Why Obama's Message Resonates with Millions

On the campaign trail with Barack Obama, four days before the Democratic convention. Another teeming high school gym in another halfway-to-somewhere town, decorated with still more banners proclaiming the heroic exploits of the Local Sports Team, in this case the football studs of Oscar Smith High in Chesapeake, Virginia.

In the audience are the same characters you see everywhere on the campaign trail: the bare-armed cheerleaders congregating near the bleachers, the sullen-faced union workers dutifully decked out in matching T-shirts, the heavyset Soccer Moms cheering from the back rows with that weird overhand applause style they all seem to use, their fingers curled back so as not to ruin freshly painted nails. There are the same Secret Service agents waiting to herd the press into the same windowless concrete filing room, and the same exhausted, khaki-clad campaign staffers with the rapidly thickening backsides ready to queue up behind the journalists to fill their buffet plates with the same Regionally Appropriate Cuisine (pork ribs and hush puppies in the South; steak, corn and potatoes in the Midwest) made up with pride by the local caterers.

And to top it all off, there's even the same speech.

Four years ago, I listened first to Howard Dean and then to John Kerry as they went through the motions of promising to support the middle class, to create jobs through investment in renewable energy, to punish companies that exploited tax loopholes by moving overseas and to find the real terrorists in Afghanistan. They trod the same ground as Gore and even Clinton, coughing out the same paeans to the same lost paradise of the middle-class lifestyle, to those same vanishing days of our history when hardworking, patriotic Americans could live with comfort and economic security on one decent manufacturing job. At stake, they insisted, was nothing less than the American Dream itself. For Dean, it was "time for a change in America." Kerry sometimes ended his speeches by presenting his campaign as a choice of "change versus more of the same" -- a phrase he actually borrowed from Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign.

Here in Chesapeake, Barack Obama offers up the same milky hodgepodge of middle-class tax cuts, investment in alternative fuels and consequences for job exporters and terrorists. And rhetorically, he uses the same old magic trick for his main theme, talking about how all Americans want is to leave a better world for their children.

"That's the essence of the American Dream," he tells the crowd, echoing his predecessors. He goes on to tell the already-famous story of John McCain's seven houses, then explains that someone who has seven houses can't possibly understand what the middle class is going through. "You need a president who's going to be fighting for you," Obama says, to thunderous applause. He concludes by declaring, "We are going to fundamentally bring about change in America" -- a message punctuated by the huge banner hanging behind him, emblazoned with his infuriatingly omnipresent campaign slogan: "Change We Can Believe In." Obama has even taken to borrowing some of his theme music from other candidates: I was mortified when his rallies began to feature the worst of the Hillary standbys, the excruciating "I Won't Back Down" by Tom Petty. The painful predictability of it all was summed up by a front-page headline in The New York Times after the first day of the Democratic convention: "Appeals Evoking American Dream Rally Democrats."

All of this saccharine talk of "change" is so transparently a mechanical come-on that if it were anybody but Barack Obama uttering the word, you'd want to throw up at the very sound of it. And yet, as I watch Obama deliver the same hackneyed act I've seen hundreds of times before, I feel against my will that I am actually watching something different at work. After Kerry and Dean speeches, I often heard people say things like, "At least he's not as dumb as Bush." But after Obama speeches, I see audience members stumbling around in all directions with orgiastic smiles on their faces, as though they've been splashed with gallons of magic pixie paint. In Raleigh, North Carolina, where Obama knocked dead a massive town-hall crowd at a local fairgrounds with a speech that said almost nothing at all, I ask a woman named Melanie Threatt why she thinks her life would improve under an Obama presidency. "It just will," she says. When I press her for specifics, she says, "I just think doors are going to open." You hear stuff like this a lot on Planet Obama, and it makes you wonder just what it is you're encountering. Obama's followers implicitly believe in the things he says, and the fervor of their belief is more religious than intellectual, closer to faith than to reason. Watching him at work, you realize that Obama's remarkable success has almost nothing to do with the same-old product being marketed by the same-old political machine, and almost everything to do with the specific qualities of the individual who is selling it. The same stuff that sounded like hollow, invidious horseshit coming from Kerry and Gore sounds, as dispensed by Obama, like nothing less than a clarion call to collective action. And every time you feel his pitch working, you wonder: Is this some chat-room robot I'm falling in love with? Or is this an actual human being on the line, offering me an opportunity at last to fulfill my deepest desires?