This is nonsense, of course. It’s nonsense to claim that she was the first black person to ever refuse to give up her seat and be punished for it, or that she would’ve made any more difference than the many other black people who’d defied the rules and been punished had she not been part of a collective effort that purposely engineered her situation to be a test case. (The movie Barbershop satirically expounds on this.)

Of course I don’t think Obama meant that changing light bulbs in your house is meaningless, but he’s absolutely right — our political mythmaking, if anything, skews way too hard to the individual choice end of the axis and downplays the importance being part of an organized movement has always had to actually changing things. We fall way too easily for stories where one random person does one random thing — gives $20 to a homeless guy, plants a tree in his front yard, sits down on a bus — and Changes the World. It seems to me that the celebrity worship by which we’re raptly fascinated by the individual, personal choices of Barack Obama — or Britney Spears, or Matt Damon, or whoever — is part of this blinkeredness.

peter55, I think I agree with you that individual choices are important, and, in environmental matters, as much a part of the solution as national and international commitments. Your counter example, however, is poorly chosen. Parks’s action would have meant nothing but her arrest if she hadn’t already been active with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and thus able to tap into larger activist networks who conceived and mobilized the bus boycott.

I only read the one article linked, but I have to describe that as “fawning”, at best. Narratives get formed well before the campaign begins and adapt from there. Reading this suggests to me the next republican president is going to be some B part movie actor or something.