In 1952, as owner of Sun Records, Sam Phillips, promoter and entertainment entrepreneur, needed air plays to sell records.  From his experience in radio as a DJ and engineer during the 1940s, he knew this to be true.  Knowing the talent and vitality involved in the performance of Black music and its effect on both Negro and White youth audiences, Phillips determined, “Man, if I can find a white person who can give the feel--with a natural feel, of course and the true essence of a blues-type song, black blues especially, then I’ve got a chance to broaden the base and get plays that otherwise we couldn’t.”   His search resulted in the music/cultural amalgamation called Rock ‘n’ Roll.  And in a performance phenomena called Elvis Presley.In 2004, as the Opening Act to the Democratic National Convention (DNC), a young virtually unknown candidate for the U.S. Senate in Illinois named Barack Obama gave the keynote speech.  Obama’s performance upstaged and outshone both John Kerry and John Edwards’s performances as candidates.  Wiki says that he caused a sensation and frenzy among the various media, the panels of historians and political scientists on the major TV networks covering the Convention, as well as power brokers within the DNC itself.  “It was pointed out that many in Illinois openly discussed Obama’s future as a possible presidential candidate, especially evident in his ability to capture white votes like no other racial minority candidate had ever down in downstate Illinois.”  After winning his Senate seat, “some say that the resulting fame and publicity from his keynote address allowed Obama to win the Democratic nomination and the Presidency in 2008, just four year later.”  But, what is the real secret of his success?   There had been other African American candidates, male and female, including Black Super-stars like Jesse Jackson and the Reverend Al Sharpton, yet none could get the backing of a major political party, or capture the imagination of the American peoples of all races classes.

BAMAISM VS ELVISM

I believe the Obama Phenomenon can only be explain in terms of what Sam Phillips determined as, “a cross-pollination going on between blacks and whites” based on the Black Blues Performance (BBP).  Barack Obama, “a stranger” from the City of Chicago, was enthusiastically received by the Illinois and other delegations at the DNC, who waved blue-and-white campaign signs and chanting “Obama-Obama.”  Surprisingly, no one seemed to question the secret of the success of this black man even then.  I say the secret of Obama’s success lay in Rock ‘n’ Roll Performance itself and foreshadowed the beginning of the secular religion, Obamaism that is similar to what John Strausbaugh in E Reflections on the Birth of the Elvis Faith calls Elvism.  This helps in understanding the Obama Effect or his “global populism.”  Obamaism was evidenced in his reception in Berlin, Germany during the Primary of 2008, where over 100,000 “foreigners” turned out to greet him waving American flags and cheering ‘Obama-Obama!’  All that was missing from the messianic event was the mule, and as a Democrat, he carried him on his credentials.  Strausbaugh wrote that “Elvis is a God.  Not the One True God of a monotheism like Islam, Judaism, or Christianity, but a modern pagan god, one of the thousands whom people have worshipped throughout human existence, across many cultures.  Like many before him, he was declared immortal when he died, and he is beginning to be worshipped as a divinity. . . . Elvism, the extraordinary Elvis phenomena—[is] the sightings, the pilgrimages the shrines, the incredible permutations of his afterlife as one of the immortals.  You could like that or hate it, find it bizarre or just ignore it, but it [is] there, it [is] everywhere, and authentic and in many ways admirably defiant expressions of global populist culture.”   Obamaism operates on the principles of Elvism except, Obama himself is éclat and extant in the flesh.  Obama, like Elvis, is blackness invisible, more Ralph Ellison than James Baldwin in maintaining the American identity.  Like Strausbaugh writes about the charm of Elvis, “It’s through music and his unusual looks [and BBP] that he begins to make his impression on the world.  Others [his opponents]. . . call him ‘Velvet Lips’ and rough him up for his . . . hair and fancy ‘Negro’ tastes.  However, it was through Rock ‘n’ Roll Performance that Elvis won them all over.

ELVIS AND OBAMA: TWO SIGNIFYING PERFORMERS

            Elvis and Obama are mirror images in public expectation in that one is White and the other is Black.  However, Barack Obama’s performance in 2004, like Elvis’s performance in 1954, is a signifier in terms of what Henry Louis Gates calls “signifyin’.”  Signifyin’ in the Black vernacular means scoring off of or “sampling” another’s creativity and improving it by personalizing it.  Obama’s keynote address signified upon John Edwards’s Two Americas stump speech:  “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America.”  He urged unity in the face of Bushism, “We Worship an awesome God. . . . We coach Little League. . . . We are one people . . . all of us defending the United States of America.”  Moreover, he gave added value to Edwards’s proposition, the mustard seed of Hope and uplift.  Obama signified upon Frederick Douglass’s Slave Narratives for his autobiographical sketches: his interracial heritage, overcoming obstacles and barriers, the value of education and literacy.  As a performer, Elvis signified on Carl Perkins’s Blue Suede Shoes and Big Mama Thornton’s Hound Dog, both of which were the making of his name as a singer and performer of Rock ‘n’ Roll.  Although secular music was his forte, it was gospel records that won Elvis awards.  He was raised in the First Assembly of God Church which believes that God can intercede directly in your life and work miracles in your life.  This belief and the blues in the gospel music helped inspire and uplift his listeners.  Obama found this when he headed out to Chicago and joined the Baptist Church, where he learned to preach a secular sermon of uplift in his speeches.             

 Moreover, both Elvis and Obama had and have “the power” of personality.   Elvis, as Sam Phillips said, was “a white guy who could get the overtones and the sexual feel” of a Black man in his performance “without anything being vulgar; just that actual thing that gets hold of somebody and says, “Hey, listen to me!”  It was not only his looks, but he oozed sexuality, “and the right Kind.”  When Elvis, like Obama, opened his mouth “it had sex, when you saw him on stage you couldn’t take your eyes off him, and that was even as a male.  . . . but this guy—and I’m talking about him as a total, total personal way, in addition to fantastic talent as far as his singing was concerned—had a certain ability for contact, and to a measured degree he could give you that sexual feel, or whatever feel was needed, if a song indicated that it had that potential.”  Phillips did not want to use the word charisma to describe Elvis’s personality, but charisma is what Obama owns.  Obama’s whiteness is in his genotype, not his phenotype—nevertheless, he is a Sam Phillips Rock ‘n’ Roll figure.  It is Obama’s quiet bluesman sexuality or charisma that attracts people to him.  Thereby in Obama, Elvis lives.

TIME WAS ON THEIR SIDE           

Both Elvis and Obama took two year increments to hone their craft, Elvis 1954-1956; Obama 2004-2006, then 2006-2008.  In 1954 after recording That’s All Right Mama for Sam Phillips and Sun Records, Strausbaugh said that Elvis spent “the next two years” touring all over the South and the Midwest with his pals “honing their chops, building momentum.  Success did not come overnight.”  By 1956, “twenty-one-year-old Elvis Presley” had signed with RCA Records and was now managed by “genius carny-shyster ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker,” where he became “a national, then international phenomenon.”  After his performance in 2004 at the DNC, forty-three years-old Barack Obama won his Senatorial Seat.  As a successful Senator he toured Illinois doing Town Hall Meetings, and proposed Bills in the U.S. Senate, but by 2006 feelers were sent out from Democratic political consultant, David Axelrod (who became Obama’s “Colonel Tom Parker”) as to the viability of an African American man running and winning the Office of the President.  In 2008, the primary elections were unusually long and brutal.  There is no need to go into them because by now they are twice-told tales.  By November 2008, Barack Obama was elected to be the 44^th President of the United States.  Thereby we see that both Elvis and Obama have similar two year “overnight success” stories.

WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET: SHAPESHIFTING 

Rock ‘n’ Roll or the “a cross-pollination between blacks and whites” based on the fascination with Black Music Performance, brought Barack Obama to political and world prominence.  Rock ‘n’ Roll is a mongrel, as Obama has spoken of his own pedigree, a mixture of Blues, rhythm & blues, and up tempo or pop mosaics, blended with benign sexual performance, BBP.  Rock ‘n’ Roll gives Obama an aural familiarity to the point of being a shape-shifter.  Sam Phillips believed that “the human ear does not like hearing something that is aurally different to the point of being strange.”  So that when whites see and hear Obama, they see and hear Frank Sinatra; when Blacks see and hear Obama, they see and hear Marvin Gaye; when other peoples of Color see and hear Obama, they see Hope; but when the world sees and hears Obama, it sees Elvis Presley, a God in the White House.