At the beginning of 2008, the BBC’s Washington correspondent Katty Kay remarked that the United States was “like a giant book club.” Americans voted for their favorite literary genre and could choose between Barack’s ballads, Huckabee’s haikus, Rudy [Giuliani]’s rap, Hillary’s heroic monologues, and so on. And the presidential campaign really did take the form of a competition between narrative genres and not just narratives. And it was the epic that emerged victorious. “Obama’s epic wins.” That is how the New York Times hailed Barack Obama’s electoral victory. It was not just an epic or legendary victory, but a victory for the epic genre itself. For the first time, a literary genre was elected by universal suffrage and entered the White House, and its entrance was as unlikely as the sudden appearance of Gogol’s “nose” on the streets of St. Petersburg.
Taking her cue from former Governor of New York Mario Cuomo, Hillary Clinton had tried to argue that “You campaign with poetry, but you govern with prose.” Her rhetoric was brilliant, but it was out of step with the times. Obama campaigned in prose and not in poetry, and it was a very narrative prose. The first words he uttered on the night of his first victory in Iowa on January 3, 2008, were borrowed from the epic register: “They said this day would never come…” His words echoed Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” and sounded like the beginning of a story. It was a story of personal courage and devotion to the nation, a story capable of embodying an individual destiny and inspiring crowds. The aura of predestination surrounding Obama’s charismatic personality suddenly crystallized in “this determining moment in history.” And when they talked about it, commentators spontaneously adopted the lexicon of revelation, with talk of legendary words, a man of destiny, and a historic election. Obama’s sudden appearance in the early stages of the campaign put an end to the chronicle of a nomination foretold—that of Hillary Clinton—and introduced a new narrative tension and heightened the suspense because the outcome was unknown.
“The outsized power of the personal narrative today compared with even a generation ago … reflects something that has become a cliché in political analysis,” observes Newsweek’s Sharon Begley. “Emotions, more than a dispassionate and rational analysis of candidates’ records and positions, determine many voters’ choice on election day.” She cites the famous neuroscientist Antonio Damasio as saying that, when Roosevelt was making radio addresses, “people had the time needed for reflection, to mix emotion with facts and reason. But now, with 24-hour cable news and the Web, you have a climate in which you don’t have time to reflect … Voters are being driven by pure like and dislike, comfort or discomfort with a personality … And voters judge that by a candidate’s narrative.”1
Novelists know all about feelings of like or dislike, and comfort or discomfort. These are the feelings they inspire in their readers. If the novel works, the feelings associated with this or that character change from one situation to the next, and they come into conflict or are reconciled, but they always find their place in a reconstructed narrative order with which the reader can empathize. Ultimately, that empathy works to the advantage of the narrator by giving him or her credibility.
The credibility of the narrator is therefore the key to a narrative’s performativity, both in literature and in politics. But while credibility is, in literary terms, a reading-effect, the credibility of a narrator who is involved in an election campaign is constantly under threat and can be destroyed by a rumor or calumny. The Democratic primaries were the theater for competing narratives.
Jean Baudrillard would have greatly enjoyed the “Warholian” moment in the campaign when Hillary Clinton, who was doing badly in the polls, described Obama’s proposals for change as a Xerox copy: “If your candidacy is going to be about words, they should be your words. Lifting whole passages is not change you can believe in, it’s change you can Xerox.”
The accusation of plagiarism marked an escalation in the attempt to deny the legitimacy of the Democratic candidate. It was not aimed at the candidate’s life or personality, his human qualities or his political expertise. There were no revelations about his conduct during the war in Vietnam (Kerry), his sexual peccadilloes (Clinton), his alcoholism (Bush), or any other episode in his biography. But doubt was cast on his ability to tell stories and his credibility as a storyteller.
The argument was, at bottom, specious, as Obama was one of the few candidates in American political history to write his own speeches. That, however, was not the point. “That’s the difference between my Democratic opponent and me,” declared Clinton. “I offer solutions.” In reply, Obama treated her to a lesson in rhetoric: “Don’t tell me words don’t count. ‘I have a dream.’ Just words. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ Just words. ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ Just words. Just speeches.”
Was the Democratic primary a contest between two visions of campaigning, one based upon programs and actions, and the other of dreams and words? Was one waged “with prose,” and one “with poetry,” as Hillary Clinton put it? What better story could there be than that of the return of the Clintons to the White House after George W. Bush’s two terms in office? That would have been a story about nostalgia for the 1990s and, for the American middle classes, it would have been about the return of peace and prosperity. But it reckoned without Obama’s story, which would contrast nostalgia for the Clinton era with the aspiration towards change and celebrate the “rainbow” story of reconciliation that could unite a divided America. One nation. One narration. So what was the point of contrasting experience with change, concrete projects with vague promises, the real with the virtual, and actions with words, when Obama’s campaign drew its strength from a story about change incarnate, or in other words from both a promise and a plot? In performative terms, the only way to ruin Obama’s story was to undermine his credibility as a storyteller. This is an old criticism that has often been addressed to postcolonial writers and hybrid literatures; it raises doubts about the authenticity of the texts, but it also queries whether “ex-colonials” can have an “original” and “authentic” identity. If you did not write these speeches, then who inspired them? Who the hell wrote them? Why should we believe these fine stories, even if they are charming? It was insinuated that Senator Obama’s candidacy was based on the strength of his rhetoric and promises, but that he did not keep his promises and that his rhetoric was not his own.
Political campaigns now take place in a performative space in which stories matter more than political programs, and in which the qualities required of a candidate have been displaced from the administrative, juridical, economic, or ethical field towards that of rhetoric. Political skills have given way to fictional competence, and presidential legitimacy to the credibility of a storyteller. And that credibility is acquired not only by making speeches, but from electoral combat, which now takes the form of verbal jousting and challenges.
Once Hillary Clinton’s advisers had distilled doubts about the authenticity of Obama’s speeches about change, the Clinton clan tried to cast aspersions on his virility. Had he more or less cojones than Hillary, a woman who does, as her most fervent supporters tell us, have them? Despite its apparent vulgarity, the affair deserves our attention. James Carville was so bold as to tell Newsweek that “If she gave him one of her cojones, they’d both have two.”2 Whilst it betrays a certain desperation, the attack is not as far-fetched as it might seem. Bush’s America had become accustomed to martial posturing, and perhaps the election would be decided by the candidate’s habitus. Would he be a fighter or a negotiator? A dreamer or a macho man? At a meeting in New York, and in the presence of the senator, union boss Paul Gibson described Clinton as having “testicular fortitude.” This is a form of competition that not even Lewis Carroll could have imagined, even though he dreamed up the memorably absurd “caucus race”: the cojones caucus. New York Times oped columnist Maureen Dowd asked “¿Quién es less macho?”3 and the Guardian’s Nicholas Mills described the primaries in North Carolina and Indiana as “the testosterone primaries.”4 Mike Easley, the governor of North Carolina—a state that was eventually won by Barack Obama—justified his support for Clinton by comparing her with Rocky Balboa, the boxer played by Sylvester Stallone: “She makes Rocky Balboa look like a pansy. There is nothing I like more than a strong powerful woman.”5
We know that “sex” and “gender” are two different things. “Femininity” and “virility” are not so much “biological characteristics” of the two sexes as socially constructed “markers.” But perhaps not sufficient emphasis has been placed on the extent to which these characteristics have become unstable in the era of what Judith Butler calls the “politics of the performative.” They are displaced by the performance of those who choose them. If we look at the two Democratic candidates, we find that the sexual “poles” have been reversed to a certain extent. The female candidate played on the signs of virility, if not machismo: expertise, competence, experience, endurance, rationality … while the man displayed signs that tend to be associated with the “female” pole: charisma or even charm, the values of dialogue and compromise rather than those of confrontation, the promise of change rather than the lessons of experience, hope rather than expertise, elegance rather than endurance, and, as Hillary complained, the lyricism of campaigning rather than the prose of good governance.
Norman Mailer said of the 1960 Democratic convention, which endorsed John F. Kennedy as the party’s candidate, that it “began as one mystery and ended as another.”6 The same could be said of the 2008 Republican convention, the only difference being that it began with a hurricane and ended with an apparition. The apparition was Sarah Palin, who came from the far North with her Down syndrome baby and her pregnant daughter to redeem America. In 1960, Mailer analyzed the American soul, which was, in his view, typified by the “double life” his fellow citizens had been leading since the First World War. Their real, concrete political life was fact-based and incredibly boring, but there was also “the second American life, the long electric night with the fires of neon leading down the highway to the murmur of jazz.” Mailer summed up the situation thus: “mysteries are irritated by facts.” After George W. Bush’s two terms in office, the American imaginary’s combination of ecstasy and violence had reached such a degree of concentration that it made possible a phenomenon as unlikely as Sarah Palin’s sudden appearance on the political scene. The press laughed at her lack of preparation, but it did make her stand out from the professional politicians from Washington. The McCain team was criticized for the inadequacies of its vetting procedures, but miracles do not need to be vetted. And Sarah Palin was either a (media) miracle or, which boils down to the same thing, a dramatic persona.
Being an expert on such things, Barack Obama immediately identified the nature of the “phenomenon” when he said: “Palin is a great story.” Being a story means displaying all the signs of the fable.
As Joe Klein pointed out in Time magazine, Sarah Palin could be seen as a new incarnation of the old Reagan-style myth of small-town America and represented the brave, honest heroes “who do some of the hardest work in America, who grow our food and fight our wars.”7 But Sarah Palin also had other cards up her sleeve. She was a composite figure who could reflect the myriad facets of a volatile and scattered electorate. She embodied conservatism and change, religion and marketing. She was both a mother and a liberated woman. Sarah hit the headlines, and that is what she was asked to do by her reader-voters: “Astonish me! Give me suspense and a plot.” The lesson of this campaign was, as David Brooks wrote in the New York Times, that “weirdness wins.” And Palin was weird. Like any star of a reality TV show, she was as transgressive as anyone could wish. She was intriguing and disturbing. She was the source of scandals and polemics, and as much a “buzz-maker” as a “myth-maker.” She “electrifies the GOP and galvanizes the twitterati,” wrote Wired magazine.8 She was a mother, and she was sexy. A macho mama. Sister Sarah and Sexy Palin. “Here was McCain, the angry old warrior, deploying sex as a central political weapon to recharge his potency,” wrote Joann Wypijewski in The Nation.9 The Republicans had not chosen just any woman to win over women voters who had been disappointed by Hillary Clinton’s withdrawal from the campaign. They had chosen a woman who was also a sex symbol. Ever since their anti-gay crusade, Christian fundamentalists had learned throughout the 1970s to use the sex weapon on behalf of the heterosexual family. They held out “mind-blowing sex as God’s special gift,” and this was, according to Wypijewski, a godsend for “a multimillion dollar industry in Christian sex guides, aids, toys, soft-core porn … promoting a particular image of married women as sex machine.” Never before had the construction of a major political figure or the image of a mother been so closely associated with pornographic fantasies. Rush Limbaugh, a radio broadcaster with one of the biggest audiences in the country, was one of the first to encourage Palin to run in February. He could not hide his satisfaction: “Sarah Palin, babies, guns, Jesus. Hot damn!”
“This is the only time to compare the two candidates side by side,” noted David Axelrod on the eve of the final debate in the campaign, which would confirm what had become apparent in previous debates: Obama’s strategy was one of differentiation rather than confrontation. And the distance between the two candidates for the presidency of the United States had never looked greater. The difference was of course stylistic as well as generational. But the difference between the candidates’ political “age” was much more important than their biological age difference. They stood on opposite sides of a divide that could not be measured purely in terms of years. Two Americas and two worlds were staring at one another in incredulity, and one of them was on its way out. McCain belonged to the Gutenberg galaxy, and his heroes, like those of the Hemingway he admired, were of pen and ink, and hewn from the marble of lived experience. They were rugged and stony. Obama was from Planet Internet. He was a man on the move and a man with multiple loyalties. He was a “liquid” hero, and still in the process of evolving. Elegance and eloquence were not his only trump cards. He owed his victory to a war machine that could be defined as a new model for campaigning. Like the four sides of a magic square, it combined four functions:
•Tell a story that can construct the candidate’s narrative identity (storyline).
•Make history an integral part of the campaign, manage its rhythms and its narrative tension throughout the campaign (timing).
•Frame the candidate’s ideological message, or in other words frame the debate, as recommended by the linguist Georges Lakoff, by using a “coherent register of language” and “creating metaphors” (framing).
•Create the network on the Internet and on the ground, or in other words create a hybrid and contagious environment that can capture the attention of the candidate’s audience and structure that audience (networking).
Obama and McCain drew over the first point. Both had written memoirs, and their titles (Faith of My Fathers, Dreams from My Father) winked at each other ironically. The candidates’ stories had become key elements in their election campaigns. Every episode in the life of a candidate is the narrative atom of a political identity. A presidential character is a narrative personified, and a performer. Political conventions are his stage. The same was true of McCain, but it was in Denver that this became really obvious. “All the speeches seem to have been written by the same storyteller,” remarked Le Monde’s correspondent Corinne Lesnes with some irony. Barack Obama’s half-sister Maya Soetero-Ng talked about their mother, who was a storyteller. His wife Michelle made the story of their two families part of the family saga of middle-class America: “Isn’t this an American Story?” And the Kennedy dynasty’s last survivor handed on the torch of the presidential legend.
At every other level (timing, framing, and networking), the Obama campaign enjoyed a crushing superiority. McCain constantly mistimed things, suspended his campaign twice, and tried to distract voters’ attention by launching defamatory attacks on his rival. Torn between his persona as the one man who could save the Republican party (the famous maverick with a “moderate” line on moral issues) and his choice of the ultra-conservative Sarah Palin as a running mate, he contradicted himself. His program fell apart and left him looking like a candidate in search of a definition. By contrast, the eruption of the financial crisis fitted in remarkably well with Obama’s agenda because it created a horizon of expectations: regulatory interventionism and a social and fiscal policy that would favor the middle classes. From the Iowa primaries onwards, Obama successfully made his personal history an integral part of the campaign and transformed the contest with Hillary Clinton into a heroic journey in search of America. The contest was staged at the Denver convention. It was a theater of the third kind and addressed three audiences simultaneously: a crowd of 80,000 people, plus television viewers and net surfers. Thanks to a clever backdrop simulating the front of the White House, the event’s stage designer succeeded in fusing two very different types of performance. This was both a happening and an episode from a TV series, Woodstock and The West Wing. Barack Obama was the embodiment of both the function of the president and a presidential fiction.
Blogger Andrew Sullivan praised his mastery of the “Facebook politics,” and in the New York Times Roger Cohen compared the Obama campaign’s rise to power with the now classic success of the “Internet start-ups.” The Internet campaign encouraged mass participation and gradually spread messages and stories about the candidate through a nebula of wiki-activists, digital campaign pioneers, MySpace activists, Twitterati, and YouTubers. They were the miracle workers—and it was a miracle—who won over more donors and sponsors. Roosevelt was a president for the radio age, and Kennedy a president for the television age: was Obama to become the first elected president of the digital age?
One of the clichés of this presidential campaign was that political life was becoming more and more “fictionalized” because there were so many similarities between the ups and downs of the campaign and TV series such as The West Wing.
Obama’s destiny did indeed seem to owe everything to the series in which, contrary to all expectations, the Hispanic candidate Matt Santos is elected to the presidency of the United States. Matt Santos began his career as a community organizer. He is married with two children. At a Democratic convention he defeated the party machine supporting the candidacy of the vice-president. His rivals attacked him because of his lack of political experience, and he responded with great speeches inspired by national reconciliation and change.
How are we to analyze these similarities between fiction and reality? Who is imitating whom, the fictional candidate or the fictional hero? Was Obama’s destiny straight out of a Hollywood screenplay designed to restore America’s luster? The idea is attractive, but it is wrong. In an interview with the Guardian, scriptwriter and producer Eli Attie revealed that the model he had used to construct the Santos character was … Barack Obama! Impressed by his speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, Attie had called David Axelrod to find out more about the young senator from Illinois. Santos was no less than Obama’s fictional double.
Within a few months, The West Wing became the real prism through which the campaign was viewed. It was both the bible for commentators, and a vade mecum for politicians lost in the mediasphere. The West Wing was not just a cult series praised for its intelligence and educational value; it was also the site and instrument that collapsed fiction and reality. The countless similarities between the candidates’ biographies, right down to their age and skin color, were designed to convince us that there is no alternative to the fictionalization of politics. Bill Clinton’s former press secretary Dee Dee Myers, who became a consultant on the series, admitted that “the script bulged with real life plots taken directly from the experience of the Clinton White House.” Some Clinton aides who never had access to the Oval Office had themselves photographed in the West Wing studios. In an e-mail to Elie Attie, David Axelrod wrote, “We’re living your scripts.”10 McCain reportedly recognized himself in his fictional double Arnold Vinick, a seventy-year-old, non-conformist, divorced “maverick” who does not adopt his party’s “faith-based” positions on social issues. Some fans actually came to see the McCain/Obama duel as a pale reflection of the one between their fictional doubles Matt Santos and Arnold Vinick. The series K Street brought this confusion between reality and fiction to the screen by using both actors and real figures such as James Carville and Howard Dean, who was a candidate for the 2004 Democratic primaries. In the early stages of the campaign, Dean used a line suggested to him by his coaches in one episode of the series. We see the real James Carville following the real debate on television, and we hear Howard Dean using a line that had featured in an earlier episode. At this point, the circle was unbroken. This was complete simulation. Increasingly, political events seemed to have been scripted in advance, doubles of their own screenplays. The reason why this reflects our distinction between “reality” and “fiction” so well is that they are both part of the same world in which real experience has given way to simulation protocols as stories inject a simulated reality, or serialized story-experiences, into everything. This is democracy’s spectral second life. This is the “Second Life” of politics.
Obama’s success inspired a lot of imitators. David Axelrod’s “ethical” storytelling will surely have as many followers as Karl Rove’s “cynical” storytelling. Axelrod has been described as Obama’s Karl Rove ever since the Iowa caucus.11 That makes Axelrod laugh, and he rejects the comparison because the way he sees his role is quite the opposite of the Scheherazade strategy Rove adopted during both Bush’s terms in office.
In his view, the world of political consultancy suffers from a “Wizard of Oz strategy”: consultants try to get their candidate elected by giving him an artificial story and asking him to conform to it. He knew his job, he said, and was familiar with political techniques such as polls and focus groups. He accepted that everything they did in a way contributed to an atmosphere of cynicism and claimed to be trying to put an end to that. He takes the view that this lack of authenticity explains the Democrats’ failure in recent presidential elections.
The Washington Post’s correspondent Howard Kurtz observed that the journalists covering Obama’s campaign were astonished that they were not being given any particular attention from the usual spin doctors, who try to use analyses and commentaries to influence the press: “The contrast in his press campaign is striking, not just with Clinton’s campaign—but also with the Bush White House and the Clinton White House before that. The Obama campaign is a bit of an odd duck. ‘There is no charm offensive towards the Press,’ said Newsweek’s correspondent Richard Wolffe. ‘The contact is limited. They see the national media more as a logistical problem than as a channel for getting stuff out.’ ”12 The linguist George Lakoff, founder of the Rockridge Institute think tank which tries to help the Democrats to frame their message, regards Barack Obama as his best pupil. Asked about his influence, Obama replied: “You know, I love Lakoff. I think he’s an insightful guy. But the fact is I am not a propagandist. That’s not my job.”13
Throughout his campaign, Obama denounced the growing gap between “talk and action,” which had been growing wider since the days of Ronald Reagan and “his brand of verbal legerdemain,” arguing that it “corrupted both language and thought.”14
Newly elected to the Senate and under siege from reporters and commentators, he began to ask himself: “How long before the committees of scribes and editors took residence in your head … How long before you start sounding like a politician?”15
There is one Barack Obama who is stubbornly overlooked by the media: the semiologist who pays attention to signs and the way they circulate within the mediasphere. In The Audacity of Hope, for instance, he describes how “a particular narrative, repeated over and over and hurled through cyberspace at the speed of light, eventually becomes a hard particle of reality; how political caricatures and nuggets of conventional wisdom lodge themselves in our brain without us ever taking the time to examine them.”16 As he observes, this “rewards not those who are right, but those—like the White House press office—who can make the arguments most loudly, most frequently, most obstinately, and with the best backdrop.”17
In a public space that is saturated with stories and in which any news item must, if it is to reach its target audience, take the form of a story, the narrative construction of a political identity is no longer left to chance or to the personal talent of the candidate. Books written by candidates serve a specific purpose: every memory, every idea, and every experience is a narrative atom in the sequence that must bring the politician to power. They both program and profile him.
Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father reveals a very different relationship with narrative. The book ends at the point when the author is about to begin his studies at Harvard Law School, and had yet to think of making a career in politics. It is both a Bildungsroman and a travel book, but it also represents an attempt to deconstruct ready-made stories and myths about childhood: “I learned long ago to distrust my childhood and the stories that shaped it … many years later …I understood that I had spent much of my life trying to rewrite these stories, plugging up holes in the narrative, accommodating unwelcome details, projecting individual choices against the blind sweep of history.”18 This is probably the key to his candidacy’s appeal to young Americans: his story describes the difficulties of learning about signs and a quest for a hybrid identity as he slipped “back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.”19 From a very early age, Obama had to make intensive and careful use of signs: “Since my first frightening discovery of bleaching creams in Life magazine, I’d become familiar with the lexicon of color consciousness within the black community—good hair, bad hair, thick lips or thin… You couldn’t be sure that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self—the humor, the song, the behind-the-back pass—had been freely chosen by you. At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap.”20
David Axelrod has known Obama for 15 years, ever since he was a young community organizer working on a working-class education program in the neighborhoods of Chicago’s South Side. He used Obama’s biography to craft a real narrative in which the life of the Democratic candidate and American history merge into one. This complex, polyphonic narrative contrasts sharply with the stereotypical tales of how Bush was saved by his faith. It is full of contrasts and contradictions. It is a faceted mirror in which everyone can recognize themselves: a man from a poor neighborhood and a university graduate, a community organizer and an academic, a realist and an idealist, a man who is willing to compromise and a man who sticks to his principles (on Iraq and torture, for instance). As conservative columnist David Brooks remarked: “He is perpetually engaged in an internal dialogue between different pieces of his hybrid self—Kenya with Harvard, Kansas with the South Side of Chicago—and he takes that conversation outward into the world.”21 He embodies the legend of a global man in the age of globalization. It is his heroic journey that makes his life exemplary: Hawaii, Jakarta, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington… But it is also a journey through time, punctuated by references to Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King Jr., and they make him part of America’s history. No matter whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, black or white, man or woman, you are going to elect the first black president of America. That is why the young Obama, criticized by his rivals for his lack of experience, looked from the outset like a “historic” candidate.
A Strategist Appeals to the American Unconscious
After a long campaign across the United States, Obama the storyteller addressed the American people on television one last time and talked about what he had seen during his long months of campaigning: stories of the average America and even, he said, “the stories of the American story.” Without renouncing his political, economic, or military responsibilities, the candidate deliberately took on the new function of an executive mandate. His function was part that of a teacher, and part that of a therapist. Like the griots who, in African societies, are described as “doctors of the bond,” he both listened to and shared stories. The tone of the story, the way his encounters with the American people were staged, and the iconography of his personal history left no one in any doubt: Dr. Obama had taken upon himself a task that the politicians in Washington seemed to have left to him in despair: curing America of itself. The Nation evoked a chronicle of despair—sick people with no health care, retired people forced to work in order to eat, unemployed people hit by the crisis, etc., putting into perspective the woes of an America that had been left to its own devices—and highlighted the candidate’s qualities: a willingness to listen, empathy, and energy. This was a story of promise, and a story with biblical overtones.
Obama is much more than a brilliant “storyteller.” He is a strategist who appeals to the American unconscious. He has succeeded in turning his hybrid personality, with its heterogeneous points of biographical reference, into a metaphor for the new composite identities of the age of globalization. That is why we should not be analyzing this event in the light of historical analogies (Martin Luther King Jr. or the Kennedys), but in terms of the unprecedented space of the post-9/11 era. Obama holds out to a disoriented America a mirror in which shattered narrative elements can be put together again.
After 9/11, the Republicans inverted America’s ideal-types by criminalizing immigration, building border walls, restricting freedom of expression, and over-coding identity in religious terms. Obama has done the opposite. He has replaced the rhetoric of the clash of civilizations with the syntax of assonance and reconciliation, hybrid identities and variations thereon, and an identity that is open to emigrants in an age of displacements. His travels through a hybrid America mark a return to the American story of origins. With Obama, America has found the points of reference it lost after 9/11: immigration, travel, the melting pot, and the frontier as a living and positive dimension. He has made himself the spokesman for “a people already stripped of their history, a people often ill-equipped to retrieve that history in any other form than what fluttered across the television screens.”22
Beautiful books, wrote Marcel Proust, are written in a sort of foreign language. The same might be said of any form of human expression. And why cannot it be said of political discourse, once it stops mimicking clichés, and begins to use a new language and a new political grammar? The extent of the change can then be measured in terms of the proliferation of new signs, some of them contradictory and some of them convergent, that are difficult to read in the political language of old because they escape the simple message of the communicators and the media logic of persuasion.
The future will tell whether Barack Obama is the inventor of a new political idiom, or merely its simulacrum, a mere “avatar” of Lincoln for the Second Life age. But it would be absurd to deny that he is the embodiment of a new generation of politicians who might be described as semio-politicians, who use signs and symbols rather than programs and promises, and who are less likely to “position” themselves on a traditional spectrum of political forces in order to inspire new ways of thinking about and changing the world.