Who's That Other?

Apropos of (as Sonny’s mentioned) Newsweek’s claim that Obama faces an attack campaign portraying him as “the Other,” I ought to mention what a pet peeve it is to talk in terms of Otherhood, which is far too abstract a category to be of much analytical use and which Republicans, certainly, are far too anti-intellectual to deploy. No, for Obama the pluses and minuses are all personal: his particular character, his particular background, and his particular approach to politics are all, I think, too particular to fit neatly into a box marked The Other.

It’s much easier to label him as Out of Touch with Average Americans, on the other hand. And it’s important to pay attention to the way that this generalization, fair or not, is a different sort of paint for the partisan paintbrush than the abstraction of Otherhood.

Probably this is a conversation that quickens the pulse only among academics, but as social-science tropes that define left-leaning intellectual worldviews leach down into the parlance of our times, it’s worth our while not to confuse them with more typical, practical, and should I say legitimately homespun approaches to playing up how a politician Ain’t Like You.