Andrew Klavan
A Fantasy Election, an Imaginary Man
Barack Obama has always been less real than dream—a media dream.
5 October 2012
Even before his inauguration, Barack Obama was an imaginary man, the creation of his admirers. Think back to the 2008 Time magazine cover depicting him as FDR, the Newsweek
cover of the same year on which he was shown casting Lincoln’s shadow,
or the $1.4 million Nobel Peace Prize awarded to him “for his
extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and
cooperation between peoples”—this in 2009, less than a year after he had
taken office. It was not that Obama had done nothing to deserve these
outsized comparisons and honors—it was not just that he had done
nothing—it was that he seemed for all the world to be a blank screen on
which such hysterical fantasies could too easily be projected, a
two-dimensional paper doll just waiting to be dressed in leftist dreams.
This weird quality of emptiness incited the imaginations of his
opponents as well. Among the more paranoid on the right, he’s been
called several kinds of Manchurian Candidate: a radical disguised as a
moderate, a Muslim disguised as a Christian, a foreigner disguised as an
American, and so on. The idea was that his hollow identity was his own
insidious creation, the result of sealed college records, votes of
“present” in the Illinois state senate, and a supra-partisan persona
carefully crafted after a scuttled lifetime of revolutionary ferocity.
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