Maureen Dowd On Obama:Who Knew?
01/23/2012
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Maureen Dowd writes in the NYT about how the Cool Black President she thought we were electing turned out to be less entertaining than she had expected from all those years watching Cool Black Guys on TV:

FOR eight seconds, we saw the president we had craved for three years: cool, joyous, funny, connected. 

“I, I’m so in love with you,” Barack Obama crooned to a thrilled crowd at a fund-raiser at the Apollo in Harlem on Thursday night, doing a seductive imitation as Al Green himself looked on. ... 

The portrait of the first couple in Jodi Kantor’s new book, “The Obamas,” bristles with aggrievement and the rational president’s disdain for the irrational nature of politics, the press and Republicans.

Despite what his rivals say, the president and the first lady do believe in American exceptionalism — their own, and they feel overassaulted and underappreciated. 

We disappointed them. 

As Michelle said to Oprah in an interview she did with the president last May: “I always told the voters, the question isn’t whether Barack Obama is ready to be president. The question is whether we’re ready. And that continues to be the question we have to ask ourselves.” 

They still believed, as their friend Valerie Jarrett once said, that Obama was “just too talented to do what ordinary people do.” 

Who knew, in the exuberance of 2008, that America was electing an introvert? 


Who knew? How could anyone possibly know? I mean, besides the presidential candidate having published at age 33 a 150,000 word autobiography that is introverted, elegant, dull, egotistical, self-pitying, not particularly insightful, and a little depressing: Obama's Presidency in convenient book form? But other than this whopping huge memoir, how could anyone have known anything about the man? And who could expect busy media figures like Maureen Dowd to read a Presidential candidate's well-written autobiography? Or even its subtitle?

Kantor writes that the Obamas, feeling misunderstood, burrowed into “self-imposed exile” — a “bubble within the bubble” — with their small circle of Chicago friends, who reinforced the idea that “the American public just did not appreciate their exceptional leader.” 
She reports that Marty Nesbitt indignantly told his fellow Obama pal Eric Whitaker that the president “could get 70 or 80 percent of the vote anywhere but the U.S.”
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