Barack Obama, the Hollow Icon
The Obama presidency gave rise to a uniquely powerful iconography that projected a sense of hope and radical possibility. But behind the president’s messianic imagery was a country unraveling at the seams — and a president who stood for nothing.
Then senator Barack Obama at the Presidential Health Forum in Las Vegas, Nevada, on March 24, 2007. (Center for American Progress Action Fund / Wikimedia Commons)
The presidency of Barack Obama was inarguably slicker than any in living memory. Preternaturally charismatic, charming, and photogenic, Obama was the object of an official iconography that projected a powerful and compelling vision of a transformative leader — an image meticulously crafted by White House photographer Pete Souza, whose 2017 book, Obama: An Intimate Portrait, documented the official visual record of the presidency as presented to Americans.
Blair McClendon is a New York–based writer and filmmaker. In an insightful recent essay for n+1 (adapted for the Guardian), he reflected on the way Obama’s official iconography obscured the president’s failures and omissions, shrouding the realities of American politics in the process. In a wide-ranging conversation with Jacobin, McClendon discusses the politics of Obama’s image — and the blind spots about his presidency it has ultimately helped to foster.
Luke Savage
You note in the introduction to your piece that the mystique constructed by Obama from the outset was essentially, and quite deliberately, a messianic one. What was that mystique?
Blair McClendon
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