The Perfect Symbols of the Obama Presidency

Reading Dale Brumfield's latest in Style Weekly ("Greek Tragedy"), I was reminded of the iconography of the Obama campaign and its relevance to the quickly crumbling 44th presidency.

On Aug. 28, 2008... Obama took the stage at Denver’s Invesco Field in front of thousands of adoring fans. In a weirdly ostentatious framing of Greek columns and pilasters[, he] decree[d] his intentions to fundamentally transform the world amid a storm of disaffection with George Bush, weariness of war, a lackluster McCain campaign and an economy in free-fall.

Admirers cheered, women swooned, media pundits and journalists pronounced him the savior of America and of the world while the deitylike echo ordered by the campaign producers reverberated. Hailed as a redeemer, his negligible political experience and enigmatic background were summarily dismissed while those of his opponent, Sen. John McCain and especially Sarah Palin, were fiercely examined and ridiculed in shameless displays of journalistic favoritism.

Even Los Angeles Times architectural critic Christopher Hawthorn submitted to his own leg-tingling adoration, writing the day following the speech that when Obama declared, “America, we cannot turn back,” he found himself “thinking about those columns... about how they were employed primarily to suggest time rolling backward all the way to the Greeks..."

Those columns represent the pluperfect symbols of the Obama presidency. They were exquisite reproductions of real columns: lightweight copies of massive cylinders hewn from granite, housing the first Republican governments whose sponsors have long since dissolved into the dust of history.

Obama's columns were, instead, constructed with styrofoam and tossed into a dumpster hours after the convention's conclusion.

As a candidate, Obama represented a transcendent Utopian ideal: a post-racial politician with an unprecedented ability to inspire and motivate through his speeches. He was a president who pledged bipartisanship and offered his bully pulpit as a lever to advance the rights of all Americans.

But within hours of taking office, Obama instead revealed himself to be a cheap copy of the politician who had so magnificently dominated the campaign trail. He was willing to divide Americans based upon race, gender, sexual preference, religion or income. He happily jammed through huge and unpopular pieces of legislation using bribes, threats and hoodwinkery. He escalated partisanship to a level never before seen in federal government, sometimes even threatening private entities for exercising their First Amendment rights.

The columns in Invesco Field represent the perfect icons for the 44th president.

Obama is nothing less than the Styrofoam President.


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