The incredible shrinking Obama

Rex Murphy In the Saturday Globe and Mail writes of Obama:

He himself has written, most memorably: "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views."

That is as bold a statement as it is an insightful one. Bold, because it is a remarkable confession from a presidential hopeful. Insightful, because it matches the facts. There are not many personalities so fluid or vague on which an attempt to "project" a storyline would take hold. Imagine, for example, projecting a "rewrite" of Donald Rumsfeld. There's too much of Mr. Rumsfeld already there to offer hospitality to new material.

Mr. Obama, however, has a kind of welcoming emptiness. Eager acolyte or stern observer, both find it difficult not to add, or project, the most flattering, even jubilant, fill-ins. The Obama candidacy, in its rocket-blast phase when he outsoared Hillary Clinton, drained the dictionaries of every superlative. The great "O" had them swooning in the stands. Why?
...

People project their best wishes on him, they fill in the blank of a very attractive and plausible outline. His is not, emphatically, a charisma of deeds. For what has he done, save run for president? He is an accommodating vessel - cool, smart, biracial and "unfinished." This is the Gatsby quality of him that others have noted. Like Gatsby, he is a receptacle of others' glamorous invention.

People see in him, or wish to see, the last great ideal of the American polity fulfilled, a final and full racial accommodation. That should he be elected president, America will have achieved, by his singular persona, the perfect emblematic demonstration of having exorcised at last the great stain of its racially riven origins.

This is the key to the Obama phenomenon. He is the screen on which American Liberalism projects its racial guilt and redemption. The man was sent from central casting, the “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner” candidate. The emptiness within, the lack of experience, the unsavory associates don’t matter to the Liberals. They don’t see it. They only see their own absolution and that of the Nation in this image of their own creation; this half-black half-white “clean, articulate” projection of their fondest hopes.

This is the mirage made flesh, the thing that makes their vision of the cleansing of America’s original sin a reality. There is nothing asked of Obama beyond this. No programs, no polices, no platform. This is truly the Savior they have been looking for. He is the expiation of all of “our” sins. And a crucifixion is not even necessary.

But for now there's the rest of the campaign.

There's more than a gap between the "audacity of hope" and "lipstick on a pig." The mouth that spoke the first phrase should not be capable of the second.

He has shrunk into a combative partisan. He crowds his own screen, leaves less space for projection. Others are not writing his narrative now - he's inscribing his own.

A candidacy that leached so much of its energy and drive from the imagination of others, Gatsby-like, is shedding its gift. The narrative stage is over. It's all tactics from here on in.