Obama: Redefining political cool
Posted on October 16th, 2008
This post by Trapper John at DailyKos I think gets something really right:
… Barack Obama isn’t just cool — he’s redefined cool in politics. He’s gotten past 20 years of presidents who equate anger with passion. There hasn’t been a president who could keep an even keel since Reagan — and even then, he was more easy-goin’ than cool. Reagan was detached. But Barack Obama is engaged, intelligent, and calm…
Who needs a comment? You’ve nailed it. Young people just call him cool, in all its groovy connotations. We oldsters prefer to see him as cool, calm, and collected — taking everything in, measuring his response, and making wise moves.
He is indeed a man for all seasons — and especially these troubled times when the game of politics has been prostituted so badly that it has become pejorative to call someone political.
Obama is in a fair way of becoming a statesman and an icon of democratic representative governance.
Interesting. One could call what he’s developed “answerable style.” But only if one understands style as something necessary for the purpose of preserving rationality under immense, almost inexorable public pressure, to abandon it.
Obama is definately the cool guy McCain on the other hand was far from cool he was nervous erratic angry and sarcastic. Sometime during the debate I thought he was going to simply pass out with a stroke form his stiff frenzied remarks. He needs to calm down and relax.
No, Obama didn’t invent cool. He just took it into the mainstream.
Read “Cool Pose: The dilemmas of black manhood in America” by Majors and Billson and you’ll see what I mean.