The Emperor's New Clothes or the Wizard of Oz?

The Emperor's New Clothes is a children's story by Hans Christian Andersen that was first published in 1837.  Like all great children's stories, its simple tale conveys deep meanings about the adult world.  In the story, the Emperor, a man besotted with appearances, is conned by two swindlers who convince him that they are weaving him a suit of surpassing beauty, all the while producing nothing and pocketing his gold and silk.  The con-men proclaim that their cloth is so sublime that the simple or unfit can not even perceive it.  So insecure is the Emperor and other observers that they doubt their own perceptions and convince themselves that the Emperor's new clothes are magnificent.  A synopsis, courtesy of Wikipedia:

An emperor who cares too much about clothes hires two swindlers who promise him the finest suit of clothes from the most beautiful cloth. This cloth, they tell him, is invisible to anyone who was either stupid or not fit for his position. The Emperor is nervous about being able to see the cloth himself so he sends his ministers to view it. They see nothing yet praise the cloth. When the swindlers report a suit of clothes has been fashioned, the Emperor allows himself to be dressed in their creation for a procession through town. During the course of the procession, a small child cries out, "But he has nothing on!" The crowd realizes the child is telling the truth and begins laughing. The Emperor, however, holds his head high and continues the procession.

The tale is not only a story of the pride and Narcissism of the Emperor but an equally telling commentary on the insecurity and gullibility of the adults who should know better but cannot see clearly.  As time goes on, more and more people "see" the invisible clothes, for fear of being seen themselves as simple for bucking the conventional wisdom.  It is only when a child, truly naive and unsullied by fear of being seen as foolish, cries out that the Emperor has no clothes that the spell is broken and the Emperor becomes a laughingstock.

It remains unclear if Barack Obama believes himself to be a magnificent Emperor, superior to the simple crowds, clothed in fine raiment of surpassing beauty.  His problem now is that he either has convinced himself that he is that magnificent Emperor, in which case the widespread dissemination of his Reverend's hate-filled sermons is the equivalent of the little boy telling us the Emperor has no clothes, or he has never bought the package and now has been revealed as a fraud, the Wizard of Oz hiding behind the curtain.

Obama has clothed himself in the cloak of a unifier, someone who by force of his goodness can bring people together for the good of all; he is post-racial, above the ugly racism and racialism that has plagued an imperfect America for so long.  He is ready to slake our thirst for redemption and move this country toward a greater, more loving, more inclusive future.

His actual record, as opposed to the words in which he has cloaked himself so eloquently, is rather more prosaic and conventional.  Shelby Steele in the WSJ today notes:

His actual policy positions are little more than Democratic Party boilerplate and hardly a tick different from Hillary's positions. He espouses no galvanizing political idea. He is unable to say what he means by "change" or "hope" or "the future." And he has failed to say how he would actually be a "unifier." By the evidence of his slight political record (130 "present" votes in the Illinois state legislature, little achievement in the U.S. Senate) Barack Obama stacks up as something of a mediocrity. None of this matters much.

Shelby Steele expands on the racial dimensions of the "Barack Obama story" and his involvement with Reverend Wright:

How does one "transcend" race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?

What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn't thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to "be black" despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity. And anyway, wasn't this hatred more rhetorical than real? [Emphasis mine-SW]

But now the floodlight of a presidential campaign has trained on this usually hidden corner of contemporary black life: a mindless indulgence in a rhetorical anti-Americanism as a way of bonding and of asserting one's blackness. Yet Jeremiah Wright, splashed across America's television screens, has shown us that there is no real difference between rhetorical hatred and real hatred.

No matter his ultimate political fate, there is already enough pathos in Barack Obama to make him a cautionary tale. His public persona thrives on a manipulation of whites (bargaining), and his private sense of racial identity demands both self-betrayal and duplicity. His is the story of a man who flew so high, yet neglected to become himself.

The point I emphasized is germane and can only add to the potential tragedy of Obama.  It is quite likely that Barack Obama, like most politicians, is not particularly self-reflective.  Politicians learn from an early age to do what they must to enhance their appeal to their constituencies, and deeply held convictions are treated as conditional encumbrances.  To this moment we do not know whether Barack Obama agrees with his Pastor and spiritual adviser on all, some, many, a few of his positions.  I doubt Obama agrees that the white government invented AIDS to kill blacks, but does he still agree that becoming middle class is a betrayal of his race?

If Obama repudiates Wright he will show himself to have been a fraud, an empty suit, the Wizard of Oz with nothing of substance behind the curtain.

Yet if he attempts to weave a verbal suit of shimmering cloth out of the air hoping to confuse our perceptions, he may fool many of his audience but the vast majority of Americans are simply too childishly naive to be able to convince ourselves he is clothed in magnificent cloth. 

Perhaps he is an even greater orator, weaver, than he has already shown himself to be; it is hard to imagine he can weave his way out of this.

Barack Obama: The Emperor's New Clothes or The Wizard of Oz.  Would we want either to be our next President?