Obama: star of his own movie

THE MOST UBIQUITOUS POLITICAL trope of the presidential campaign has been that Barack Obama is not just any old politician; he's a "rock star." (There are 770,000 Google hits of Obama and "rock star" and counting.) He attracts the kind of huge crowds that congregate around rock stars. He elicits the fevered passion from his adherents that a rock star does. He has the loose-limbed bearing, the cool, the charisma of a rock star, and his constituency is disproportionately young, like a rock star's. Obama is the Britney Spears of this political season, as a recent John McCain political ad implies.

By Neal Gabler

August 9, 2008