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| Home Front: Politix |
| Obama's seal problem |
| 2008-06-25 |
| Jim Geraghty, National Review It’s extremely unlikely that Barack Obama and his campaign will get in legal trouble for featuring a revised version of the presidential seal. But like Michael Dukakis riding in a tank or John Kerry declaring that he voted for war funding before he voted against it, we may have just witnessed one of those unexpected moments that, in retrospect, comes to define one of the candidate’s unflattering traits. The decision to create the “Seal of Obamerica” seems like an almost deliberate response to Peggy Noonan’s column about the difference between “Old America” and “New America,” and how each party’s candidate embodies one of the two. When President Bush speaks, the Obama campaign doesn’t just want to change the rhetoric, the policies, and the man behind the lectern; apparently the seal seems a bit stodgy and old-fashioned for their tastes as well. In November, we’ll be hard-pressed to find a voter who says they voted for McCain because some Obama staffer thought it would be a good idea to redesign the presidential seal, just as no one is going to vote against Obama because some overzealous volunteer made two women in headscarves move further away so they would be outside camera angles. (Of course, a third example of this,“we need more white people! we need more white people!” will be a bigger story, because it will be a recurring pattern instead of one or two instances of bad judgment.) Now comes word that Obama has gotten rid of the Obamerica seal. Yes, boys and girls, the Obama campaign killed a week-old seal! Where's Greenpeace when you need 'em? But the fact that the someone on the campaign said some variation of, “Hey, let’s have Obama speak with his own redesigned version of the seal,” and that either no one objected or the objections were overruled — may become a symbol of hubris and disconnect on par with the candidate’s litany of what motivates “bitter” small town voters during a fundraiser on Billionaire’s Row in San Francisco earlier this year. The Obama camp uses the word “change” more frequently than commas and perhaps in that constant repeating of the mantra they occasionally miss that a country yearning for change wants improvement, not change for the sake of change. What exactly was wrong with the presidential seal? The idea that a candidate and the people around him should deem it lacking, and that an upgrade would be an all-blue version that incorporates his campaign logo into the seal is… strange. The idea that no grownup was around to shake a head and say, ‘you don’t change the seal of the office you seek while on the campaign trail’ furrows the brow. Perhaps most perplexingly, why use the Latin “yes we can” as a replacement for “E Pluribus Unum” (Out of Many, One)? Wasn’t this campaign pledging to unite the country? Didn’t this guy wow the political world with a debut speech that called for “no red states or blue states, but red white and blue states?” . . . As Kurt Andersen noted in New York magazine, it’s easy to conclude that the precisely diverse crowds behind Obama represent “the America.” But they actually leave out large swaths of an America that, if “old,” isn’t gone yet — and this isn’t even getting into the headscarves. It’s not only that the people who create and run the media — and who love Obama — occupy the social and cultural upper rungs. The world depicted in “the media,” broadly construed — not just straight journalism but everything we watch and read and hear — is overwhelmingly a bright, shiny, upscale, youngish world. Uneducated white people, residents of the so-called C and D counties, and the elderly — in other words, Hillary Clinton voters — are seldom allowed into the mass-media foreground, and when they appear it’s usually as bathetic figures, victims or losers. (And working-class black pop culture is considered part of the sexy mainstream in a way that working-class white pop culture is not.) The redesigned logo, the will.i.am video, the cover of men’s Vogue, his ability to be deemed one of the fittest men in America (despite the occasional cigarette), his Versace-dedicated line, the news that he regularly trades lengthy e-mails with Scarlett Johansson. . . . We get it, the guy is cooler than 99 percent of us will ever be. We will hear endless comparisons to John F. Kennedy, the last president who enjoyed the status of a style icon. But it’s easy to imagine John Kennedy winning the 1960 election even if he hadn’t been cool. It’s hard to imagine him winning if he hadn’t gotten to the right of Nixon on national security. Having the coolest-looking seal in the world on your lectern can’t compensate for weaknesses of the man speaking behind it. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #3 I'm amused that the self proclaimed champion of 'Hope and Change' used Latin on the seal. The office responsible for shield and device heraldry within the US government dropped the use of Latin and French on such devices over a decade ago. Day late, dollar short. Some change. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2008-06-25 13:22 |
| #2 Barry Obama is the fittest man in America? No wonder the rest of the world likes to think of us as a couch potato people. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2008-06-25 11:30 |
| #1 HO gottem a seal problem? Maybe it's just an ice-cream problem? |
| Posted by: .5MT 2008-06-25 11:23 |