Naomi Klein, Nike & Obama
In this New Yorker profile, Naomi Klein compares successful advertising slogans…
…she [Klein] doesn’t spend time wishing Obama were more progressive. “I don’t want to appear too cynical, but when I first saw the ‘Yes We Can’ rock video that Will.I.Am made, my first response was ‘Wow, finally a politician is making ads that are as good as Nike’s,’ ” she says. “The ‘Yes We Can’ slogan means whatever you want it to mean. It’s very ‘Just Do It.’ When you hear it, you catch yourself thinking, Yeah! We’re gonna end torture and shut down Guantánamo and get out of Iraq! And then you think, Wait a minute, is he really saying that? He’s not really saying that, is he? He’s saying we’re going to send more troops to Afghanistan. He’s telling regular people what they want to hear, and then in the back rooms he’s making deals and signing on to the status quo.
These are exactly the kinds of voices you’d expect to hear from a disgruntled left, which we might expect will grow louder when Obama governs from the center, as he throws the occasional breadcrumbs left and right.
But for all those disappointed lefties, who are shaking their heads at Obama’s cabinet appointees, Andrew Sullivan reminds us
He [Obama] is not now and never has been a leftist ideologue. That was a paranoid fantasy that helped kill the GOP this year. He is a pragmatic, sane, reasoned centrist liberal.
But so what if the change you were hoping for might not be exactly the change you get. If he can right the economic ship at home while mopping up some of the damage abroad, then that might be enough for a second term, regardless of how many liberal social policies he embraces.
