There is a certain paradox to political language. While the ideas to be communicated are often complex and nuanced, the way these ideas are expressed are often in elusively simplistic terms.   The political messages  often get boiled down into single words or phrases, creating an eerily understandable message–a message left often (intentionally) to the listener’s assumptions and wishes rather than to any substance the speaker intended.  In fact, each sound-byte or slogan most often most often exists to hide true intentions rather than to serve the education of the voting populace.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Obama campaign.  The entire campaign promises one thing: CHANGE.  There is no qualifier, no explanation, no plan… just the promise that things will change.  The utter obscurity of what this word might mean reminded me of a quote from my favorite French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard.  Allow me to re-word the quote just slightly with this political message in mind:

‘CHANGE’: the message we hear, see, and experience at every Obama campaign is mysterious, because we really have no option to not change.  If you elect a new president, change is inevitable..  It is like saying ‘I am the candidate of inevitability’  It is stupid, and yet it is enigmatic.  You could read it to mean that you should vote in order to realize destiny, but that is banal.  Following the model of ‘change or no change’, ‘the future or the present’, it would become ‘the future is the future!”.  Stupid again, since you cannot exchange the future for itself.  And yet there is poetic force in this implaceable tautollogy, as there always is when there is nothing to be understood.  In the end, the lesson of this political message is perhaps: ‘if you are stupid enough to vote in change, you get obama!