Obama = Will Smith and McCain = John Wayne

This article says that it's great that Obama is an up and coming "star" like Smith and it's sort of boring that McCain is like John Wayne but it's interesting to see that all the things that the writer praises Obama for actually sound like condemnations to me. I have highlighted those words and phrases which seem particularly damning:

THE MOST UBIQUITOUS POLITICAL trope of the presidential campaign has been that Barack Obama is not just any old politician; he's a "rock star." (There are 770,000 Google hits of Obama and "rock star" and counting.) He attracts the kind of huge crowds that congregate around rock stars. He elicits the fevered passion from his adherents that a rock star does. He has the loose-limbed bearing, the cool, the charisma of a rock star, and his constituency is disproportionately young, like a rock star's. Obama is the Britney Spears of this political season, as a recent John McCain political ad implies.

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The last time the media carted out this theme was 40 years ago, when Robert Kennedy, running for president, attracted the same sort of frenzied adulation and also threatened to upset the political apple cart by assembling a coalition of the young, the disenfranchised and the well-educated. But for Obama and for Bobby, the characterization is insulting and imprecise. It is insulting because it suggests that their devotees' effusions are just a visceral reaction -- the political equivalent of puppy love. And it is imprecise because Obama is -- and Bobby was -- more movie star than rock star, which is an analogy with a difference. Rock stars, with some glaring exceptions, typically whip up the crowd; the thrill tends to be short-lived. Movie stars, by contrast, tend to create a long-standing emotional identification with their audience.

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It was nearly 50 years ago that Norman Mailer, in his essay "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," observed how John Kennedy, the original political movie star, was reinventing U.S. politics. As Mailer saw it, Kennedy was "unlike any politician who had ever run for president in the history of the land." Most candidates were dull, prosaic, cautious; they lived solely within the political arena. Kennedy, with his good looks, his beautiful wife, his ironic wit, his style, was the first candidate who also lived outside it, in what Mailer called the "subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely romantic desires" -- the psychic territory inhabited by our movie stars. Kennedy was the first politician to realize that the best politics wasn't politics at all. It was a form of popular culture -- dream-making. Or, as Mailer put it, Kennedy turned politics into a movie.

All campaigns are movies now, consisting of competing narratives with competing stars. Part of Obama's appeal, as it was for the Kennedys, is that he has what all rising stars have. He has youth. He has good looks. He has charisma. He has an ability to spellbind. He has had a rapid ascent that makes him new and unfamiliar. He has, in this McLuhanesque age, unflappability that plays especially well on television.

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Obama is a star in this sense too. As he reiterates endlessly, Obama brings idealism at a time when many Americans are despairing of making any headway against the problems the nation faces. Drawing on his own personal story of disadvantage that led to Columbia University, Harvard Law School and now to the Democratic nomination, Obama in his every gesture and utterance suggests that "Yes We Can." This idealism isn't inspiring adulation because Obama is already a star. Obama is a star precisely because he is inspiring. He is the anti-Bush, and what he's selling is hope.

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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.

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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 [Richard] Nixon," the staid, reliable politics of trepidation rather than "be brave enough to enlist the romantic dream" of America that Kennedy promised. You never quite know where a movie star might take you.

Obama faces that obstacle too. It is the downside of being a star. What this election may finally come down to is a choice between politics and movie stardom, between the safety of what we think we know and the expansiveness of what we dream, or, in more prosaic terms, between good old John Wayne and the less predictable but more exciting Will Smith.

"Despairing of making any headway against the problems the nation faces?" Gimme a break! Since when do real Americans despair? What problems do we have that are new and different from those that we've faced and solved before many times. What crap! Ugh! At least the writer of this article is honest about what emotional morons leftists are.

I'll pick a practical politician over a movie star anytime. Give me John Wayne over the hyped up solipsistic Scientology cultist, Will Smith, anyday.