Branding Barack Obama — and his abused "lovers"

Naomi Klein, a while back, reflected on the 10th anniversary of her book "No Logo," The Guardian excerpts here her reflections.

In this, she gets much more into "branding" in politics, noting W. was decent at it, but that Barack Obama makes every predecessor of his look like a piker in terms of modern branding, both in techniques, and degree of use.

This, from the excerpt, sounds all too true and all too depressing. Although I didn't have a label for what I was "seeing through" by the end of 2007, it's clear in hindsight, and with a bit of help from Klein, that I was seeing through his branding, and finding the hollowed-out non-core of neoliberalism inside.

But, she also sounds like an abused woman returning to the man who just slapped, or even punched, her in the face:

Personally, none of this makes me feel betrayed by Barack Obama. Rather I have a familiar ambivalence, the way I used to feel when brands like Nike and Apple started using revolutionary imagery in their transcendental branding campaigns. All of their high-priced market research had found a longing in people for something more than shopping – for social change, for public space, for greater equality and diversity. Of course the brands tried to exploit that longing to sell lattes and laptops. Yet it seemed to me that we on the left owed the marketers a debt of gratitude for all this: our ideas weren't as passé as we had been told. And since the brands couldn't fulfill the deep desires they were awakening, social movements had a new impetus to try.

To me, without the actual violence, of course, that sounds exactly like the psychology of an abused lover, claiming they're not betrayed, that you have to look on the bright side, that it's not really that bad, etc.

It's amazing how someone like Klein can be so insightful and then ... so willfully self-blinded.