How did a black junior senator from Illinois become the golden boy of American politics? With a little help from Hollywood

This article originally ran in the March 2007 issue of Radar Magazine. For a risk-free issue, click here

Conventional wisdom holds that Americans simply won't elect a black man president, even if he's "rock star" Barack Obama. We're just not ready, goes the party line. Our racism is too deeply rooted. Maybe so, but we sure do fantasize about it a lot.

Back in 1995, General Colin Powell was the Great Black Hope, basking in the fuzzy glow of media adulation and pondering a bid for that big leather swivel chair. Like the current outbreak of "Obama-rama," what was known as "Powellmania" had the overwrought hormonal quality of a summer fling.

"Can Colin Powell Save America?" wondered Newsweek dreamily. Time mooned over "the Persian Gulf war hero who exudes strength, common sense, and human values like no one else on the scene."

We all know how that turned out. Powell bailed on a presidential run with the prim self-denial of an ROTC lieutenant passing on a joint. Eight years later, as secretary of state, he delivered his UN speech making the case for war in Iraq—demonstrating a lot less strength, common sense, or human values than Time might have hoped.

But America wasn't down with a dream deferred. We just kept pining.

Fortunately, Hollywood—which has been electing black presidents since James Earl Jones took the oath in 1972's The Man—was on the case. Less than two months after Powell's UN speech, Chris Rock's Head of State arrived in theaters (having bumped off Chris Tucker's Mr. President). Forget the nasty reviews. The film hit on a key aspect of the black president fantasy that's now paying dividends for the Illinois senator: the notion that blacks have an innate authenticity whites lack, and that they can therefore speak unvarnished truths that whites are too repressed to utter. In the movie, Rock plays Mays Gilliam, a Washington, D.C., councilman picked to replace his party's nominee after a fatal accident. His selection is a bid to burnish the party's image; nobody really expects him to win—least of all Gilliam—so he embarks on a brazenly candid campaign and teaches his rich, white donors how to do the Electric Slide.

Along the same lines, anyone planning a black POTUS movie marathon—Hillary, take note—might also include Eddie Murphy's 1992 comedy The Distinguished Gentleman (technically he's a congressman, but same idea) and Warren Beatty's 1998 Bulworth (technically he's white, but again, same idea). Another must: Dave Chappelle's gangsta president, "Black Bush," who, when asked about his rationale for toppling Saddam, howls in a congressional hearing, "That nigga tried to kill my father!"

Of course, the famously Kennedy-esque Obama bears little resemblance to any of these racial fish-out-of-water clichés. But he does demonstrate a certain ability to keep it real that provides a point of contrast to the painstakingly calculated positions laid out by white politicians of either party. Take the acknowledgment in his memoir that he's done "a little blow" (not "cocaine," mind you, blow) and smoked his share of weed. His rather, um, blunt admission to New Yorker editor David Remnick—"I did inhale. That was the point."—brings to mind the scandalized response of Mays Gilliam's handler to one of his stump speeches: "Are you insane? You can't just go out in front of people and talk!"

The not-so-subtle inference: You can if you're black.

At precisely the same time Chris Rock was portraying the street-smart, comical hustler-in-chief (a role played to perfection, come to think of it, by Reverend Al Sharpton), a rather different black leader of the free world could be found on TV's 24. President David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) was courageous but humble, masculine yet vulnerable; a classic example of the stoic black authority figure tackled by Jones in The Man and Morgan Freeman in 1998's Deep Impact, not to mention just about every judge in every courtroom drama produced in the past 20 years. Curiously, not long after Powell made his case for war, Palmer found himself in a similar predicament. Presented with evidence that a Middle Eastern axis of evil was trying to nuke us, Palmer was under pressure to retaliate. He decided to hold out for irrefutable proof (where do screenwriters get this stuff?), the upshot of which was that he was removed from office by his own cabinet for being a wuss. A few "hours" later, Jack Bauer rode to the rescue, Palmer was reinstated, and his guilt-ridden colleagues offered to resign. As the season climaxed, Palmer did what blacks on the big and small screen pretty much always do: He forgave the white guys.

This, of course, is also Obama's big selling proposition, to whites anyway. Just maybe he'll grant them the pardon they've been craving for so long—absolution for having enslaved, oppressed, disenfranchised, and ripped off blacks for several centuries—and set them free at last. Obama's unspoken promise to do so gently, without rancor, may be why whites are so drawn to him.

Then there's, of course, his aisle-reaching empathy.

"I am obligated to try to see the world through George Bush's eyes, no matter how much I may disagree with him," Obama writes in The Audacity of Hope. "That's what empathy does—it calls us all to task."

Wait, empathy for Bush? From a liberal black dude? Maybe we can all get along.




This article originally ran in the March 2007 issue of . For a risk-free issue, click here