(Photo: Alice E. Backer | blog)
Andrew Galasetti at Lyved is an extremely devoted admirer of Obama. While fanatical devotion can blind — Galasetti thinks for instance that the McCain celebrity charge backfired, when the polls suggest a different picture (last week Ras had +6 Obama, now it’s +1 McCain) — it can also be a benefit when you’re looking for someone to find hidden advantages in faults. Often there are adantages, particularly foreign policy advantages, wrapped up inside domestic political vulnerabilities.
Thus Andrew does makes some interesting points for why Obama should embrace his celebrity image. In particular, for the benefit of American world leadership:
As the speeches and tour Mr. Obama did in Europe show; international citizens are still behind America and are optimistic for its future. You can go on various websites and social networks and see people from Europe and Asia supporting Obama with his logo and slogan. They can’t even vote and they are spreading the word for the Obama campaign. You’d think they wouldn’t care about an election in a country across the globe. Obama’s celebrity status is reaching every corner of the globe and getting nations talking positively about the US.
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I want world famous celebrities from our country to represent the United States in a positive, respectful way. Barack does exactly that.
Lyved
I think that’s all very true (they’re even printing their own t-shirts) and would doubtlessly improve popular perceptions of the United States abroad…up until the moment when the world realizes what Obama himself increasingly has: American interests and broader foreign policy can’t be fundamentally changed by course of his election. The real question is whether Obama’s international popularity can sustain such a “betrayal” of global expectations for fundamental change in foreign policy structure. And here of course, the loving treatment from Andrew could begin to fail us for an answer.
I think that it’s possible it would though. One of the dimensions of celebrity is that it can act as a force for legitimation. While that’s true for social (primarily sexual) issues in the United States, it’s rarely true for policy ideas. You could count the number of celebrities who endorsed George W. Bush in 2004 on one hand and it had no bearing whatsoever on the election. It’s not known however if that is true abroad, where Obama is seen through a different prism than he is domestically.
It’s this dimension of the Jack Kennedy comparison –policy legitimation through international popularity– which might deserve further scrutiny. It’s questionable whether many of Kennedy’s aggressive anti-communist initiatives in the early 1960s would have been as well received in Europe had they come from Nixon — or as they were not, when they came from Johnson.