Barack Obama is No Superman

As everyone now knows, Barack Obama has long held friendships with characters that can only, and most generously, be described as politically radical. Over some of these friendships -- those that hurt him in the polls -- he has expressed regret, and he has attributed them to bad judgment on his part. Of those that his allies in the media stopped from gaining traction, he has said relatively little. Whether he continues to remain close friends with people whose shared view of America strikes the vast majority of Americans as both alien and outrageous is ultimately irrelevant, for -- far from being a Marxist radical -- Obama is really as American as “apple pie.” Thus, his most recent campaign ad is intended to endear Obama to those Americans for whom his radicalism is anathema.

The ad features still photos of Obama and his white mother and grandparents. As one photo fades into another, Obama relays how his Kansas upbringing made him into the man he is today. And who is this man? To hear him tell it, Obama is just a good ol’ country boy at heart who continues to affirm those old-fashioned “middle American” values that his God-fearing, law abiding, patriotic mother and maternal grandparents labored incessantly to instill in him, values that made America great, the land of the free and the home of the brave.

This ad is nothing more than a fairly rare display of a black politician pandering to a predominantly white electorate. However, it is not this aspect of the ad on which I want to focus.

The messianic aura with which Obama’s supporters have endowed their candidate has not gone unnoticed by the punditry class. His critics complain that both the theatrics and rhetoric of the Obama campaign have had the intended, even if subtle, effect of likening Obama to the quintessential Messiah of the Christian world -- Christ Himself. I encourage readers to consider that this latest Obama ad has the (more likely than not) unintended effect of comparing Obama to another all-American from Kansas. His name is Clark Kent, but the world knows him as Superman.

On its face, this undoubtedly will strike many people as laughable. But before people write it off, they should bear the following considerations in mind:

As I already said, I do not think it’s necessarily true that Obama and his people had Superman consciously in mind when they made Obama’s Kansas origins and grandparents the focus of their ad. Yet Superman is an American icon. In the popular imagination of our nation, this visitor from another planet is as much a symbol of “Truth, Justice, and ‘The American Way’" as the star-spangled-banner itself!

Yet Superman, in spite of being the most famous and powerful superhero of all time, has humble origins. From the time he was a baby, his adopted parents -- an elderly couple past child-bearing years -- raised him in a small Kansas town and instilled in him a love of country and humanity that would eventually make him into the hero that he would become.

The narrative that Obama is now busy at work weaving is strikingly similar to the narrative of the Superman mythos. According to the campaign ad that is the subject of this discussion, Obama, like Superman, was raised in the modest, but quintessentially American, environment of “middle-America.” Like Superman’s adopted parents, his virtually adopted parents -- his grandparents -- were an elderly couple whose unconditional love inspired in young Obama a lifelong commitment to those values, like “Truth” and “Justice,” that, while universal, are also distinctively American. Obama is positioning himself as a larger-than-life character, like Superman, who transcends “the American Way” even while exemplifying it.

Of course, this Obama ad is a sham and Obama is not in the least like Superman. The latter would never befriend criminals (like Tony Rezko) and terrorists (like William Ayers); Superman would never draw spiritual sustenance from a person (like Jeremiah Wright) whose career consists of promoting poisonous fictions about his beloved country, including and especially the fiction that the middle American values that are his greatest power are, in reality, the means by which “white supremacy” preserves and strengthens its hold over oppressed racial minorities; and, finally, while the Superman mythos has undergone multiple changes since its inception seventy years ago, not once did “the Man of Steel” ever accuse his mother (like Obama accused his grandmother) of making racially charged comments regarding black males that made him “cringe,” or of being “a typical white person.”

No, Obama is no Superman.