Splicetoday

Politics & Media
Jul 25, 2008, 09:21AM

Our Harvey Dent?

Batman kicked some serious butt last weekend by including tense modern social anxieties and grappling with questions of moral leadership. Harvey Dent, the hard working District Attorney, tells us “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” Where does Barack Obama fit in on that spectrum? Can a superhero become president, or are they necessarily corrupted? A writer uses the lessons of Batman to examine the supercandidate.

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Photo by whorange

Last week, we were wondering how seriously to take a magazine cover depicting Obama dressed as a Muslim, idolizing Osama bin Laden, standing with his militant wife and watching the American flag burn in the Oval Office fireplace.

This week, we are being asked by John McCain’s campaign to consider the depth of the media’s “love affair” with Obama.

This is, for better or for worse, the Harvey Dent effect. “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” the character says in “The Dark Knight.”

Without resurrecting Hillary Clinton’s unfortunate misstatement, Obama has lived long enough to see himself become the villain – an unfortunately frequent and easily earned title in the Democratic Party, which finds itself more open to self loathing than the Republicans, who tend to accept their fate with the patience of Job (“The ways of George Bush cannot be known to men,” we imagine them telling themselves).

Or, as a reporter for The New Yorker found, Obama’s problems – notwithstanding the magazine’s cover – “stem from a realization among his supporters that superheroes don’t become President; politicians do.”

This doesn’t mean he is any less of a man, but it certainly ruins the image many had of him – which apparently involved a lot of washing of feet, casting out of money changers and bringing hope to the generations.

“Is there really room for a white knight in out society or is Barak doomed to become a villain or a monster because the world corrupts all it’s heroes?” DC Comics message board user cookylamoo asked.

It’s not that Obama has fallen or anything, it’s just that he was never on a higher plane.

Discussion
  • This is a very smart article, one of the very few I've read about the inane New Yorker cover flap that mentions that Ryan Lizza's inside story was far more "damning" than the cover. I blame the media, as usual, for casting Obama as a messiah. If gifted rhetoric and a "compelling personal story" were all it took to win a PRESIDENTIAL nomination, the entire recent history of politics would be vastly different. Of course Obama's a politician who's made deals, compromises and opportunistic decisions along the way. That's what politicians do: if they didn't have the drive and ego to dream of high office from a very young age they wouldn't succeed. I think Obama might've overreached with the Berlin rally/speech/European reconciliation, but compare his POLITICAL boldness with McCain's and it's just no contest. And the "netroots" whiners can eat my shorts.

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  • Obama shouldn't be held to proposals he made a year ago or six months ago, either on the war or the economy. The set of issues are fluid, and any smart leader, which he is, will be flexible enough to recalibrate. Hasn't that been one of Bush's myriad problems: that once he makes up his mind he doesn't change until it's too late? I don't agree with the author that the Democrats are more "self-loathing" than the Republicans, but it's an intelligent and realistic piece.

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