Welcome to the American Political Theatre- Oprah & Obama

[Orwellian_Ghost]

Oprah & Obama: Corporate Marketing for a Corporate Campaign
by Bruce Dixon
December 13, 2007

Two of the best marketers in the U.S. teamed up for a three-state weekend extravaganza of vapid, substance-devoid entertainment posing as presidential politics. Oprah Winfrey – a certified genius of self-salesmanship – and the faux progressive, fraudulent anti-war candidate Barack Obama wowed crowds in South Carolina, Iowa and New Hampshire in a mega-media celebration of celebrity, itself. Political theater has devolved to theater without politics. Corporate “journalists” behave like sports “color” commentators, minus real stats and facts. Next stop: Broadway – if the world doesn’t explode before curtain-time.

...

We North Americans are the best entertained and the least informed people on this planet. Most of us are fully up to speed on Britney Spears' last several breakdowns, the bios of our favorite "American Idol" and "Dancing With The Stars" contestants. We're conversant with details of Anna Nicole Smith's death and knowledgeable about Angelina Jolie's latest tattoos and the odds on the New England Patriots going undefeated this season. But more than a quarter of U.S. young adults can't find the Pacific Ocean on a map. Perhaps one in five of their parents can identify their state senator, and fewer than one in a dozen can name a sitting member of the local school board.

Media determine our pubic consciousness. America's billionaire-owned media maintain a nearly seamless bubble of false reality in which we are invited to live large parts of our lives. Resources devoted to journalism and news coverage have radically shrunk, so that the corporate-created culture of celebrity has come to dominate our daily discourse.

Inside the bubble, corporate resources devoted to newsgathering have been relentlessly shaved, so that far fewer journalists are at work today than a generation ago. Inconvenient and unprofitable news operations have been trimmed, often replaced with no notice to audiences with corporate PR print, audio and multimedia productions, and infected by the passive celebrity worship that permeates the rest of our mediascape.

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http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=90&ItemID=14492

[K Gardner]

1. I love this article, perfectly stated. Thanks for posting. n/t

[IntravenousDemilo]

2. What? No Uma?

Oprah, Obama -- Uma.
Uma, Oprah -- Obama.
Obama, Uma -- Oprah.

[Bitwit1234]

3. It works for American Idol I guess they thought since the young crowd

in this country are so brain dead and go out of their mind over celebrity's they could use that idea to get the dumb bells to vote. You see how they almost pass out when they see Brittany of Paris or Lindsey. With Oprah on the stage with her invisible leash on Obama it's all they need to get their dose of make believe.

[flashl]

8. Did you say belief? There is

American Christian Idol

[Diamond Dave]

4. Number one reason We will have nothing to do with Obama.

Oprah, go away and take your influence with you. Till you came along in support well..... enough said.

[Blue_In_AK]

5. The writer of this article

accurately puts into words vague feelings I've had about Obama from the beginning. I've tried to like him but I just can't. I'm tired of the marketing of politics.

Given the sorry state of the media, it becomes more important for us to remain skeptical and for each of us to make it our mission to educate the people around us about what's going on. We the people need to take back the government.

[scarletwoman]

10. Watching Obama on Jay Leno sealed it for me. I don't clearly remember now whether this appearance

on the Tonight Show was just before or just after Obama announced his candidacy, all I remember is that I watched it specifically to see Obama, since I normally don't stay up late enough at night to watch Leno (whom I generally loathe).

What really struck me about Leno's conversation with him was how much Obama stuttered and hemmed and hawed when asked questions about policy or issues, but how he would suddenly wax eloquent when speaking about himself. I even wrote a post about it on DU at the time.

To me it was extremely telling -- this was a guy in love with his own image: all surface, no substance. Turned me off of Obama for good.

My revelatory moment about Oprah came years earlier. I used to catch her show now and then just because it came on around the time I'd get home from work -- I'd flip on the TV while I changed out of my work clothes, feed my dogs and go through my mail. Oprah's show was the only thing on that I found remotely tolerable/interesting -- it was interesting to see what that particular segment of the mainstream media was up to.

One day she had a show about big name fashion designers, with impossibly perfect-looking models appearing onstage wearing the designers' finest wares. One of the most amazing dresses thus featured was a completely hand-beaded full-length gown -- it was, admittedly, breathtakingly gorgeous.

Being a beader myself, my thoughts immediately went to how many hours and hours of eye-straining, neck muscle-spasming, bloody-fingered work must have gone into creating such a gown. As Oprah gushed over this finished product of someone's literally painstaking handiwork, she asked the designer how many hours it took to do all that beading. "Oh, hundreds of hours!" the designer replied proudly -- as though HE, himself, had done the beadwork.

Neo-Marxist that I am, I waited for her to ask the next (to me) obvious question: WHO actually did that beadwork? (A well-paid French craftswoman or a grossly underpaid Third-Worlder in some sweatshop?)

But the question was never asked, of course. The lovely, shiny, surface appearance is adulated, but the reality beneath the surface is never considered or referenced. That told me all I needed to know about Oprah's sensibilities.

Oprah and Obama are the perfect pairing of superficial narcissism.

sw

[zabet]

13. Well said.

:thumbsup:

[scarletwoman]

14. Thank you. (nt)

[Blue_In_AK]

18. We do share a brain, Scarlet Woman,

in case you haven't noticed. :loveya:

[frazzled]

6. But it's not theater when Bruce Springsteen, Barbara Streisand, or Bonnie Raitt does it?

This article is bull ... candidates have always had celebrities at rallies. The only difference here is that Oprah appears to be a bigger celebrity than any of the others.

In case the writer hadn' t noticed, politics has been theater in this country for decades ... if not from its inception. Deal with it.

[rosetta6]

7. I have no idea what Oprah finds so inspiring about Obama

He's just been a standard issue spineless Dem from the second he was sworn in.
I'm so sick of the media cramming him down our throats, as they studiously ignore Kucinich--the only candidate who represents the people.

[scarletwoman]

9. It makes perfect sense. She is all surface, superficiality, and show just like Obama. (nt)

[spanone]

12. it's because obama has a much larger following then dennis, plain & simple

[Beausoir]

11. "vapid, substance-devoid entertainment posing as presidential politics."

That perfectly sums up my feelings about Oprahbamapalooza last weekend.

[suston96]

15. Ah, yes, I remember it well......

I believe it was 2000, Oprah had George Bush on her show and as the audience squealed Bush grabbed Oprah and kissed her on the face......

Yeah, that was the day, my friends........

[Orwellian_Ghost]

16. "Obama is deeply conservative."

Obama is deeply conservative.

- Larissa MacFarquhar, “The Conciliator,” The New Yorker. May 2007.



“STANDING UP” AND KNEELING DOWN

Maybe it’s because Barack Obama and his handlers are sensitive to the need to reassure ruling forces that the “first black United States president” will not challenge existing hierarchies. Maybe it’s because he’s bought and paid for by big money (1). Or maybe it’s because he believes in his “deeply conservative” (2) heart that good Americans show deep respect for their socioeconomic masters. Whatever the explanation, I’ve never seen an avowedly “progressive” political candidate more eager than Obama to display his deep willingness to obsequiously kiss the ring of dominant political and economic authority. For someone who is marching across Iowa and New Hampshire calling working- and middle-class American to “get fired up” and “stand up” for democracy (and for him), Obama sure likes to spend a lot of time groveling before supposed white and upper-class superiors.

BLACK EXPERIENCE “NOT FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT”

We know that the technically black Obama has political reasons to avoid threatening the white electoral majority. Still it is too much for him to absurdly claim, in his power-adoring 2006 campaign book The Audacity of Hope (3), that “what ails working- and middle-class blacks and Latinos is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts”(Obama 2006, p. 245). Also rather audacious is Obama’s praise of the U.S. for historically possessing “an economic system that, more than any other, has offered opportunity to all comers regardless of status, title or rank”(Obama 2006, pp. 231-232) – including apparently the many millions of black chattel “comers” who came in chains, carrying literally subhuman “status.” Just to make sure that no Caucasians fear he’s about reawaken the tragically unfinished revolutions of Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement, Obama calms white anxieties further by claiming that black Americans (who suffer from a median household wealth gap of seven cents on the white dollar in the 21st century United States) have been “pulled into the economic mainstream” (Obama, 2006, pp. 248-49).

He also apologizes for whites’ indifference to the persistence of profound racial inequality and discrimination in the U.S (see Street.2007c and Brown 2003) by explaining that “white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America” as “even the most fair-minded of whites…tend to push back against suggestions of racial victimization and race-based claims based on the history of racial discrimination in this country” (Obama 2006, p. 247). This statement of understanding toleration for white racism-denial deftly consigns racial oppression to the supposedly finished past, cleverly deleting its continuing and deeply cumulative (Brown 2003) relevance in the living historical present (4).

.....

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=90&ItemID=14481

[Blue_In_AK]

17. This mirrors comments made by Bill Moyers' last guest

last night on Bill Moyers Journal. What he said about Oprah and Obama made so much sense.