Everybody wants a star! See JFK, RFK, Reagan, Schwarzenegger, and now Obama

[FrenchieCat]

From an LA Times Editorial

....Obama is a star precisely because he is inspiring. He is the anti-Bush, and what he's selling is hope.

It is axiomatic that the more powerful the theme a star embodies, the more powerful his or her stardom. Obama's theme is a potent one. Whether one buys into it or not, he promises to cross divides -- political, ideological, racial, geographic -- and to transcend the old politics of fear and hate that has commandeered recent elections. He believes that America can -- and should -- be the moral beacon for the world by returning to its core values. In analyzing his own appeal, Obama says he has become a symbol -- which, again, is exactly what all stars are. He is providing a really good, uplifting movie.

Critics, not least of all John McCain, have complained that this is merely windy rhetoric -- high-blown but ultimately empty. Eventually, they say, Obama will come back to Earth the way rock stars do when the concert ends. But this misses the point of what Obama has tapped into, as well as the point of movie stardom itself. Yes, politicians can declaim themes, and Obama is doing that. Yet Obama is not just declaiming his theme the way most politicians have. He has lived it, which is why it has been so effective.

Of course McCain is a hero in his own right, but his narrative is familiar -- it's a war movie after all -- and his feat is that of having survived, which in a Hollywood film is not the same thing as having led the rescue. He hardly embodies the new-style heroism that Mailer saw in John Kennedy, which allowed the late president to extend the bounds of politics not only into stardom but into imagination as stars do. With Kennedy, anything seemed possible.

Obama is attempting the same feat. But as Mailer, a Kennedy admirer, also observed in 1960, this goes against the traditional American political grain. There were many voters, he realized then, who would opt for the "psychic security of Nixon," the staid, reliable politics of trepidation rather than "be brave enough to enlist the romantic dream" of America that Kennedy promised.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-gablernew9-2008aug09,0,1401772.story

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In other words, McCain wants to be a star too, it's just that he doesn't have the star power required. Sounds like a personal problem to me.

[FrenchieCat]

1. It is true.