Rebranding America with Obama

Does it matter if an African American is the figurehead of America? He’s still American to the rest of the world. America the brand is more of a cultural thing, as opposed to a “racial” thing. However, Taplin’s POV shows how some Americans do get hung up on the “race” thing (more often than most other cultural groups). Yeah, maybe an African American president will revolutionise American politics — it’s pretty much BAU (business as usual) for the rest of us.

I think the success of Kevin Rudd was due to the fact #1 people got over Howard and #2 Workchoices. The seats that swung hardest to the ALP tended to be the battler type ones (outer suburban/rural). Australia doesn’t have much of a presence in the international political scene and I doubt most Australians particularly care about that either.

Feel free to disregard the first paragraph of my previous comment — reading it now, it’s a bit of a rambling mess

I had a couple more rambling paragraphs, but I do like concise bullet points so I will attempt to do that instead:

#1 “Re-branding” America has more to do with their corporate institutions, the political institutions that support them and changing the way they work. Regardless of president, they have generally chugged along in a similar fashion in the last half century or so, hence why I said figurehead.

#2 From my limited observations of Obama, reading up on the candidates’ policies on the interweb and observing American friend intelligibly squabble about the issues, I think he and fellow Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton are similar in viewpoints and they will end up working in similar ways when in power. Obama is superficially more attractive to people who want a significant change, because he lacks the strong institutional links of Clinton and he does rhetoric well, but I haven’t seen anything to suggest that his actions will back up the rhetoric (I suppose I should point out that I am intrinsically suspicious of rhetoric). I don’t think he will be the great reformer many want him to be.

#3 I would probably like to be proven wrong.

#4 In Andrew Sullivan’s article, there was a line about the Pakistani boy seeing Obama and saying that Obama’s appearance would be useful in the US’ fight against radical Islamism (and part of the re-branding according to Taplin’s article). While humans are visual creatures, I think people’s issues with the US’ branding is more cultural than racial and that seeing a non-white president is unlikely to make much of a difference (especially with the baggage involved!). I think that’s a better summation of my point regarding Obama’s appearance.

[Stilgherrian says: I've even link to the Sullivan article for you, I'm that considerate. Yes, I sometimes edit comments -- but only to fix obvious spelling and typographical mistakes or provide links.]