"....I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there...."
I've been wondering if that line from Obama's "You Didn't Build That" rant had any resonance at all with the slobbering Obamatons. Take for example, Meghan Daum, who was still slobbering over how smart Barack Obama is -- as recently as mid-May of this year:
"TOO brainy to be president?"
As devotees of Barack Obama know all too well, qualities that made him so attractive as a candidate — an affinity for subtle arguments, a tendency to carefully weigh his options — have at times proved less useful in his role as president. That carefulness has been read as indecisiveness. The subtle arguments have sounded, to some ears, like hedging. In response, the president has simplified his rhetoric. The nuances of the 2009 Cairo speech about relations between the U.S. and the Muslim world have given way to chest thumping over killing Osama bin Laden. The sophistication of the speech on race he delivered during the 2008 campaign has morphed into sentimental headline grabbers: "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon."
But the old-school Obama is on delightful and rather hilarious display in the June issue of Vanity Fair, which features an adaptation of some especially juicy portions of David Maraniss' forthcoming biography, "Barack Obama: The Story." Drawing from interviews with the president's old girlfriends (one kept letters; the other kept a detailed journal), Maraniss reveals an Obama brimming with the kind of existential angst and intellectual precocity usually reserved for characters in Woody Allen movies.
[....]
It's hard not to come away from the Vanity Fair article without feeling, strangely enough, that the White House is holding Obama back. The gulf between the brilliant young man who wanted to change the world and the stymied president who can barely pass a piece of legislation, the cosmopolitan wearer of the sarong and the lock-step wearer of the flag pin, suggests he could have served the American people far more effectively if he weren't bogged down being the leader of the free world.
If Mz. Daum took the president's recent proclamation to heart, that being "so smart" is really no big deal after all, it's not apparent in her writings.
| Article Title | Date | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Confessions of a TV couch potato | 19 July 2012 | ||
| The GOP's Palin hangover | 12 July 2012 | ||
| Under Nora's wing | 28 June 2012 | ||
| 2012's pop song for grads | 21 June 2012 | ||
| Really? First gay president? | 14 June 2012 | ||
| Speaking down to Americans | 07 June 2012 | ||
| When parents hover | 31 May 2012 | ||
| Attack of the flesh-eating bacteria | 24 May 2012 | ||
| Too brainy to be president? | 10 May 2012 | ||
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