The Elvis of politics

I wonder if Barack Obama will go down in American history as the Elvis Presley of politics.
Elvis’s field was music. It wasn’t the music, but the way he sang it, and the way he moved doing it.

Elvis Presley was the first white man who knew how to sing black music. When Sam Phillips, the Sun Records studio owner who “discovered” Elvis, first heard it in 1954, he knew instantly that it was unique, extremely valuable, and utterly revolutionary. From that first Memphis session, and the capturing of “That’s All Right, Mama,” on vinyl, Elvis Presley’s voice radiated out in a widening gyre and all who heard it realized in less than three minutes that something was being changed forever. Little did they know. They hadn’t seen him yet.

Barack Obama’s field is politics. But everybody says it isn’t the politics; it’s the way he says it, and the way he moves doing it. He has created a media sensation which begets a public sensation which feeds the media sensation, and his critics say he has done it without saying or doing anything substantive. But maybe he has. Sen. Barack Obama sounds like the first black man who knows how to talk white politics.

People are all shook up. Here’s Maureen Dowd, quoting Sen. Hillary Clinton: “I think that there is a certain phenomenon associated with his candidacy, and I am really struck by that because it is very much about him and his personality and his presentation.”

She could say the exact same thing in, oh, 1955, about the young stardom candidate Elvis Presley, as the word was starting to get out. Then as now, she would have been saying it negatively, using the word “phenomenon” to suggest something transparent, or impermanent, hoping it would go away. Is a phenomenon transparent and impermanent? Or can it be substantive and permanent?

Answer: in 1959, RCA Records released Elvis’s second album of gold records. Its title: “50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong.” He’s on the cover, skinny and loose as sin in that slinky gold suit with the diamond lapels and cuffs, all that black hair, slicked and twitchy, the eyes, the pout, the grin, the grin of a boy on the road to becoming not only the King of Rock and Roll, but of an entire new culture.

Is that where the American experience is with the current phenomenon, a black man out of nowhere talking presidential politics with a personality and presentation and color that nobody has ever seen before? Is that why some people are alarmed, some begrudging, some admiring, and some unabashedly beguiled?

We all seem to be “really struck by that,” as Sen. Clinton opines. We all seem to be united in confusion, which is typical of people trying to get a handle on something that gives every appearance of being a tectonic shift, something rising, something maybe being born that in our lifetimes will take the form of a new culture.

Sen. Clinton can’t explain it, Tim Russert can’t explain it. Republicans can’t explain it. But we know that it is there, and it is substantive. Standing next to it, Hillary Clinton looks like Rosemary Clooney, and she seems to understand, as Rosemary no doubt did in 1955, that there isn’t a thing she can do about it.