246 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographybeen rubbing shoulders in the various clubhouses of the South Side for a decade and more were
stunned to see the forces that were now promoting Barky’s meteoric career.
When Mr. Obama delivered a now-famous speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention
that catapulted him onto the national stage, sitting in the audience was Mayor Daley of Chicago.
As Mr. Obama spoke, Mr. Daley and other Illinois officials “were just as wide-eyed as the
thousands of convention goers,” said James A. DeLeo, a Democratic leader in the Illinois
Senate. The mayor and the senator had some ties, but they had never had a close relationship.
Mr. Obama’s friend Ms. Jarrett had worked for Mr. Daley, and had hired Michelle Obama into
the administration in the early 1990s. Yet Mr. Obama had run multiple times as a candidate
without the mayor’s help. (Jo Becker and Christopher Drew, “Pragmatic Politics, Forged on the
South Side,” New York Times, May 11, 2008.)
Obama’s Boston keynote address of 2004 represents essentially the same speech that he has been
giving ever since: a tissue of patriotic clichés changed by New Age sensibilities, an oblique polemic
against the Lee Atwater-Karl Rove use of wedge issues by the Republican party, and above all a
cascade of vapid messianic slogans and Utopian rhetorical figures. The great overarching theme
was the mystical unity of the American nation and people. Obama’s oration had not a scintilla of
originality. It was a standard Democratic Party corporatist speech in the Volksgemeinschaft tradition
- the (at best) communitarian idea that the mystical unity of The People magically dispels all real
conflicts of interest, also a staple of the fascist rejection of class conflict. Congresswoman Barbara
Jordan at the 1976 Democratic National Convention had played the Volksgemeinschaft card against
Nixon and Ford. Jordan had intoned on that occasion:
This is the question which must be answered in 1976: Are we to be one people bound together
by common spirit, sharing in a common endeavor; or will we become a divided nation? For all
of its uncertainty, we cannot flee the future. We must not become the “New Puritans” and reject
our society. We must address and master the future together. It can be done if we restore the
belief that we share a sense of national community, that we share a common national endeavor.
It can be done.
This speech had doubtless been written for Ms. Jordan by the Trilateral managers who ran both
Jimmy Carter and the 1976 convention. Some of the rhetorical devices are actually echoed in
Obama’s boilerplate rhetoric.
“My story is part of the larger American story,” Obama pontificated in a performance that the
controlled corporate media uniformly touted as electrifying and inspirational. “In no other country
on Earth is my story even possible.” “We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t
like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states,” he said. “We coach Little League
in the blue states, and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who
opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all
of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”
Here again was the mystical unity of the nation, a staple of standard fascist rhetoric.
THE APOTHEOSIS OF A MEGALOMANIAC
In the standard Roman triumphs, the victorious general returning to receive the tumultuous
accolades of the Senate and people was also provided with a slave whose job it was to keep
repeating that he was only mortal and that all glory was fleeting; this was a kind of Roman
preventive care lest megalomania ensue from too much adulation. Obama has always needed an