The Obama "Hope" poster is the iconic image of the 2008 presidential campaign. Ever wonder what photo was the source for the poster? Tom Gralish tracks it down.
It is amusing, given all the ponderous significance an image like this is meant to convey, that the source photo apparently comes from a George Clooney event at the National Press Club.
It serves to remind us that there remains a disjunction between the ways in which we love our politicians and the grounds upon which they earn our love. They go to hear an actor speak at a press club and we turn it into a Christos Pantocrator.
Anne Althouse, who voted for Obama, has a reflection in a similar vein here.
"By contrast, the entire plan to bring Obama into office depended on the glorification of the man, whose actual experience was so bizarrely limited that it took some nerve to claim to be ready. Magic was required. The cult grew up not as he held power and needed to respond to a crisis. The cult was the campaign to bring him into power. It depended on our projecting all sorts of hopes and dreams onto him, and he knew it. Inside, he may have felt embarrassed by the whole enterprise, but he'd figured out that it could work, and he was right. Now, I think this worked because he really is a solid, normal person who remained grounded in the middle of all this craziness. And I like to think that, now that he's President, with his steely nerve, his intelligence, and his groundedness, he'll do the job that must be done. The trickery is over."
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