A President’s job is to do political things, in case people are starting to forget. But if a reminder needs to go anywhere, it’s the White House itself, regarding perhaps the most (self-)glamorized president of all time.
After the 2008 elections, Newsweek‘s Evan Thomas had prescient words about President-elect Obama. “There is a slightly creepy cult of personality about all this … He’s clearly managing his own spectacle,” he said. Since then, Obama has maintained an image of coolness and virtue, or been given one by America’s institutions. Of course, he isn’t the only president who has gone out of his way to paint a favorable picture for himself. But no president has cultivated a personality cult like Obama.
Schoolchildren have sung praises to Obama to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic. MSNBC has hosted an entire debate on whether Obama’s face should be etched on Mt. Rushmore. The New York Times has “leaked” material before elections to prop up Obama’s image as a strong, swashbuckling leader. The First Lady, who can’t be detached from Obamania, exemplified the blending of politics with glitter when she presented the Academy Award for Best Picture this year.
Most recently, nine-year “Kid President” Robby Novak, who became famous in the lead-up to the 2012 elections with his viral videos, was finally adopted by the White House for April Fool’s Day, appearing behind the podium for “A Special Message From the President” when people expected Obama. He also co-announced, with Obama, the White House’s Easter Egg Roll, and was a special guest at the event. With that, the White House had successfully co-opted an pop cultural icon that could be associated with goodness and fun transcending partisan politics.
“Sexy” and “hip” aren’t words that we should be bothered about associating with political figures, but that’s the spectacle The Obama Phenomenon attempts to create, and that’s how our societal tendency of mixing everything with entertainment is manifesting itself in the political realm. We’re accepting personas being manufactured for political figures that judge them based on their integration into the cultural cool and their association with glamor ― not how it should be. The effort on the part of the USA to believe in Obama as a Great Leader-cum-Mr. Cool is evocative of personality cults created in dictatorships.
Such glitterization of politics is unhealthy for democracy. Enmeshing political figures with entertainment and glamor ― especially a political figure whose actions affect billions of people, who is responsible for making direct decisions about the lives and deaths of civilians ― renders politics frivolous. It fosters a setting in which the biggest things the country takes from the presidential debates are women full of binders and Big Bird. It turns anything the President does into a hollow spectacle, meant only to either contribute to or detract from his personality cult.
It also settles notions about political leaders that lead us to electing student body presidents who run on a platform of bringing more parties and concerts to campus. While, of course, we shouldn’t be alright with having perpetually lame-duck SBP’s who are little more than red-suited mascots for the administration, grinning and making wolf-gestures in front of the Bell Tower and making students feel represented.
Politics, whether here or in Washington, is becoming little more than a show. Everything isn’t in our hands, but some things are. Such as the power to turn off the tube when it becomes little more than an unconscious ad hominem propaganda vehicle for (or against) presidential awesomeness. And the power to take a stand against people immediately around us who don’t take a strong stance for student interests when it is their job to do so.
Politicians are not celebrities ― be they in the White House or on our campus ― and if we care about the ways in which, and whether at all, they act with regard to our lives, we shouldn’t regard them as celebrities.