The Obama phenomenon

John Judis has an interesting discussion of the roots and significance of Obama’s candidacy in the March 12 issue of TNR . In part, he sees it rooted in the American obsession with novelty. By presenting himself as the “candidate of the new,” Obama strikes a deep chord in the American imagination – R. W. B. Lewis’s notion that the hope to be a new Adamic race haunts American history and the recurring hope that we can re-start the American experiment.

That Obama is black is also crucial: Americans growing up through the civil rights movement “yearn for racial reconciliation, and they see voting for Obama as a means to achieve that.” But it’s not just his race; Obama is a unique sort of black politician. Given his Kenyan heritage, his birth in Hawaii and his upbringing in Indonesia, he is a black politician who comes from outside the world of black politics: “Obama has little of the typical black politician’s underlying outlook.” Appealing to the heritage of slavery comes naturally to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, but Obama “wouldn’t simply shun these kind of metaphors; the probably wouldn’t occur to him because they aren’t part of his political heritage. To put it in Adamic terms, he is outside of America’s racial history and conveys little resentment over his own racial past.”