Obama Media

On Brooklyn for Obama

April 13, 2007 on 12:15 pm | In obama, Brooklyn, NYC | No Comments

In The Brooklyn Paper, Gersh Kuntzman takes a look at the local group Brooklyn for Barack:

If the Hillary Express is to be derailed, it will happen in Brooklyn….[W]hat is most refreshing about Brooklyn’s budding Obamania is that it is not exclusively an affliction of young college kids (“Rally on the green!) and professional activists (“Make sure to grab a stack of petitions by the door!”).

There were about 100 people on hand — and the group itself was an inspiration, representing virtually all of Brooklyn (and there were even three guys from Staten Island who cursed their hometown as “locked up for Giuliani”) and uniting races and ethnic groups. A gorgeous mosaic, if you will…

Then my old cynicism rose up again. Where is all this Obamania coming from? Far fewer than half of the people in the room knew anything about what kind of president he would be (except that he’d be a different kind than Hillary). And no one in the room had even met him. So the candidate’s supposed magnetism is as much a creation of media imagemakers as the negative one many people have of Hillary.

So, as always, the winner of the next presidential beauty pageant is going to be — as it always is — the candidate who appears the most “charismatic” on the small screen…Of course, the Obamaniacs made a strong case that their man is not only the most charismatic, but the best. And I, of course, am willing to listen — as long as the half-price beers keep flowing and as long as Hillary cannot get elected by these 50 states.