Looking Back at Obama’s Campaign in 2008: “True Blue Populist” and Social Production of Empty Signifiers in Political Reporting

Constructing a People: Hegemonic Articulation and Empty Signifiers

In this much celebrated and contested essay, “Why Empty Signifiers Matter in Politics?” Laclau (1996) explained the social logic of articulation in populism and argued that “empty signifiers” are important for the construction of collective identity and social logic of populism (pp. 36-46). Here “empty signifier” articulates the “absence” of unaddressed issues (Laclau, 2005, p. 45). Laclau traces the origin of the notion of absence in an empty signifier back to Saussure and Lacan. de Saussure (1983) explained that all signs are arbitrary and there is not a preexisting relationship between a signifier and signified outside of the linguistic discourse. In a discourse, the relationship between a signifier and a signified (object or description of an idea) produces plurality of meanings. Lacan (1977) explained that signification or meaning does not float endlessly but is retroactively held together by one of the signifiers in a chain of signification, which works as a “quilting point” (point de capiton) in a discourse (p. 304). This paper suggests that the voids in change, hope, and Obama’s identity served as quilting points that mirrored a chain of differential signification and served as an equivalential moment. For Laclau (2005), a signifier that is articulated as a quilting point becomes a point of “equivalential” identification among a plurality of descriptions, “differential” identities, and issues—a point that represents an absence of fullness, a universality in a chain of particularities (pp. 102–105). Populist politicians in their articulation call on differential groups to fill the emptiness or the absent-fullness, as Obama (2006) wrote, a “blank screen” on which people project their own views.

In hegemonic articulation via deployment of empty signifiers often a person or an issue emerges as an “antagonistic frontier” in the discontent of people across the political spectrum against which disparate groups come together as a people (Kumar, 2011; Laclau, 2005, p. 83). The antagonistic frontier forms the basis for articulating equivalence across ideology, color line, issues, and discontents. For example, in 2008, it can be argued that for the majority of the people in the country—the Obama supporters—the common antagonistic frontier in the public discourse was President George W. Bush. One of the equivalences that transcended the differential concerns of the people was the opposition to the 8 years of the Bush administration.

An empty signifier can be an idea, an image, a word, or a phrase in a political discourse (Laclau, 1996). For example, politicians of all shades use high-soaring words such as justice, equality, freedom, and change, which often imbibe emptiness that highlights the equivalence among a series of differential issues. Even John McCain was for “change we can believe in,” the drawback was, despite having a great story of a war hero, he seemingly lacked the skill and opportunity for hegemonic articulation that could include everyone in the message of change including the Democrats. McCain’s adoption of the message of change was only “a faint echo” of Obama (Ivy & Giner, 2009, p. 359). As previously mentioned, in mediated politics the eloquence of a populist politician requires the news media’s role in fostering empty signifiers in the news discourse.

Empty Signifier and News Media

Media play a crucial role in the circulation and the amplification of empty signifiers (Laclau, 1996, 2005). For example, there are some similarities here with the popularity of Lady Diana Spencer, especially with how the media presented her as an empty signifier, which allowed people from different social groups to identify with her (Simons, 1997). He argues:

On a theoretical level, Diana functions as an empty signifier with whom people could identify, at least for a hegemonic moment …  Diana serves as a conduit for different popular and personal feelings, or a nodal point at which somewhat different sentiments are articulated together such that by identifying with Diana, people identify with each other … Diana signifies different things for different people, and it is in this sense that she can be considered as an empty signifier.

But before analyzing the reporting, let us briefly consider how the equivalence among the differential discontents of a heterogeneous electorate was expressed in Obama’s speeches.

Empty Signifiers and Candidate Obama’s Speeches

Obama’s arrival on the national political stage was recent and it seems that one of the central features of Obama’s appeal was that he was an enigma. His childhood was spent outside the United States, he was educated in Hawaii and New York City, and had made Chicago his first political turf. He was Black, but he did not share the North American slave ancestry, which constituted an important component of Black identity. As a politician, he did not have much of a legislative record, and neither was there a significant paper trail of him as a lawyer and a professor. He was a candidate from nowhere or, as the campaign seemingly suggested, he was from everywhere.

In the media, he was seen as a pragmatic politician that could not place him convincingly in any one ideological category, though the conservative media tried to present him as one of the most liberal senators (Friel, Cohen, & Victor, 2008). The void was filled by two autobiographical books, which in a sense, in hindsight seem to have been crafted with future electoral challenges in mind. Critchley (2008) wrote, showing almost a sense of frustration, “the more one listens and reads, the greater the sense of opacity … Who is this man?” (p. 18). The alternative available was the caricature in the far right media and blogosphere.

Like many American presidential candidates who came before him, Barack Obama was a great storyteller on the campaign trail (Boller, 2004). If politics is like a theater then a politician is the ultimate actor on a political stage. Politicians, like actors on stage, to project a preferred meaning strategically choose their props and masks (Goffman, 1959). For Goffman a successful act is one in which an actor succeeds in establishing her/his preferred definition of the situation between her/him and the audience, which then, steers the meaning(s) in a desired direction. However, when politicians use empty signifiers, the meaning floats and the emptiness in articulation retroactively holds together multiple definitions of the situation in a political discourse (Laclau, 2005).

On February 10, 2007, Barack Obama announced on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois that he was running for the Democratic nomination in the presidential race. Speaking to a gathering of a few thousand people on a frigid cold day, Barack Obama started on optimistic note, calling on the youth who constituted his first cohort of admirers:

Each and every time, a new generation has risen up and done what’s needed to be done. Today we are called once more – and it is time for our generation to answer that call … For that is our unyielding faith – that in the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it. (Obama, 2007)

Obama laced his speeches with words and phrases taken from songs and speeches of the civil rights leaders that gave a hint to the older generation of African-Americans that his candidacy was part of their struggle, and at the same time, he ensured that he did not alienate the White people by center staging the political conflict of the 1960s. His postracial credential was further bolstered by his parentage and social background. This was perhaps the basis for Democratic Senator Harry Reid’s comment, in which he was reported to have said that what made Obama acceptable to many Whites was the fact that Obama was “light skinned” and did not speak “Negro dialect” (Heileman & Haleprin, 2010). When Obama’s opponents forced him to explain his alleged association with Black radicalism espoused by his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, he reached out to the White voters by displacing his Black identity rhetorically with a postracial emptiness to be filled by his supporters across racial divide. The night Barack Obama was elected, among other things, he said:

But above all, I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to – it belongs to you … It’s been long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America. (Obama, 2008a)

The voters from different classes, races, and ideologies, reflecting their concerns, dissatisfactions, and aspirations, seemingly filled the emptiness in the message of hope and change. Now in the following section, I hope to show how the universalism in the empty signifiers was further fostered in the news discourse.

Production of Emptiness in Political Reporting

Reporters and editors, especially when it comes to politics, try to simplify things for their audiences, but perhaps Barack Obama was too complex to define. Reporters relied on his speeches and autobiographies and were excited by the newness. For example, one of the news reports mentioned that Obama’s candidacy was about generational change and reported that there was positive reception to a “certain presumptuousness … a certain audacity” in his announcement speech (Nagourney & Zelleny, 2007). The reporting suggests that the journalists quickly recognized that Obama’s voice could strengthen the capacity to aspire among the people and organize the campaign into a social movement. Rhetorical claims in reporting such as historic, generational change, and charismatic were used by journalists, especially in headlines and leads, to amplify the populist message in Obama’s speeches. A close reading of the reporting not only shows the poverty of journalistic practice in dealing with complexity of a political campaign, but also highlights the constraints of making sense of empty signifiers that cut across social differences. The following persistent pattern of rhetorical and thematic structures emerged in the reporting that amplified the emptiness and the definition of situation in Candidate Obama’s speeches.

Conclusion

There was very little evidence in the reporting to suggest that the reporters made an effort to unpack Obama’s message and provide context. The journalists amplified the empty signifiers in Obama’s speeches by reproducing emptiness in their reporting. Reporting on Barack Obama’s campaign posed an unprecedented challenge for the journalists. Obama was too complex to define, or rather intentionally defied definition, if you will. Unlike other politicians who slowly and progressively emerged in the national media, allowing journalists to dig into their past over a long period, Barack Obama burst on the scene in 2004 from the relative obscurity of Chicago politics. However, the reporters did not make an effort to anchor the meaning of the empty signifiers in Obama’s message. Instead of interpreting and organizing meaning, the reporters allowed the meaning to float—meaning different things to different people who came together as Obama people. Moreover, just like in Obama’s speeches and his book, in the news discourse his identity was a blank screen onto which people with different political ideologies could project their own views. For many journalists, Obama was neither liberal nor conservative; rather, they presented him as being above politics. Thus, the journalists uncritically fostered the hegemonic articulation in his speeches—that seemed to speak for everyone—neither the Red nor the Blue, but the United States of America.

One could argue that the reporters were just objectively reporting on what the Obama campaign was putting out. However, this belies the role of journalism in public life and politics. Journalists are not just conduits for information. For news to become knowledge, journalists interpret the news for the audiences with the help of independent sources. Interpretation does not mean that the journalists have to give their opinions; however, it does mean that the journalists talk to a variety of sources (politicians, experts, and potential voters) that helps provide context and interpretation. Occasionally, when the journalists quoted sources, the sources they picked only further contributed to the emptiness of the message. It would be facetious to suggest that journalists did not find any sources that could provide a counter narrative; we know many did not vote for Obama. His opponents, Hillary Clinton and John McCain, for their own political reasons, did try to question the emptiness in his speech. Obama’s opponents acknowledged that the then-senator from Illinois was an excellent orator and a better candidate, but they also highlighted that emptiness in his exhortation, especially when compared with John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King—unlike Obama, their exhortations were calls to action (Rachman, 2008).

Later, as President Obama moved along in his first term defining change through his policies, the hope of bipartisanism vaporized and the discourse in Washington between Democrats and Republicans became rancorous. The day the health care bill was passed in Congress, Obama finally seemed to anchor the meaning when he said, “This is what change looks like” (Obama, 2010). Nevertheless, the health care debate forced us to see the differences between Blue and Red America—restored partisan politics, as we know it—and gave rise to the reactionary populism of the Tea Party (Kumar, 2011). The irony seems to be that Obama and the Democrats were faced with the Tea Party’s appropriation of the message of change and emptiness in its right-wing populist discourse (Kumar, 2011). This reminds us of what Laclau and Mouffe (2001) argued—the paradox of democracy is that consensus is only temporary and hegemonic articulation is provisional.

Finally, building on Laclau’s (1996, 2005) argument of why empty signifier matter to politics, I have argued in this paper that the social production of emptiness in the news discourse is a valuable concept to understand platitudes in political reporting. However, we need further conceptual development, using other examples, to understand the role of empty signifiers and hegemonic articulation in production of meaning and its reception.