The most striking recent exemplar of glamour was not a movie star or fashion plate but a political candidate: Barack Obama in 2008. With its stylized portraits of the candidate gazing upward and its logo featuring a road stretching toward the horizon, the iconography of Obama’s first presidential campaign was classically glamorous. (The Onion satirized the candidate’s many glamorous photographs in a story headlined “Obama Practices Looking-Off-into-Future Pose.”)

The source of the candidate’s glamour was not merely his campaign’s graphic design, however, but the persona those images signified. Like John Kennedy in 1960, Obama combined youth, vigor, and good looks with the promise of political change. Like Kennedy (and Ronald Reagan, another glamorous president), the candidate was both charming and self-contained. While Kennedy’s wealth set him apart, Obama’s mystery stemmed from his exotic background: an international upbringing and biracial ethnicity that defied conventional categories and distanced him from humdrum American life. He was glamorous because he was different, and his differences mirrored his audience’s aspirations for the country.

The candidate also had little national record, allowing supporters to project diverse political yearnings onto him. Even well-informed observers couldn’t agree on whether Obama was a full-blown leftist or a market-oriented centrist.