jail for months at a time. The constant Secret Service security protocol leaves everyone On the Bus roped off from all external human contact from morning till night; at the events in between, the press is often kept in windowless rooms behind closed doors or curtains, where reporters sit and listen to the candidate's speeches fed in via loudspeaker. This hilarious setup makes it possible for so-called "political journalists" to cover a candidate without (a) seeing him, (b) seeing his audiences and (c) receiving any information at all that is not fed to them directly by the campaign. On one recent swing through the South, I actually witness a reporter sitting in a concrete filing room during a town-hall session, checking his BlackBerry for an e-mail from the campaign staff to find out what town he is in.