VIII: “Our Souls Are Broken” - Michelle Obama, Postmodern Fascist Ideologue 301on the planet.’” “What the focus groups his advisers conducted revealed was that Obama’s
political career now depends, in some measure, upon a tamer version of this same feeling, on
the complicated dynamics of how white women respond to a charismatic black man. “I
remember when we realized something magical was happening,” says Obama’s pollster on the
campaign, an earnest Iowan named Paul Harstad. “We were doing a focus group in suburban
Chicago, and this woman, seventy years old, looks seventy-five, hears Obama’s life story, and
she clasps her hand to her chest and says, ‘Be still, my heart.’ Be still, my heart — I’ve been
doing this for a quarter century and I’ve never seen that.” The most remarkable thing, for
Harstad, was that the woman hadn’t even seen the videos he had brought along of Obama
speaking, had no idea what the young politician looked like. “All we’d done,” he says, “is tell
them the Story.” From that moment on, the Story became Obama’s calling card, his political
rationale and his basic sale. Every American politician has this wrangle he has to pull off,
reshaping his life story to fit into Abe Lincoln’s log cabin. Some pols (John Edwards, Bill
Clinton) have an easier time of it than others (George Bush, Al Gore). Obama’s material is
simply the best of all. What he has to offer, at the most fundamental level, is not ideology or
even inspiration — it is the Story, the feeling that he embodies, in his own, uniquely American
history, a longed-for break from the past. “With Obama, it’s all about his difference,” says Joe
Trippi, the Democratic consultant who masterminded Howard Dean’s candidacy. “We see in
him this hope that the country might be different, too.”’ (Wallace Wood, Rolling Stone)
Obama’s handlers have devoted much special study to enhancing their candidates appeal among
women, specifically white women, and even more specifically middle-aged white women. This has
included attempts to capitalize on sexual tensions across racial lines, obviously a big issue for
Obama’s mother, and the phenomenon evoked by one blogger who observed about Obama:
‘Years later, when he’s working on Wall Street, he’s creeped out by his visiting mother’s
insistence on seeing her favorite film, the 1959 Brazilian art-house classic “Black Orpheus.” He
belatedly realizes that his very fair-skinned mother is sexually attracted to dark men. He pompously
intones, “The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the
desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our
demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.”’
Here is a description of the results of some of Obama’s white woman focus groups:
What the focus groups his advisers conducted revealed was that Obama’s political career now
depends, in some measure, upon a tamer version of this same feeling, on the complicated
dynamics of how white women respond to a charismatic black man. Early in his run for the U.S.
Senate in 2004, Obama’s pollsters discovered that women loved him, especially nice white
ladies who like personalities more than politics and definitely don’t like political arguments.
Then, running preliminary polls, his advisers noticed something remarkable: Women responded
more intensely and warmly to Obama than did men. In a seven-candidate field, you don’t need
to win every vote. His advisers, assuming they would pick up a healthy chunk of black votes,
homed in on a different target: Every focus group they ran was composed exclusively of
women, nearly all of them white.’ (Wallace-Wells, Rolling Stone) But these same middle aged
ladies were not happy with Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Anton Rezko,
and their view of Barky began to change. By late July 2008, Dick Morris was arguing that
Obama’s greatest vulnerability was his failure to convince older women to vote for him. Recent
national polls show Obama with just a 40% favorable ratio among white voters. “He is clearly