Not a mother for a child (or vice versa).
Or a husband for a wife (or vice versa)
Or a patriot for country.
No, the truest form of love is when a Senior Editor of The New Republic pens a guest column in The NY Times about young Obama, Young Obama’s Poetic Politics:
One of the things that most excited writers and intellectuals about Obama the candidate in 2008 was his literary sensibility. In her essay “Speaking in Tongues,” the novelist Zadie Smith enthused about Mr. Obama’s ability, in his memoir, to convincingly channel a wide range of voices: “Obama can do young Jewish male, black old lady from the South Side, white woman from Kansas,” and on and on. This gives him something in common with the author of “The Waste Land,” that chorus of disparate characters, whose working title was “He Do the Police in Different Voices.” ….Mr. Obama’s ability to recognize the poetic truth of [T.S.] Eliot’s conservatism, while still embracing the practical truth of liberalism, is what makes his letter not just a curiosity but also a hint at the complexity of his mature politics.Yet the vicissitudes of his presidency prove that possessing an ironic, literary mind is not necessarily a help when it comes to day-to-day governing. The big revelation of the Obama presidency, for intellectuals, is that his authenticity and irony have not succeeded in making him a transformative figure — that the quality of the president can’t be directly deduced from the quality of the man.What remains certain is that Mr. Obama has it in him to produce the best post-presidential memoir ever — if he is willing to let that unguarded early voice speak again.
And that was before Obama went gay marriage. So let’s do a rewrite of one of the sentences:
The big revelation of the Obama presidency, for intellectuals, is that his authenticity and irony have
notsucceeded in making him a transformative figure —thatthe quality of the president can’tbe directly deduced from the quality of the man.
James Taranto analyzes this literary analysis, and reaches the same conclusion I do.
It’s feeling a little like May 10, 2008, isn’t it?
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