Et Tu, in the Bubble, Obama?

11/7/2008

At this critical point in the post-election whatnot, nothing is too small to escape annoying in-depth analysis. So what’s with the sunglasses?

On Tuesday, Barack Obama parted the Red Sea of American history. Then he gave another perfectly calibrated, uplifting but sober, speech accepting his election. Since then he’s barely appeared in public at all.

On Wednesday we slept off Tuesday.

But on Thursday came the photo of Obama fleeing his allegedly happy home on his way to a secret meeting with his advisors. His prominent sunglasses literally and figuratively reflected the blacker than black, back-off blackness of the waiting Secret Service SUV.

Then on Friday, came a pic snatched of “That One”, again doing the now all too familiar dash to the Tahoe, as he left an early morning workout, at a soon to be much more popular Chicago gymnasium. This time clad in exercise togs but again - the shades. He looked like he was auditioning for a star turn on The Sopranos.

This is a jarring sartorial development, a dissonant pre-presidential accessorization. The ramifications are manifold and ominous. Did we elect the smiling, open-faced, big-hearted Obama of our deepest hopes, aspirations, and dreams, only to find ourselves stuck with a be-goggled, bubble-encased, politics-as-usual nightmare Obama?

Let’s pause before we drag the molehill all the way to Mohammed. The sunglasses may only signal that Obama wanted a day off. After performing an innumerable series of political miracles, the man may simply need some down time. Sunglasses are the internationally accepted symbol, employed by celebrities everywhere, indicating: “Please leave me alone, I don’t want to be bothered by you, the insignificant groundling.”

The Grumpy was ready to accept this benign interpretation on Thursday, but then came the Friday Sopranos photo along with the news that Rahm Emanuel, the famously vicious Clinton hatchet man, had been named as President-elect Obama’s Chief of Staff. Many commentator types have been moved to comment: “Yeah. What’s with that? Here we go again, maybe”.

Also on Friday, Emanuel’s “best friend” described him as “a combination of a toothache and a hemorrhoid.” Is a painful rectal itch on the brain really change we can believe in?

Presidential sunglasses sometimes strike the perfect note, as in any photo of JFK sailing or hanging out shirtless on a PT boat.

(Gratuitous historical factoid: As President, JFK avoided appearing without a shirt because the drugs he took for many years to treat his well-concealed case of Addisson’s disease caused him to develop embarrassing man boobs.)

A useful rule of thumb for the employment of Presidential sunglasses, many experts agree, is that they should not be worn unless the sun is actually beaming down.

Throughout the arduous campaign of the last two years Obama followed this rule and wore shades only when called for by an actual excess of solar glare. He wore them, memorably, while touring a desolate Afghan landscape with his bipartisan traveling buds Senators Chuck Hagel and Jack Reed. Photographed in dark suit trousers and unbuttoned white shirt, Obama looked like a cool black 007, catapulted by some international emergency directly from an elegant Georgetown drawing room or an exclusive European casino, to a sun-baked third world hell hole. The rest of his entourage looked definitely uncool, an L.L. Bean catalog montage of appropriately dressed weekend campers in the Adirondacks.

In that same image Obama’s sunglasses said: “I can take the heat. I’m prepared to be President the way I’m prepared for high noon at Kandahar.”

The sunglasses in concert with the romantic business dishabille shouted: “I’m a globe-trotting, multi-tasking, multi-cultural, multi-dimensional demigod.”
This well circulated photo may have been more important to the success of Obama’s foreign trip than his speech in Berlin a few days later.

The Grumpy was almost moved to an act of journalism, but there was no need to research this week’s weather in northern Illinois. Chicago in November is not normally sun drenched.

Clearly, Obama’s shades of the last few days were intended either to conceal or reveal something, but what? Was he trying to conceal the very rational terror that might be evident in his eyes at actually having to deal with the dog’s breakfast now heaped up on the Presidential plate? Were his eyes all red and puffy because he’s been curled up in a fetal position crying and sleepless, while Michelle and the girls rubbed his back and applied cool compresses to his forehead?

And then just a little while ago Obama gave his first press conference, since the election. The sign on the podium, “The Office of the President Elect”, sounded a clunky note of excessive expectation control. How about: “He’s Not the President Yet”? Apparently, the finely tuned Obama campaign machine has run through the finish line and continues right around the track doing endless laps at full speed. Clearly nothing has been left to anything even vaguely hinting at chance.

Rahm Emanuel stood closest to The President-Elect but he was also careful to stand outside the frame of the main shot of Obama at the podium. That important just over the shoulder role, was given to the venerable reassuring Paul Volker, the giant of the American financial establishment. A quick glance at the huge white haired Volker visage should sober up the craziest short selling, greed obsessed criminal on Wall Street.

The President Elect looked a little weary around the eyes but he gave a controlled and careful performance. He offered the nation a quick peek-a-boo to reassure us that he was still functioning. His appearance was crisp, almost perfunctory, expressing a freshly fledged disdain for our attention. Then he strode off the stage with his posse of economic heavy hitters, leaving us alone, abandoned. Get it? The election is over. “Sniff.” He doesn’t need us anymore.

In Obamaland, every detail, no matter how tiny, is part of a powerful, unrelenting, subtle and seamless communication. The President Elect’s new shades clearly whisper: Time to get to work.