Like a comic-book superhero, Obama is there to help, out of the sheer goodness of a heart we need not know or understand. For as with all Magic Negroes, the less real he seems, the more desirable he becomes. If he were real, white America couldn’t project all its fantasies of curative black benevolence on him. ~David Ehrenstein

As I read the article, Steve Sailer basically said some of the same things about Obama’s appeal (call it the Poitier Factor, if you like) and then set about trying to show who the “real” Obama was (or at least the person he portrays himself as being in his first book) with a typical Saileresque flair for the provocative.  Mr. Sailer has noticed Ehrenstein’s article and comments on it here.   

Since Obama of the “curative black benevolence” type is indeed a fantasy and a stock stereotype from the world of film, it stands to reason that the actual Obama would be different, complex and human and not the gooey purveyor of hope made out of cotton candy and syrup that media reports make him out to be.  For attempting to find out who Obama is, or who he has claimed to be in the past, Sailer has received some of the usual tut-tutting, while I assume Mr. Ehrenstein, who is black, will not hear a contrary or discouraging word.  Someone might do well to write an article about that phenomenon. 

Isn’t it the case that quite a few pundits and journalists have bought into the Obama-as-healer view of the man because they have mistaken what Matt Yglesias might call “politico-media reality” for the actual merits and characteristics of Obama as a candidate? 

On this point, Yglesias writes about the right’s national security fetish being played out through adoration for Giuliani the tough goombah:

I think this brilliantly sums up what’s so wildly off-base about conservative thinking.  Absolutely nothing in Giuliani’s history suggests that he is any more skilled than a randomly chosen individual at plotting a military response to an armed attack on the United States of America.  I understand, of course, why it is that as a matter of electoral politics an “image of toughness” matters more than actual experience or sound policy ideas. What’s crazy about today’s rightwingers, however, is that they’ve chosen not only to accept this slice of politico-media reality but actively embrace it. 

Likewise, I might say about Obamamania: “I understand, of course, why it is that as a matter of electoral politics Obama’s image of racial reconciliation and good feelings matters more than Obama’s actual policy views or past attitudes and associations with radical black nationalism.  What’s crazy about a lot of white pundits and journalists is that they’ve chosen not only to accept this slice of media-driven reality, but treat it as if it were the absolute truth.”

The alternative to Sailer’s reading of Dreams From My Father would seem to be to say that Obama told not simply a slightly fictionalised account of his own life, but that he was just making up things all over the place to pander to readers who wanted to find in him the angst-ridden, aggrieved black man they were expecting to find.  Obama might just be that smooth and good at selling himself as anything his given audience wants him to be (see below), but to conclude this you would also have to conclude that most of Obama’s autobiographical account is a lie.  This might overthrow Sailer’s article but it would also make Obama into the left’s equivalent of Mitt Romney, which would not be all together good for Obama’s political hopes.

I think Sailer’s “head or heart” bit at the end of his article was one of the weaker parts of the piece, because it treats Obama’s enthusiastic expressions of solidarity with Kenyans as genuine statements of allegiance.  This is like the mistake evangelicals made when they took Mr. Bush’s invocation of the name of the Lord as proof that he was “one of them,” since the man has rarely done anything politically that would indicate such powerful and deep solidarity.  Whatever else Obama is, he is still a smooth-talking pol who frequently identifies with his audience in idiom and manner (as Sailer himself noted in the same article).  A closer reading of the rest of Sailer’s article would show that this final, provocative concluding note isn’t really all that plausible, not because Sailer’s general interpretation of Obama is really all that mistaken, but because Obama always pretends that the people around him are his “brothers and sisters” even when he has nothing in common with them.  This is why he can generate such fawning press coverage and such exuberant reactions from crowds.  Similar to of Clinton’s campaigning style with individuals (“he made me feel like the only person in the world”), Obama’s style is to make whichever group he’s talking to feel as if they are the fulcrum of political and social transformation on a world-historical scale and he makes them momentarily believe this garbage long enough to win a favourable impression.  As a politician, what he cares about is leaving that favourable impression, which tends to make policy disagreements or other objections to the candidate fade into the back of voters’ minds. 

Politicians of this sort have natural talent at winning people over, and they know that the fastest way to win people over is to convince them that you are, in some sense, one of them (and someone who will therefore “fight” or “work” for them once in power, which is a silly thing to assume).  In Obama’s case, doing this involves at once ignoring his heritage and revaluing it, so that he can convince voters of any race that he is basically on their side while also emphasising his own heritage enough to make it seem as if he represents some epochal shift in race relations and racial attitudes in this country.  Precisely because such a shift is not and has not been taking place to such a great degree, the image of Obama as someone transcending race both provides space for his natural political talent to flourish with every audience and serves as the reason for all of the excessive, absurd adoration lavished on the man.  He can become the “Magic Negro” because everyone knows that there’s no such thing (it is a stereotype and a fantasy), and he can appear to “transcend” race because everyone knows that nobody has and nobody actually can.  That is, these two ideas that have been pounded into the minds of modern Americans for the last forty years are seen as desirable and laudable in inverse proportion to their actual existence in the world.  Some might call this magic.  I would call it the product of propaganda and cultural indoctrination.