Column:

Celebrating a historic presidency that's still in the future

By Charles Austin

Published Nov. 18, 2008

Last night, while sifting through the sludge heap of late night TV infomercials, I came across an ad for a limited edition coin commemorating the presidency of someone who isn't even president yet. This struck me as ridiculous for two reasons.

Firstly, it's not even good marketing. If the goal is to make as much money as possible and as quickly as possible, then why not first release a coin for "President-elect Barack Obama," commemorating the campaign, and a subsequent coin for "President Obama"? And if the goal is merely to commemorate a historic presidency, why not wait until this man is actually president?

But the main reason this coin is ridiculous is the same reason it's marketable in the first place: Besides being our first black president-elect, Barack Obama is the first celebrity president-elect of the Information Age.

A trip to the grocery store shows that he's not President George W. Bush famous, but Angelina Jolie famous. Obama and his family are on the cover of just about every tabloid that isn't about sex (those ones probably feature Gov. Sarah Palin). On Friday night, Anderson Cooper spent an obscene amount of time showing YouTube videos of wild, wacky canine antics under the premise that this somehow relates to the Obama family getting a new dog. Any minor happening that vaguely relates to President-elect Obama is newsworthy, and it's not because he's a political figure, but because he's a cultural one.

Sarah Palin is famous in the same way. A Google search for Vice President-elect Joe Biden turns up 14.9 million results, while a search for Palin nets 56.3 million. Considering that Biden's career spans decades and Palin was introduced to the public consciousness hardly three months ago, they're clearly famous for very different reasons.

Running for president as a celebrity opens you up to heightened scrutiny over your physical features and your family life. This is why Palin's husband received a moderate amount of media coverage, while Biden's wife was nowhere to be seen. It's also why we see stories about the Obama family getting a new dog, and why I wonder if Franklin Delano Roosevelt would have ever gotten elected under this kind of scrutiny.

If media in the 1930s and '40s were as invasive as they are today, Roosevelt never would have been able to conceal his disability as well as he did. I'm sure there would have been a huge uproar over whether a president who is disabled would be capable of asserting himself against dictators and other world leaders, especially after World War II was under way in Europe.

Being both a president and a celebrity can obviously be a bad thing. But more often, it's just a weird thing. Barack Obama could hypothetically turn out to be the absolute worst president of all time, and yet we're already eager to commemorate and capitalize on the time he has yet to spend in office.

The Web site for the Obama coin implores us to "remember the day our country came together as one and forever changed." My first assumption is that this is a pun on the word "change" because, as far as I can tell, the only difference between America today and America on Nov. 3 is that now Barack Obama has his face plastered on a coin.

This is change people can believe in, in the absolute most literal sense. The site features testimony from a slew of attractive customers who say, "I wanted to remember and celebrate the first time I felt as if my vote counted...the Obama coin says it all!"

The Obama coin says a lot. But is it worth celebrating?