In a word, yes.
Yes, Curtis Sittenfeld, you are the last person in America who adores Obama. Even Chris Matthews, liberal rat he is, has jumped off the sinking Love Boat that is the Obama administration.
Let’s start with a few quick, slobbering, try-to-hide-the-bulge-in-your-pants (oh, wait, we forgot that “Curtis” is a woman) comments before we get to the heart of Curtis’ paean:
Two years after voting for him, I’m just as exhilarated as Oprah Winfrey was in Grant Park on Nov. 4, 2008. … I’ve remained in the tank for Obama … the thrill still hasn’t worn off for me of once again having an intellectually nimble president, not to mention one who doesn’t pride himself on going with his gut when it comes to foreign policy … when I see Obama on television, I’m unfailingly struck by his intelligence and charisma, by his easygoing humor, by the magnificence of his megawatt smile. He just makes me proud … my Obama admiration is a kind of emotional inverse of the right-wing Obama antipathy…
Consider that a mere warm-up, because we’re getting to the main event. Now Curtis begins working herself into a frenzy that can only end with an explosion of bodily fluids:
I like that he’s married to—and seemingly still quite taken with—a strong, opinionated, gorgeous woman, and that he has two ridiculously cute daughters. I like his mind-bendingly multicultural extended family. I like that in a campaign interview in Glamour magazine, he could fluently and unabashedly talk about Pap smears. I thought that the beer summit of 2009 was delightful. I was even excited when Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, not realizing until pundits explained otherwise that I was supposed to be aghast at its prematurity … I was one of those Democrats who thought it’d be nice to have an entrée of eight years of Hillary, with Obama as a vice-presidential side, followed by eight years of a more seasoned Obama as the main course. I was always an Obama admirer, but maybe the fact that I was initially rooting for Hillary has prevented me from feeling the disappointment in his presidency expressed by certain Obamamaniacs. So swoony and ardent was their Obama love during the campaign that it couldn’t be sustained; my more measured affection, by contrast, has grown over time.
At this point, I love Obama so much that I recently thought if it were 1961, I’d probably display a bust of him in my living room. Then I realized I’m already displaying the 2010 equivalent: On my living room wall, I have a framed version of that famous November 2008 New Yorker cover of the O moon over the Lincoln Memorial. Meanwhile, on my desk, I keep a printed-out photo I first saw on the Huffington Post in May 2009, of Obama in the Oval Office, bending over so a little African-American boy could rub his head. The boy, it turns out, was the child of a White House staffer, and the reason Obama was bending was, according to the caption in the White House’s Flickr account, “The youngster wanted to see if the President’s haircut felt like his own.”
I don’t care if it’s good PR—the picture still practically brings tears to my eyes. It reminds me of the sense of excitement and possibility I felt in November 2008, as if in electing Obama, we Americans were acting as our best, smartest, least racist selves, as if there really was change we could believe in. And, OK, so it’s been a long two years since then, and for a lot of people it’s been an undeniably hard two years. But I’m just not convinced that’s Obama’s fault.
For god’s sake, Curtis, get a room. You know, one of those rooms that rent for an hour where they don’t change the sheets between customers. Send us the bill.
Source: Slate.com
