Jackson's version is great. I didn't make it through Obama's version, but I did like the part at 0:24 when he's stumbling around and Michelle starts clapping, perhaps in the hope that everybody will join in and put an end to this ordeal before it gets started.
Much of the palpable disappointment with Obama among youngish voters who got so excited about him in 2008 is that for their whole lives they'd been informed that black guys are cool. So what could be cooler than electing President Will Smith? But then President Obama turned out to be, the more you got to know him, nowhere near as cool as he thinks he is.
We could have guessed that long ago from the way Michelle treats him. According to Jodi Kantor's book The Obamas, Michelle still very much believes in Barack as "transformational" for the rest of us. But, her body language always suggested that she never really got Obamania, and in fact resented the hoopla over her husband, who, if you know him the way Michelle knows him, isn't all that.
Kantor discovered that Michelle's initial reaction to his election was to demand a separation — he could go bach it in the White House while she and the girls stayed in Chicago through the rest of the 2008-2009 schoolyear. Eventually, aides talked her out of what would have been a PR cataclysm, and her mood has improved as her husband's poll ratings came down from the stratosphere.
In June 1971, LOOK magazine recorded an encounter between Sen. Edward Kennedy and Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Kennedy "stuck out his hand and exchanged banalities [with Jackson]. Kennedy acted like a man running for the Presidency. Jackson, typically, acted like a man who is President." The article went on to say Jackson is "the closest thing to a national leader that has surfaced on today's fragmented civil rights scene. Tough talking, fast-stepping Jesse Jackson is as different from the conventional notion of a black minister as a Maserati is from a Dodge."
