Selling the President

One product of Barack Obama's unprecedented internet campaign was that I found myself inundated with opportunities to buy overpriced t-shirts and stickers from him. I thought little of this at the time. After all, the man had a national campaign to win, and you don't do that without money by the trainload.

For some naive reason, I assumed that the opportunities to buy stuff from the Obama campaign would end, well, with the election. Instead, the Obama for America campaign site remains up and running. It continues to bill itself as somehow associated with the 2008 campaign, and most curiously, continues to offer to sell me $30 t-shirts. I got an email from it last night detailing my opportunity to purchase a modified Obama campaign poster, not really improved by the addition of what appear to be palm branches framing an announcement of the inauguration.

The most obvious question for me: where the heck is this money going? Is Obama literally planning to continue campaigning non-stop through 2012? And on a related note, does anyone over there at Obama for America believe that someone in my income bracket, who donated the amounts I did to their campaign, is unaware of the inauguration date and would need yet another garish campaign poster cluttering up my apartment to remind me?

I turn also to this story in HuffPo, detailing the degree to which Obama has inherited the mantle of Babe Ruth as a marketing opportunity for everything from commemorative plates to Ikea furniture. I realize that this sort of shameless marketing fits comfortably within the American tradition of working to transform our most fundamental hopes and aspirations into lucre. I do get that. But I remember attending a rally in Cincinnati last year at which I was assailed, for hours, by local vendors hawking bootleg t-shirts, buttons, stuffed animals, postors- pretty much anything. In fact, despite specific effort, I was unable to locate a vendor among the dozens selling legitimate Obama gear. I finally broke down, and bought my shirt off the website.

What are we to make of all this? It's almost cliche at this point to observe that Obama takes office more as a social movement than as a candidate, which I guess goes some way toward explaining the universal market appeal. But I can't help feeling that this cheapens the brand, in the larger sense. Clintonian wit to the contrary, Obama is not going to wave and bid the heavens open for him. As real-world decisions plant him ever more firmly to the face of the Earth, I have to believe that all the iconography is going to seem...misplaced. I don't have television and therefore cannot track these things, but if the late-night comics haven't turned to this yet, they soon will. I've suggested before that Obama, for all his obvious talent and preternatural self-assurance, is due for an unpleasant collision with the fiasco bequeathed to him by the Bush administration. All the...junk...is just going to make it harder to come to grips with reality.