Conservative Donnybrook

Larison commented a few days ago about a particular passage in Andrew Sullivan’s Atlantic essay pushing the Obama candidacy. I thought I would add my own comments. Here’s the passage in question:

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

The idea that a radicalized Pakistani youth would identify with a racially half-white, half East African man because they sort of share a skin hue does seem highly questionable. Sullivan himself terms the effect of an Obama presidency a “re-branding,” and Sullivan’s idea really does seem to borrow from the corporate Madison Avenue marketing world. It’s like the typical television ad for, say, a new pharmaceutical product, displaying an obligatory rainbow of diversity, therefore presumably showing that in addition to allowing elderly men to sustain an erection, the product and its brand also embody a superficial sheen of inclusion and diversity–the only difference here being that instead of Levitra, the product being branded is American global hegemony. Continue Reading »

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