Jill Porter: What if Obama's tale doesn't hold up?
ONCE UPON A TIME, there was Barack Obama, the man who made people believe again. And it occurs to me that the story of Obama is, indeed, a fairy tale.
ONCE UPON A TIME, there was Barack Obama, the man who made people believe again.
And it occurs to me that the story of Obama is, indeed, a fairy tale.
Not in the demeaning way that Bill Clinton allegedly meant. And not to say that he's inauthentic or a fiction.
But his public image is one of near infallibility, as if he's come into adulthood with all the ideals of youth intact, immune to cynicism and spiritual doubt, a pure, unsullied soul.
He's maintained his innocence in a corrupt world.
Despite a life lived in the public eye, the only controversy in Obama's past is his early experimentation with drugs - which is accurately perceived as a passage of modern youth, not a pitfall of character.
He's seems to have never made a wrong move, a bad decision, a regrettable choice.
He was even right on Iraq when almost everyone else was wrong.
He has the ideal wife and the postcard family.
He's a poet, a philosopher, a preacher of peace.
His remarkably admirable life, as portrayed in the media, makes him irresistible to youth who fear the defeats of growing up.
He's the promise we make to ourselves never to become our parents.
So, think about it.
This presidential contest isn't about "change" versus "experience."
It's about Peter Pan versus Pandora.
Of course every romantic hero, every embodiment of good, has to be cast against the creature from the dark side.
You know who that is.
The media's portrayal of the contest with Hillary Clinton has the same simplistic, childhood narrative that infuses every fairy tale, nursery rhyme and fable.
By default, she's the Wicked Witch to Obama's Good Witch. She's the Evil Stepmother to Cinderella. She's the wolf to Little Red Riding Hood.
No wonder she can't win.
Hillary is, of course, anything but infallible.
She's a battle-tested survivor, otherwise known as that loathed creature: a grown-up.
Whatever idealism she expresses - her emotional coffee-shop explanation that she endures the grueling campaign because of her patriotism, for instance - is portrayed as an insincere, poll-shopped strategy.
She's got baggage. She's made mistakes, big ones. In public.
From her health-care plan to her haircuts, from foreign policy to fashion to her fealty to a philandering spouse, she's had to retreat and recover in the face of public fury.
In media-land, where the palette contains only black and white, she's almost always the ruthless and calculating Machiavellian villain.
She's had to eat her words, justify her personal decisions, and compromise along the way.
She's been criticized, mocked and reviled.
Pure? Innocent? Unbowed by the vicissitudes of life?
Not a chance.
The question is whether Obama's apparently flawless life can endure.
Will he prove less than perfect if he becomes the presidential candidate?
Will the fickle media be less approving? Already the undercurrent is beginning to change now that he seems to be the front-runner. Already the pundits are beginning to ask: "Where are the specifics to flesh out his soaring rhetoric?"
And will we turn on Obama if the fairy tale gets tarnished?
If he makes a terrible mistake, an error in judgement, a questionable compromise, will we forgive him or abandon him?
Will his story still captivate if and when he runs against John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee?
Will it have the same appeal when the contrasts are less stark?
When the childhood narrative no longer seems to apply?
I don't know.
Perhaps Obama will fulfill his promise and live up to what seems to be our impossible expectations.
We know what we're getting with Hillary Clinton.
She's proof of a reality that might not inspire the fantasies of young people but is reassuring to us old folks: Life can wear you down but it doesn't have to take you down.
Her ability to prevail in the face of impossible adversity is one of the reasons I support her.
But who doesn't love a fairy tale? *
E-mail porterj@phillynews.com or call 215-854-5850. For recent columns: