left as a comment on lorna's blog


obama's his trip to berlin is another in a v. long line of ways that he embodies, in a self constructed, historically reflexive, image heavy way, the ideology of kennedy.

the fascinating, and under stated comment in the big new yorker article this week, is how this kennedy mirroring began explicitly with his engagement in chicago politics.

(the new yorker article was useful for a couple of reasons, as a primer on urban american politics, as a gloss on how political obama is, and as a reminder of how that smoothness is not the result of naturalness, but of an extreme and delicately placed artifice, he seems to be a man w/o appetites---Clinton, who has the same charisma, and also Kennedy, who had more of the same charisma, were both men of raeblesian appetites, they ate and they drank and they fucked...obama is not only post-racial, he seems to be post-corperal, in a miraculous act of transubstanation, the body of one man becomes the body politic....which makes him ripe for martyrdom, which has been noted by people has varied as doris lessing ("hes going to get shot") and hilary clinton (who was basically saying, we know the consquences of charisma, hire someone with no charisma (and no body), because to be seduced is to be put in danger)

not that it is quite seduction that is happening here.