Obama: Politics and Pop Culture

I was lucky enough to be able to attend the rally on Saturday and be in a position where I could clearly view the president's speech. I personally attended the rally to see our president in the flesh. I believe many people also attended for this reason, because our President, Barack Obama, has become in a way, a pop culture icon. The fact that he is younger, the first African-American to take office as President, and is “good-looking” all contribute to his pop culture status. Many people love it when he smiles because his smile has the energy and attractiveness that most people find endearing. The main reason of the rally seemed to be to get people to vote for democratic candidates and keep the republicans out of office. The rally began with upbeat music playing in the background and a man playing songs on guitar such as "All you need is love" by the Beatles. This type of music may suggest who the type of people who attend these rallies may be. This may suggest that they believe more "hippie-esque" or "free love" type of people may attend an event like this. From all of the speakers, there was an obvious trend: Keep republicans out of the government. I read an article on Fox9.com about the rally entitled, "Obama's Speech and GOP Response." The article seemed to represent the event as something where Obama was trying to convince people to vote democrats into office and to avoid republicans who will take us down the same path we did in 2000-2008. They quote him saying to keep having faith in the democrats because change is slow, but it is change for the better although it may not always seem like it. Obama is in a way, a bit like John F. Kennedy, in that he has so much promise and idealism going before him, as well as the youthfulness and attractiveness. Obama has been represented as a figure that has a lot of hype behind him, and a lot of people are blinded by that and can’t see through sometimes to what the actual issues are in the world and what’s being done about them. People saw Obama as this angel coming to sweep down and save America from the Bush administration. Although Obama has committed nowhere near any major unfavored public moves as Bush did, he hasn’t saved the world either. Some people immediately jump all over this, finding everything he has done that hasn’t been absolutely beneficial for the country. What the article is telling us is that Obama is stressing that even though change has not come entirely yet, republicans won’t fix it, and they will regress back to the old paths that did not work from before. The fact that they include “GOP response” suggests that the republicans are in fact the group that Obama, the “great man”, is trying to exclude from this part of history. He wants to create a history of a government that is composed of mostly democrats. This article seems to not have a bias and simply states the facts. This event will have estranged those who are strongly republican since the rally was in a sense “anti” republican.

http://www.myfoxtwincities.com/dpp/news/minnesota/obama%27s-speech-and-gop-response-oct-23-2010