President Obama and the Polymorphous "Other" in Political Discourse

At the Asian American Law Journal Symposium at Berkeley Law last spring,' I displayed two pictures from two presidential contests twenty years apart. Only a few in the audience, composed mostly of twentysomething-year-old law students, recognized the first picture as a mug shot of Willie Horton, the black convicted felon featured in the Republican television ad that helped sink Democrat Michael Dukakis' presidential bid in 1988.2 They did, however, recognize the second picture: the July 2008 cover of the New Yorker featuring Barack Obama and Michelle Obama dressed as a Muslim and a militant (Black Panther?) respectively. Barack is giving Michelle what FOX news anchor E.D. Hill called a "terrorist fist jab";' Osama bin Laden's portrait hangs over the mantel; and the American flag bums in the fireplace. Both pictures capture historic moments in which race emerged as a potent force in American electoral politics. Both give voice to conservative fears about the kind of threats to which liberals are leaving the nation vulnerable-in the first case, recidivist crime by the incorrigible black felon; in the second case, an inside takeover at the highest level of power by Islamic terrorists posing as the American President and the First Lady. I suggest that juxtaposing these two pictures, these snapshots from presidential contests twenty years apart, tells us something important about shifting notions of race, religion, and the Nation in the new millennium. These changing notions, burnished in the course of partisan political struggle, intimate the seemingly contradictory point that "the Other" in U.S. political discourse is a continuously shifting form even as it stays eerily the same.