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“The Imagined Presidency”: Political Communication As “Narrative” and “Performance” – a Case Study of Barack Obama’S 2008 Presidential Campaign

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“The Imagined Presidency”: Political Communication As “Narrative” and “Performance” – a Case Study of Barack Obama’S 2008 Presidential Campaign Universität Passau Philosophische Fakultät Dissertation Amerikanistik / Culture and Media Studies “The Imagined Presidency”: Political Communication as “Narrative” and “Performance” – A Case Study of Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential Campaign Sarah Nike Makeschin Disclaimer Bitte beachten Sie, dass der Leser selbst die Verantwortung für das Abrufen der im Doku- ment genannten URLs trägt. Für die im Dokument per URL referenzierten Inhalte auf den Webseiten ist stets der jeweilige Anbieter oder Betreiber der Webseiten verant- wortlich. Deshalb trägt die Autorin für die im Dokument gesetzten Referenzen (URLs) auf Webseiten, deren Inhalte sowie die Aktualität der Inhalte auch keine Verantwortung. Es kam nicht darauf an, wie Martin Krüger […] wirklich, ja ob er wirklich war. Kam es darauf an, ob Jesus von Nazareth aktenmäßig gelebt hatte? Ein Bild von ihm existierte, das der Welt einleuchtete. Durch dieses Bild war, nur durch dieses Bild, Wahrheit entstanden. Lion Feuchtwanger – Erfolg “The Imagined Presidency”: Political Communication as “Narrative” and “Performance” – A Case Study of Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential Campaign 1. Introduction: Political Culture, Imagination and Meaning-Making in the Public Sphere – 5 2. A Cultural Sociology Perspective on Political Culture – 8 3. Defining the American Presidency of the 21st Century: Political Communication and the Imaginative – 13 3.1. The Presidency in American Political Culture – 13 3.1.1. The History and Development of the American Presidential Office – 14 3.1.2. The Pragmatic and Symbolic Functions of the Presidency – 17 3.1.3. Presidential Roles in the American Civil Religious Landscape – 19 3.1.4. The American Presidency as Center of Meaning-Making – 21 3.2. Performance and Narrative Imagination in 21st Century Politics – 23 3.2.1. Collective Meaning-Making and Political Communication in the 21st Century – 23 3.2.2. Staging Politics: Ritual-like Performances and Political Campaigns – 25 3.2.3. Collective Meaning-Making as Narrative Event: “Telling a Story of Who We Are” – 34 3.2.4. The Concept of the “Imagined Presidency” – 39 4. Obama’s “Imagined Presidency”: A Case Study of Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential Election Campaign’s Public Performance – 44 4.1. Obama as the 21st Century Adamic Innovator – 44 4.1.1. Ending Business as Usual: Politics and Corruption in Washington D.C. – 51 4.1.2. Identity Politics for the 21st Century: America’s Universalist Promise – 54 4.2. Michelle Obama: The 21st Century Angel of the House – 61 4.3. Being Lincoln: Obama’s Promise of Unifying America – 69 4.3.1. Overcoming the Rift: Offering a Post-Bush Consensus – 72 4.3.2. “Perfecting the Union”: Finishing the Work of Lincoln and the Founders – 79 4.4. On King’s Mountaintop: Obama and the Way to a Post-Racial America – 86 4.4.1. “At the Same Table”: Negotiating Race and Reconciliation – 91 4.4.2. “The Content of Their Character”: Obama’s Colorblind America – 99 4.5. Michelle Obama as Barack’s Better Black Half – 104 4.6. Obama’s “Great Depression”: Renewing the American Dream in Crisis – 116 4.6.1. Reagan’s Road to the Land of Opportunity – 121 4.6.2. FDR’s Community and Obama’s Communitarian American Dream – 138 4.7. Michelle Obama: The 21st Century Working Class Woman – 160 5. Conclusion: The “Imagined Presidency” and Political Communication in Contemporary Election Campaigns – 170 Works Cited – 179 List of Figures – 221 1. Introduction: Political Culture, Imagination and Meaning-Making in the Public Sphere The political world of make-believe mingles with the real world in strange ways, for the make-believe world may often mold the real one. (Morgan 223) National identities and their manifestation in governmental bodies and institutions depend on cultural imagination and meaning-making. The performative use of imagi- nation is crucial for establishing and maintaining political power. This is of particular relevance with regard to the 21st century’s political sphere. Anthropologist David Kertzer remarks that “the state is invisible; it must be personi- fied before it can be seen, symbolized before it can be loved, imagined before it can be conceived” (Kertzer 6). The socio-political institutions and processes of collective mean- ing-making that have defined human society since the 19th century developed from simpler social systems. According to cultural sociologist Jeffrey Alexander, ritual-driven symbolic communication and clear-cut social roles have become complex social systems defined largely by contingency and open-ended consensus building (“Pragmatics” 529). The explosion of complexity in a globalized and hypermedialized world, leading to a dis- solution of boundaries at both, the micro and macro levels, has permanently changed the modern political sphere. These circumstances have caused an increasing fragmentation of socio-political col- lectives, frequently leaving their individual members disoriented. This development requires political actors seeking power to respond appropriately. In what Andreas Dörner has called the modern “Multioptionsgesellschaft” that is defined by “Enttraditional- isierung” (Dörner, “Wahlkämpfe” 33) it has more than ever become necessary that the political process and its political actors bring abstract meaning systems to life, make them understandable, and revive the value and symbol systems underlying collective identities. During elections, the dramatic enactment of politics is an especially powerful tool. The masterful storytelling by Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign illustrates how contemporary collective meaning-making in the political sphere is increasingly dependent on making credible imaginative offers and successfully staging them. Barack Obama, to a yet-unknown degree, re-fused the American collective by regenerating the public’s belief in fundamental American narratives. The key to his election was his ability to performatively imagine a future version of the American Presidency, by telling stories about himself and staging them. Thereby he successfully offered himself to voters as an accessible and verisimilar version of their own collective self.1 1 This strategy is also reflected in a training concept for volunteer campaigners applied by the Obama campaign in 2008. The training concept was developed by Harvard public policy scholar Marshall Ganz. Ganz’s “Public Narrative Participant Guide” (Marshall, “Public Narrative”) revolves around the principle of “telling your story of self” (Marshall, “Public Narrative” 7). Ganz specifies that successful campaigning depends on performing different stories: “A ‘story of self’ tells why you have been called to serve. [A] ‘story of us’ communicates why our community in particular is called to act, and why we in particular have the capacity to lead. [A] ‘story of now’ communicates the urgent challenge we are called upon to face now“ (Marshall, “Public Narrative” 7). 5 In this dissertation, I show that established concepts like the “Rhetorical Presidency” (Thuerow/Bessette 1981, Tulis 1987) and the “Symbolic Presidency” (Denton 1982, Hin- kley 1990) require conceptual refinement, as they no longer adequately characterize the functional logic of the American Presidency in the 21st century. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s idea of the “Imagined Community” (1983) my project elaborates a new con- ceptualization of what Louis Koenig called the “Imagined Presidency” (1968). Obama’s first presidential campaign serves as the dissertation’s case study, demonstrat- ing how deeply rooted cultural concepts in the American socio-political sphere require a imaginative resignification of their identity-establishing power in the fragmented, glo- balized and hyper-mediated world of the 21st century. My reading of the 2008 election campaign shows how collective identity formation resulted from Obama’s integration of core American collective self-concepts into storytelling, performing himself as a 21st century American Adam, bipartisan unifier, post-racial American and communitarian American Dreamer. In this context I also analyze Michelle Obama’s role in her husband’s 2008 campaign. In the past decade, researchers in cultural studies, sociology, communication studies, and performance studies have increasingly focused on the performative implementation of imaginative structures in politics. It is generally acknowledged that major political institutions and the political sphere as a whole rely on “the centrality of images”, the power of “imaginative rhetoric” and “the role imagination plays in individual and social governance” (Butler, Imagination 16). The institution of the American presidency is at the center of a collective and national meaning-making process, and the presidency, accord- ing to Jeff Smith, was “born in storytelling” Presidents( 8). The paper first reviews research at the crossroads of cultural studies, sociology and political science on collective meaning-making in the socio-political sphere. My anal- ysis of collective identities and their underlying formation processes aligns with these approaches, and is particularly relevant for the examination of the United States of America which, in the words of Sacvan Bercovitch, “invented the meaning of their com- munity, that is, ex verbo” (174). The United States, as one of the first modern democratic nation-states, was founded on abstract rules and ideals. With its highly heterogeneous population, America depended more than any modern European state on imagination to maintain its identity as a people. Clinton Rossiter claims that the highest American
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