Star of his own movie

THE MOST UBIQUITOUS POLITICAL trope of the presidential campaign has been that Barack Obama is not just any old politician; he's a "rock star." (There are 770,000 Google hits of Obama and "rock star" and counting.) He attracts the kind of huge crowds that congregate around rock stars. He elicits the fevered passion from his adherents that a rock star does. He has the loose-limbed bearing, the cool, the charisma of a rock star, and his constituency is disproportionately young, like a rock star's. Obama is the Britney Spears of this political season, as a recent John McCain political ad implies.

Like all cliches, this one has some truth and a lot more gas. The last time the media carted out this theme was 40 years ago, when Robert Kennedy, running for president, attracted the same sort of frenzied adulation and also threatened to upset the political apple cart by assembling a coalition of the young, the disenfranchised and the well-educated. But for Obama and for Bobby, the characterization is insulting and imprecise. It is insulting because it suggests that their devotees' effusions are just a visceral reaction -- the political equivalent of puppy love. And it is imprecise because Obama is -- and Bobby was -- more movie star than rock star, which is an analogy with a difference. Rock stars, with some glaring exceptions, typically whip up the crowd; the thrill tends to be short-lived. Movie stars, by contrast, tend to create a long-standing emotional identification with their audience. It's a difference that may have a bearing on the outcome of this election as voters weigh the advantages of being a movie star against its disadvantages. Movie stardom can be confused with mere celebrity, which has connotations of insubstantiality.

It was nearly 50 years ago that Norman Mailer, in his essay "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," observed how John Kennedy, the original political movie star, was reinventing U.S. politics. As Mailer saw it, Kennedy was "unlike any politician who had ever run for president in the history of the land." Most candidates were dull, prosaic, cautious; they lived solely within the political arena. Kennedy, with his good looks, his beautiful wife, his ironic wit, his style, was the first candidate who also lived outside it, in what Mailer called the "subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely romantic desires" -- the psychic territory inhabited by our movie stars. Kennedy was the first politician to realize that the best politics wasn't politics at all. It was a form of popular culture -- dream-making. Or, as Mailer put it, Kennedy turned politics into a movie.