Did Obama Base His Campaign on a Comic Book?

I was going through some back issues of "The Adventures of Superman", and came across some interesting issues (#619 and #620) from 2003. What intrigued me were some parallels with the 2008 election between Barack Obama and John McCain. Though I was aware (vaguely) of the story arc, I didn't make the connection then. Keep in mind that at two issues this was a very short arc.

So here's the deal. Out of nowhere, an extremely charismatic figure shows up and announces his candidacy for President of the United States. As you apparently can in the comics, he does this without disclosing his real name, billing himself only as "The Candidate".  

So what is the platform? Well... there is none, really. At least no significant policy platform. He does, however, run on slogans involving hope, change, and distrust of the current administration (and since Lex Luthor is the incumbent President in this reality, it's not that hard to be distrustful).

"CHANGE!"

"YES, WE CAN!"

Rhetoric over Policy

Now, the parallel isn't perfect. It hardly could be. This was published five years before the 2008 elections. "The Candidate" is the stereotypical whitebread Arian minister-type in a white suit, while Obama delivered the same message format from a Black pulpit. But it's uncanny all the same. And the parallel doesn't need to be exact to illustrate my point... I'm not suggesting that DC comics was prognosticating. Rather, I'm wondering -- given the indisputable facts that this hugely popular comic came first and illustrated a very similar campaign strategy for the most recent previous election cycle -- whether someone influential on Obama's campaign team read it, thought it could work, and adopted it. Whether it was done consciously or not really doesn't matter. I think a solid argument can be made that  the 2008 campaign was based on a comic book!

Distrust the incumbent!
Not hard... the incumbent is Lex Luthor!

Who does he think he is, anyway?
"...a light will shine down from somewhere. It will light upon you.
You will experience an epiphany.
And you will say to yourself, 'I have to vote for Barack.'"
-- Barack Obama, Jan 7, 2008

The Next Effort... a little background, and a conspiracy

So what about the latest campaign? Could we conceivably see more of the same?  Well, let's look at those DC comics issues again, shall we? And be warned that in this section I'm going to float a conspiracy theory, not because I believe it, but purely because it was fun cooking it up based on a comic book juxtaposed against current events. You can build a conspiracy theory on just about anything... it's not particularly difficult.

In the news feed we have a lot of recent activity regarding Operation Fast and Furious, a scheme in which illegal firearms were knowingly sold to puppets of Mexican drug cartels, in the hopes of somehow tracking the weapons (presumably through magic) to the cartels themselves, and leading to their arrest. Instead, in a twist that surprised no one but the Justice Department, the guns were used in crimes, and resulted the deaths of many innocent people and two border patrol agents. Now, Operation Fast and Furious was an Obama administration continuation of a similarly stupid Bush administration plan, Project Gunrunner (same link). It should have been pretty simple to kill the project rather than rename it and continue it. But because it was renamed and continued, I'm afraid the current administration doesn't get to blame this one on the previous crew (as they very well could have done IF they had just killed it).

But who to blame is not the intriguing and relevant part of this.

Today we saw Barack Obama invoke executive privilege regarding papers that were subpoenaed by Congress from the Attorney General's office. Now the safe, sane, political approach to this would simply be to find out who was responsible for this mishegoss and rightly toss his ass under a bus. Whoever it is belongs under the bus, so that's not even a moral dilemma. But instead, the Attorney General has stonewalled Congress for months, and now the President assumes responsibility of the problem by declaring executive privilege.

"Assumes responsibility?" you gasp. Well, yes. The precedent is clear. In 1972, Richard Nixon did not break into the Watergate hotel. He didn't order anyone to do it, either, and at no time did anyone indict him of that. He did, however, attempt to cover it up after the fact, invoking executive privilege to do so, and that's what lead to his resignation (contrary to popular belief he was not impeached).  It was Nixon injecting himself into the situation, protecting those who did wrong on his behalf, that took him out.

Because of the Watergate scandal, the Supreme Court was asked to rule on the subject of executive privilege, ruling in United States v Nixon (1974) that the privilege could only be invoked when involving communications of his own office, and then for specific causes, which could in fact be over-ruled, as in the case of Bill Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

So again, the sane political approach is to prosecute wrongdoers, not protect them. This leaves precious few reasons to legitimately invoke executive privilege. One is because there are ongoing national security concerns, military or otherwise. Another is because of diplomatic concerns. A third is because you personally were involved in the conversations (and even then it's limited, as we saw with Clinton). Now, it would be the easy course for my fictional conspiracy to be due to the President's involvement in Operation Fast and Furious. Too easy. No, here I'm imagining the President to be completely innocent... squeaky clean... and injecting himself for a fourth reason, one that's more in keeping with the tone of our comic-book conspiracy and which keeps us on topic.

In "The Adventures of Superman" issue #619, we're told that "The Candidate" is the target of an assassination plot.  In issue #620, it's revealed that the hit man (in this case an alien, but hey, it's the comics) was hired by none other than "The Candidate" himself! Why? Because in casting himself as a martyr... a victim... he secures his popularity and his legacy. 

So in our imaginary Glenn Beck-inspired almost-Earth, Barack Obama injects himself into the issue because he wants to be investigated. He wants to be a victim and to be persecuted. He can pick any reason to blame it on... racism, demagoguery, just plain "mean-oldness"... it doesn't matter. The end result is that he can say to the public, "Hey, I've got your back, now I need you to have mine!" In a campaign end-game it gives him an emotional string to pull to replace the worn-out and increasingly ineffectual one of Bush-hatred.

The very best part of it is, when it turns out that the President really is squeaky-clean, and his exertion of executive privilege is for no apparent reason at all, everyone else loses. He still gets to assert that in his assessment, national security was at stake. Your assessment may differ, but that's an 'honest' disagreement. He still gets to assert that he's the victim of a witch-hunt, despite any reasonable doubts raised by continued stone-walling of Congress. In this scenario, inserting his innocent self into this scenario is an exercise of the old adage, "there's no such thing as bad publicity." And he still gets to play an emotional wild-card on the electorate, even if it be one of his own manufacture.

Of course, that's the sort of thing that could only happen in a comic book.