By JoAnn Wypijewski
In politics as in pop, legions of little girls jumping out of their panties can't be wrong. That's the vital lesson so far of Election '08. I watched a throng of them in November 2006, teenagers in their short skirts and breathlessness, jumping and jittering, hands to cheeks, screaming for Barack Obama. White and black, they crowded to the front of a rally for Jim Webb in the onetime capital of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia. Jim who? One of the white girls awkwardly told me that she didn't really know anything about the beet-faced warrior for the white working class running for the Senate, and she wasn't really there to find out. Obama hadn't come there to say much about the candidate or Virginia or even that year's election, either. He glided across the stage like a crooner, one slender hand gracing the microphone, the other extending long fingers to trace the imagined horizon of his hopes and dreams. He must have talked for thirty minutes. It didn't matter what he said; he smiled a thousand watts, put a little Southern sugar in his voice and mentioned his mama. Webb steamed in the wings as the girls keened, and from somewhere in the crowd grown-ups started calling out, "Obama for President." He wasn't yet a candidate. He was Frank Sinatra, so cool he's hot, a centrifugal force commanding attention so ruthlessly that it appeared effortless, reducing everyone around him to a sidekick, and the girls in the front rows to jelly.
Those girls represented what they always have in America, a cultural longing. By '07 even the boys were Obama Girls, and their parents were borne along on the energy, feeling young and hip and a little damp in the drawers themselves. "America is back!" Obama told crowds he would announce to the world if they elected him. Hillary and the others didn't have a chance. They had welded themselves to prosaic needs and familiar lies. Obama recognized a different need, requiring a different lie, a pretty lie, not just "change" but "change you can believe in." Tell me again. Yes, darling, you really are beautiful... Like someone ground down by years in a bad relationship, America needed a seduction and, then, like the starlet on the crooner's arm, the reflected shine.
The Shadow of His Smile....
