Is Obama Real? A little over a decade before anyone had heard of Barack Obama, cyberpunk author William Gibson already had his number, as it were. The novel was called Idoru (“idol” in Japanese) and told the story of a holographic emanation, an entirely virtual media star projected upon an adoring world. As Rolling Stone put it in a review, “Gibson envisions a future in which the lines between the virtual and the actual are terminally blurred. How ‘real’ are today’s celebrities?” There’s no doubt that the world’s “greatest” celebrity creation is Barack Obama, an idol who mesmerized the American...