Obama and Che

A recently-opened Obama office in Houston had the following on the wall:

Obama/Che Picture

So, what is Obama to do? This is a picture of Che Guevara superimposed over the flag of Cuba, a US enemy. Granting that Obama had nothing to do with this, I feel like we've seen this before.

It reminds me an awful lot of the Paul flaps over the racist things written in his newsletter (author unknown), or of Paul being called on to reject the funding of white supremacist groups. I remember that Paul, an absolute fringe candidate, was hammered over those issues. The Obama campaign responded to the story like so:

"This is a volunteer office that is not in any way controlled by the Obama campaign. We were disappointed to see this picture because it is both offensive to many Cuban-Americans -- and Americans of all backgrounds -- and because it does not reflect Senator Obama’s views. Barack Obama has been very clear in putting forward a Cuba policy that is based on one principle: freedom for the Cuban people."

I am a bit miffed that the response to Obama's campaign has been relatively muted (excepting a few very angry conservatives), while Paul dealt with fire from many sides, but that's just me being a spiteful sympathizer of Ron Paul's. The Obama campaign has been very, very good at handling these stories, and I think that they did a good job with it. I don't know what else Obama's campaign could be expected to do about this; these things happen, and they handled it well.

Che was not the most... pro-American of revolutionaries, if you will; one of his quotes was, "Our every action is a battle cry against imperialism, and a battle hymn for the people's unity against the great enemy of mankind: the United States of America." He's an odd person to support, if you're working on an American political campaign.

Really, the question is, why is Obama attracting support from this kind of person, the one who won't only wear the Che t-shirt, but the one who will literally hang his flag in their office? It's a difficult question. I would like to pose a couple of suggestions:

1. Many of Obama's supporters are idiotic young people. Oftentimes, idiotic young people support Che Guevara. Thus, some of Obama's supporters support Che Guevara. Simple syllogism, there.
2. Obama, as a black man, is seen as distinctly qualified to work against the structures of white power that led to the imperialism that Che Guevara so opposed.
3. While every candidate speaks of "change" as a good thing, Obama's "change" message is at the very center of his campaign. Thus, he is the closest candidate to supporting an outright "revolution," other than the quixotic Ron Paul.

I think, though, that a lot of it stems from the basis of Obama's campaign about the "audacity of hope." Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal made some good points in this editorial.

The obvious thing that I have missed in the Obama campaign is how the underlying themes are pervasively negative. Obama's "change" isn't an empty message; it's based on a view of Washington as an utter disaster, the present-day US as a land of empty promises, and capitalism as a flawed system. Obama's "hope" is to change the system that he views as so flawed. His "Yes, We Can" ideology is that the system can be changed. But it's not just a series of empty rhetorical devices at all. It's real.

I've written that Obama can't really pull people together with an unabashedly liberal record, but then again, that's not entirely true: if he can convince people of the flaws in the system, he can pull people together.

So, why would the Che supporters drift to Obama? I think it's pretty simple, actually: Obama is charismatic, like Che, and he is negative about the effects of capitalism, like Che. Hillary Clinton is only one of these things. I don't recall Bill Clinton and Al Gore being quite so angry about capitalism. It's a new old thing in American politics.