McCain, Obama: The Authenticity Gap

What's left of the real Barack Obama and John McCain after all this nonstop being seen and heard? If Obama wins the prize Tuesday, it may be, behind all the political jabber, a victory in the media war of attrition not to lose his authentic self.

After eight years of having a beer with a nobody-there George W. Bush, voters gave the nominations to candidates who appeared to be most themselves--Obama over the seen-as-calculating Hillary Clinton, McCain over an empty suit known as Mitt Romney.

If McCain goes down, it will be due mainly to his mystifying decision to keep being the semi-fictitious figure required to appease the Far Right in the primaries and not reverting to the straight talker who won over so many media people and independent voters in 2000.

John F. Kennedy summed up the problem in 1960 saying he sometimes felt sorry for Richard Nixon: “It must be hard getting up every morning trying to decide who you’re going to be that day.”

In these past months, there have been too many McCains, with only rare glimpses of the real one, who has fittingly enough surrounded himself with fictitious figures like Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber.

Obama's most crucial campaign decision was to try to hold on, as much as possible, to his authentic self--a problem he recognized early in the process, telling Tim Russert with a worried smile that his wife and friends thought he was still there behind all the hype and admitting on 60 Minutes that the “attempt to airbrush your life...is exhausting.”

That he has made it seem effortless is an important part of his achievement, but if wins, it won't get any easier, as foreshadowed by his irritation with photographers last evening as he took his daughter out for Halloween.

In the White House, it will be four years of trick-or-treat, to say nothing of hide-and-seek with the media trying to find the "real" Barack Obama.