Pop Culture in the Age of Obama

"Obama’s presidency will undoubtedly influence the tone and substance of pop culture. But what’s most pop culturally interesting about him is not so much Obama as cause but Obama as effect. He strategically harnessed pop culture, he produced it with two best-selling books, he avidly consumes it. Barack Obama simply is the pop cultural colossus.

Three big trends made his ascension possible. First there was the steady blackening of American popular culture. This transformation had been happening incrementally for more than a century, as Leon Wynter explained in his great book, “American Skin.” “The future,” Wynter wrote pres­ciently in 2002, “is not about black people leading black people,” but “about black people leading all Americans.”

Then there’s our turn-of-the-21st-century pop-intellectual zeitgeist. Although most of the seats for serious novelists at the mass-market table were removed, PowerPointable nonfiction books retained their ability to shape the popular discourse...[becoming] phenomenally popular by embodying a cheerful, bracing, empiricist rigor without tilting too strongly left or right. They are lucid and accessible, carefully researched but not boring, pop but not too pop. And they have flourished in counterpoint to the harsh, predictably ideological manifestoes that dominated the pop political discourse during the preceding decade. In other words, the new species of pop-intellectual best seller is like Barack Obama himself.

The third big trend that helped usher in the Age of Obama was the morphing of news into entertainment. During the last decade, with the proliferation of Web news and 24/7 cable jabberfests, the old ratio of news supply to demand was upended. The vast new maw needed feeding, and a charismatic young black candidate and then president was a godsend. “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” finally dissolved the remaining membrane between news and pop culture. What’s more, the Comedy Central hybrids are (like Obama) fair-mindedly center-left, manifestly smarter (like Obama) than their conventional counterparts and hosted by men (like Obama) born in the early ’60s.

Previous national politicians leveraged their political fame into publishing success. But Obama became a best-selling author before he announced his candidacy. And why did he get a book deal? Because of an amazing prime-time television performance, his keynote speech as a little-known senatorial candidate at the 2004 Democratic convention. Thus his carefully platformed pop-cultural cred enabled his presidency. When the McCain campaign imagined last summer that it was dissing Obama by calling him “the biggest celebrity in the world,” it was clear who was clueless and who had the cultural winds at his back.

And then there’s Obama the tasteful pop-culture-consuming American, redefining presidential regular-guyness. He doesn’t just name-check, but convincingly declaims — he prefers Spider-Man and Batman to Superman because “they have some inner turmoil.” And — crucially — he’s even acute and impolitic enough to discriminate between quality and crud: his favorite movies are the first two “Godfather” films, but he acknowledges the inferiority of “Godfather III” and says his wife “likes ‘American Idol,’ her and the girls, in a way that I don’t entirely get.”

There’s a lesson here about how we think of consuming culture. Maybe we can once and for all stop defaulting to easy categorical boundaries between high and low, and discriminate instead between the well made and the shoddy. After all, didn’t Obama’s election prove that people will respond to vision and intelligence, that familiar binary (racial and ideological) pigeonholes no longer necessarily apply, and that the very good can occasionally become very, very popular?"