Who is the real Barack Obama?

When Barack Obama first started campaigning for the democratic nomination his name was synonymous with popular, vital politics. In Ohio, where the Clintons enjoyed the almost total control of the Democratic political apparatus, Obama's backers mounted a campaign using as "database" a list of laundromats's and hair dressers's clients. He didn't win Ohio, but for somebody starting from scratch his performance was just short of spectacular.

The enthusiasm elicited by Obama's candidacy was clear in the sudden politization of very young people: sometimes as young as six, seven years old. In some places in California, kids went to school wearing Obama's t-shirts. The movement was, if anything, spontaneous. Its effects shocked the democratic establishment. The politics of the apparatus was confronted with a wave of militants that Obama was recruiting right and left. Most of the time, he or his people were not even recruiting. Obama's supporters just showed up or started campaigning on their own. And Obama's speeches many times reflected this reality: he talked about mobilization, community, and people on the street. (In Ohio, Obama voters marched to the polls cutting the flow of traffic in the streets). The press first welcomed this breeze of fresh political air. But when became clear that Obama will clinch the democratic nomination, things started to change. By the end of the Democratic primary the media launched a vast program of domestication of the wild candidate.


This process of co-optation started the same night of Obama's triumph over Hillary Clinton. For more than a week after the election, NBC, CNN and other big media corporations, run programs and analysis of the primary election that turn all around the question of how was that Hillary Clinton has lost. Everything was about the mistakes that Hillary made, the stubbornness of her advisors, the arrogance that doomed her campaign, the lack of due attention to caucuses etc. Barack Obama did not win. Hillary Clinton lost.

It is true that Obama became more "presidential" after clinching the democratic nomination. But the media had made a point of ignoring the less conventional aspects of his candidacy. Instead we hear, now and then, reports about the "enthusiasm" elicited by Obama among young voters, a description soon followed by doubts about these young people actually showing up on election day. Even when Republicans attack Barack Obama asking "who is the real Barack Obama"?, they don't have in mind the street organizer (as one Republican voter put it in a TV interview: he worked to gave houses to people who could not make the payments), but rather a very petty-bourgeois system of associations that connect a former "terrorist" to a living room in Chicago. Obama is never attacked by his militant, radical liberal past (let's hope that also present). Some people don't even want to hear that these things are actually possible.

The Barack Obama representing a rhetoric of popular participation has vanished (or perhaps it has been banished) from the media. This teaches us a lesson in methodology. The system starts its work very early. As all those who live in the land of the free know, sometimes, as early as kindergarten. It seems that they couldn't get Obama at that early age. But they are going after him now.