This skirt is messing Obama up.

Barack Obama "is really messed up. I'm giving him some time because this beautiful skirt that my stylist Meredith Koop picked out that is my favorite portrait of my mom. He didn't know it existed until just a few minutes ago. I've had a few weeks to settle down"
- Michelle Obama pic.twitter.com/YbjPXRy0OS

— Howard Mortman (@HowardMortman) June 16, 2026

ADDED: I've seen faces on shirts but I can't remember ever seeing a face on clothing below the waist. I went looking and found this from Jean Paul Gaultier in the 1990s. I think it works because the faces are small and numerous, making it not that different from, say, a floral print.

One giant face, larger than the face of the wearer, feels quite obtrusive. But it's long been accepted above the waist. How long have those things been around? I remember the Che Guevara shirts, circa 1970, but what was the original T-shirt with a big face? My quick research says it was probably the Thomas E. Dewey 1948 U.S. presidential campaign T-shirt — Dewey's face and the slogan "Dew-it with Dewey."

"His almost zealous commitment to moderation rankled some progressives, who had assumed that his soaring campaign rhetoric meant he was a visionary bent on overturning the status quo."

"Whenever he felt stuck, he fell back on empathy and 'process.' They sound like incommensurate traits — one is inventive and literary, the other is bland and technocratic. But for Obama — who in this book demonstrates an almost compulsive tendency to imagine himself into the lives of others (whether it’s Hillary Clinton, John McCain, or, in one passage, a Somali pirate) — a sound process 'was born of necessity.' Decisions that were made after taking into account a variety of perspectives reassured him that he wasn’t blinkered by his own...."

I'm reading "In ‘A Promised Land,’ Barack Obama Thinks — and Thinks Some More — Over His First Term" (NYT). This new book review, by the regular NYT nonfiction book critic Jennifer Szalai. 

The book is 700 pages long and only goes up to May 2011 — which means it includes "his roasting of Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 30 and the killing of Osama bin Laden the day after" but does not reach "the 2016 election, his abdication of his own 'red line' in Syria, the entrenchment of the surveillance state and a discussion of drone strikes." But, Szalai assures us, "This isn’t to say that 'A Promised Land' reads like a dodge." Ironically, that reads like a dodge. Szalai could be thinking that cutting off at May 2011 was a dodge, but the dodge was well-shrouded in contemplative prose so that it doesn't read like a dodge.

Make America Possible Again.

From "I’m Not Yet Ready to Abandon the Possibility of America" by Barack Obama (an excerpt in The Atlantic from his forthcoming book "A Promised Land"): 

What I can say for certain is that I’m not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America—not just for the sake of future generations of Americans but for all of humankind. I’m convinced that the pandemic we’re currently living through is both a manifestation of and a mere interruption in the relentless march toward an interconnected world, one in which peoples and cultures can’t help but collide....

Our divisions run deep; our challenges are daunting. If I remain hopeful about the future, it’s in large part because I’ve learned to place my faith in my fellow citizens, especially those of the next generation, whose conviction in the equal worth of all people seems to come as second nature, and who insist on making real those principles that their parents and teachers told them were true but that they perhaps never fully believed themselves. More than anyone else, my book is for those young people—an invitation to once again remake the world, and to bring about, through hard work, determination, and a big dose of imagination, an America that finally aligns with all that is best in us.

In this rhetoric, America is something that has never existed in reality, only as a set of ideals. The "America" of Trump's "Make America Great Again" was not only never great in the past. It was never even America. At some point in the future, the dream of America may come true. Obama has considered abandoning the hope that America will some day come into existence, but he's holding off. He's putting his faith in the people, especially the "next generation," which might be the Millennials, but could be Gen Z. 

And don't forget the babies — the "Alphas" — and what they'll be thinking, seemingly second nature, after 10 or 15 years of whatever the Gen X and the Millennials inflict upon us. Somehow, something known as "the best in us" — be best! — will align with Mars, then peace will guide the planets, and love will steer the stars.

"What’s done is done," "What will be will be" — these "tautophrases" "preserve and burnish the established order."

"When God informs Moses, 'I am that I am,' he is telling the prophet, 'Look, get off my back, I’m God.'... 'Boys will be boys' and 'A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do' excuse mischief and usually worse, reinforcing the dominant masculine code....  'You do you is the ultimate self-­referential slogan for the ultimate self-­referential presidency,' [a Wall Street Journal writer 'fumed.'] 'It’s the Be yourself piety of our age turned into a political license by Mr. Obama to do as he pleases.' According to The Journal, Obama’s millennial affectations and his age-­inappropriate preening provide context for the rise of ISIS, our crummy foreign policy, immigration amnesty’s wrong turn. 'You do you,' taken to its extreme, provides justification for every global bad actor.... Might as well do you. Perform the impersonation of your best self. Maybe you’ll get it right this time."

From a 2015 column in the NYT "How ‘You Do You’ Perfectly Captures Our Narcissistic Culture" by Colson Whitehead. I'm reading this because I've been studying the phrase "You do you," and I am only just now noticing that he's the author of a novel I happened to write about yesterday, "Underground Railroad."

ADDED: At English Language and Usage, back in 2015, they discussed that NYT column, and somebody wrote:

Scott Adams v. Bill Maher. Adams wins.

Reminds me of the $500 I won after someone bet me Obama would try to become a dictator and never leave office. https://t.co/EYkKo6Sfkm

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) May 5, 2019

"This is the third year Louisiana crawfish have been seen in Berlin."

"City wildlife officer Derk Ehlert says when crawfish first appeared, the city released eels into the waterways, hoping they'd catch the crawfish and eat them. But then the next year, there were still 3,000 crawfish in the parks. This year there are 10 times as many and they seem to be spreading. At one point, hundreds of crawfish clambered out of the lake and ambled along the Tiergarten's shaded paths.... To the west of the Tiergarten, in the Spandau borough, Olaf Pelz cracked the shell of one of Hidde's red crawfish in his restaurant, called Fisch Frank... 'When we serve it here we make it with salad and bread and typical sauce,' he says. He puts dollops of mayonnaise and cocktail sauce on the plate, and tops the crawfish with a thin slice of lemon. Despite his efforts, customers are skeptical. Erika Klugert rises from her outdoor table to watch Pelz uncover the soft tail meat of the crawfish. 'This food requires too much work,' Klugert says."

From "For Berlin, Invasive Crustaceans Are A Tough Catch And A Tough Sell" (NPR).

I wanted to give this post a "crustaceans" tag, but I didn't want to create a new tag. So I started typing out the word in the place where I add my tags, and by the time I got to "crus-," there was only one tag the software was suggesting, and it wasn't "crustaceans," so that's it for the potential "crustaceans" tag.

I'm not creating a new tag, because I don't want to bother with adding it retroactively, searching for crustaceans in the 14-year archive. Sometimes I do create new tags and do that work. For example, I did it yesterday with Kathleen Turner. But that was a matter of doing a search for "Kathleen Turner."

"Crustaceans" would not be so easy. I'd have to look up which animals are crustaceans and search for them individually.

And I already have separate tags for some of them — lobsters (with 41 posts!) and crabs (with 17 posts!). But I don't have a "shrimp" tag. And I've mentioned shimp quite a few times.

Should I now create a "shrimp" tag and a "crawfish" tag? But today's post is only the second mention of crawfish in the history of the blog. The first was "Barack spent so much time by himself that it was like he was raised by wolves" (from 2010). Excerpt:

In the end the story of Barack Obama will make perfect sense. It will all fit together. The lonely man — raised by wolves — swept up into our American psychosis.

“Even though I’m president of the United States, my power is not limitless,” Obama, who has forced himself to ingest a load of gulf crab cakes, shrimp and crawfish tails, whinged to Grand Isle, La., residents on Friday. “So I can’t dive down there and plug the hole. I can’t suck it up with a straw.”

What's weird is that I included that 2009 photo of myself that I also reused 3 days ago. It's funny how things cycle around in blogging. Leaving tags along the way can help tie things together, but some of the tagging just leads to weirdness. So, when I was starting to write "crustaceans," and there was only one suggestion left when I got to "crus-," can you imagine what it was? It was "husbands crushing their wives' aspirations"! As noted above, that tag had only one post. It was: "Anthony Weiner says he 'crushed the aspirations' of Huma Abedin."

That was just last September. What was I thinking? That it was funny to do that as a one-time tag or that the tag would cause me to notice this phenomenon and amass evidence of it? If the latter, it couldn't work unless I remembered the tag, which I didn't. Maybe now I'll remember it, and the aspiration-crushing husbands will be noticed and collected as they clamber out of the lake and amble along the shaded paths.

ADDED: On rereading this post, the one tag I'd like to create is "straw." Obama "can’t suck it up with a straw," there's the recent straw-related environmentalism, and I know I've blogged about not liking how people look sucking on straws.

"The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions, classes, make them mine, me theirs. Taken separately, they’re unacceptable and untenable."

Wrote Barack Obama to his girlfriend Alexandra McNear, in one of the excerpts from letters, dated 1982 to 1984, that were released from the collection at Emory University, reported at WaPo.

“I must admit large dollops of envy for both groups, my American friends consuming their life in the comfortable mainstream, the foreign friends in the international business world,” Obama writes McNear in one letter. “Caught without a class, a structure, or a tradition to support me, in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me.”...

“I don’t distinguish between struggling with the world and struggling with myself... I enter a pact with other people, other forces in the world, that their problems are mine and mine are theirs... The minute others imprint my senses, they become me and I must deal with them or else close part of myself off and make myself and the world smaller, lukewarm.”

Speaking of lack of warmth, his attitude toward McNear was, as WaPo puts it, "cooling." As Obama put it:

“I am not so naive as to believe that a distinct line exists between romantic love and the more quotidian, but perhaps finer bonds of friendship... but I can feel the progression from one to the other (in my mind).”

Poor McNear! McFar.

I went looking for a picture of Alexandra McNear and found this Daily Mail piece from 2012: "First picture of Barack Obama's first serious girlfriend... and how she went on to marry a Serbian boxer who is now one of New York's most famous bartenders":

A friend of Miss McNear [said]: "Alex is so embarrassed about this coming out right now. She has a family and is a grown up, for her to be called somebody's 'girlfriend' is really making her cringe. It was all in the past but her family still tease her about it. I know her sisters say they would have liked to have been in the White House, but ce la vie [sic]. To think she could have been First Lady, and she married a boxer instead. You couldn't make it up."

IN THE COMMENTS: MathMom said:

"The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions, classes, make them mine, me theirs..."

I had to stop reading there. My heart began to pound, my hands began to sweat, I felt dizzy and disoriented...I was reading about intentional cultural appropriation, and that by a revered statesman! Our former president!

I'm getting the vapours...must take to my fainting couch. Words fail me.

And sykes.1 said:

What Obama was unconsciously pointing out is that multiculturalism is not a goal. It, like anarchy, is a tool to break down the existing society. The goal is a totalitarian socialist dictatorship. Socialism insists that all individuals are literally identical, and it adopts policies to make sure that they are identical. These policies are, of course, brutal. There can be no White or black persons, no Jews or Christians, no Hispanics, etc. Socialist man is a single, homogeneous thing.

"At a fund-raiser for the president at his Westport, Conn., estate Monday night, Harvey Weinstein spoke in a softly lit room shimmering with pink dahlias, gold Oscars, silvery celebrities and black American Express cards."

Wrote Maureen Dowd in August 2012, in a column I'm reading because in my previous post, about Dowd's current column, I observed that Dowd had been writing about the movie business for a long time and wondered whether she'd ever gone after Weinstein. She quoted somebody calling Weinstein a "master" at avoiding bad press by "giving to liberal causes."

So let's see what press Dowd gave Weinstein in the heat of the 2012 presidential election. That column — which begins with the sentence I've used as the post title — continues:

“You can make the case,” Weinstein said of Barack Obama, “that he’s the Paul Newman of American presidents.”...

Paul Newman, Dowd explains, was aloof. 

[T]he president does not think people should expect too much in return for paying $35,800 for an hour of his time, as they did at the Weinstein affair, or in return for other favors....

“[Obama] realized that he could stir crowds while also thinking to himself that it was all a game and posturing,” [said David Maraniss, author of “Barack Obama: The Story"]. “He is always removed and participating at the same time, self-conscious and without the visceral need or love of transactional politics that would characterize Bill Clinton or L.B.J. or even W., in a way.”...

“His [will] is cool and [Bill] Clinton’s is hot, but they burn at the same temperature inside,” [Maraniss] said. “So he does some of what he finds distasteful, but not all of it, and not all of it very well.”

By the way, 60 guests paid $35,800 for the dinner at Harvey's.

There's not a whiff of negativity about Weinstein in this old column, which is about Obama's cool lack of interest in being "a glad-handing pol." The phrase "a glad-handing pol" seems to relate more to going out among the common people. At Harvey's, Obama was ensconced with the beautiful elite. I have to go to a different NYT article for this:

Among the guests were Anne Hathaway, who played Catwoman in “The Dark Knight Rises,” the new Batman film; Jerry Springer, the talk show host; Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue magazine; Joanne Woodward, the actress and widow of Paul Newman; Aaron Sorkin, creator of television shows like “The Newsroom” and “The West Wing”; and Gov. Daniel [sic] P. Malloy of Connecticut.

Mr. Obama made sure to single out Ms. Hathaway, who was wearing “a silver dress with puffed sleeves gathered from the elbow to the shoulder, and a tight bodice,” according to a pool report by Dave Boyer of The Washington Times. “She’s spectacular,” Mr. Obama said....

ADDED: Other old Weinstein mentions by Dowd:

From  November 2015: "The Women of Hollywood Speak Out/Female executives and filmmakers are ready to run studios and direct blockbuster pictures. What will it take to dismantle the pervasive sexism that keeps them from doing it?"

In her black-and-cream miniskirt and black Balenciaga hightops, [Leslye] Headland was a magnetic presence with a throaty voice and a booming laugh. She had a Nicki Minaj ring tone, ‘‘Truffle Butter,’’ and several movie tattoos: ‘‘redrum’’ from ‘‘The Shining’’ on her lower back; a line from ‘‘War Games’’ — ‘‘The only winning move is to not play’’ — on her left forearm; ‘‘How would Lubitsch do it?’’ in script on her right. Harvey Weinstein, for whom Headland worked as a receptionist and assistant, calls her ‘‘wildly talented.’’

From December 1998, "Liberties; Icon and I Will Survive":

The President's head is on the block, and the First Lady has never looked more radiant. As her husband gets dragged through the mud by bone-headed Republicans, she glows. She looks as if she's traveling with her own pink baby spotlight.

Here she is on the cover of Vogue, looking Hallmark happy and Hollywood glamorous. Here she is making the flashbulbs pop, with Harvey Weinstein and Gwyneth Paltrow at the New York premiere of Miramax's ''Shakespeare in Love.''...

Last Thursday she repaid the generosity of Mr. Weinstein, the co-chairman of Miramax who is a big contributor to Clinton campaigns and the Clinton legal defense fund. As Alex Kuczynski reported in The Times, the First Lady went to Mr. Weinstein's premiere and spoke in praise of ''my friend Harvey.'' Sounding very Tina Brownish, Mrs. Clinton raved about ''the buzz'' around Miramax, and said the company ''has done a great service.''...

Axelrod got everything he wanted.

From the podcast with Obama:

OBAMA: And you know, part of the reasons that I think I've stayed sane in what has been this remarkable journey, and you've known me a long time and I think you'd confirm that I'm pretty much the same guy as I was when we started this thing.... [Y]ou know, success came late to me, notoriety came late. And it -- it made me realize that to the extent that I had been successful, it wasn't about me.  It was about certain forces out there and -- and me hitching my wagon to a broader spirit and a broader set of trends and a broader set of traditions. And so, when -- when we came up with the phrase Yes, We Can, which again, to give you credit I was a little skeptical of, it felt a little simplistic when we first started. But...

AXELROD: You didn't like the logo either, but that's -- that's a different discussion...

(CROSSTALK)

OBAMA: The logo I thought was a loser, it looked like the Pepsi logo and I thought...

AXELROD: That's what you said, that's...

OBAMA: ... that seems a little...

(CROSSTALK)

AXELROD: That's what you said, it became more iconic than the Apple insignia. So -- I'm glad we straightened this out...

OBAMA: But look, I...

AXELROD: I've gotten everything I wanted...

Obama tags on this blog that have collected a surprising number of posts.

You can see all my Obama tags below the fold. I'll just list some I particularly like for various reasons — odd specificity, surprising usefulness, whatever:

Obama the mood elevator (74)
Obama the boyfriend (58)
Obama and manliness (24)
Obama's psyche (68)
Obama is everywhere (15)
Obama and irony (14)
Obama and pop culture (87)
Obama the father (19)
Obama the teacher (28)
Obama and the fly (13) (Let's see Trump catch a fly with his bare hand.)
Obama eats dog (12)
Obama attacked from the left (11)
Obama gets mad (3)
Obama is bland ( 63)
Obama's tired (5)
Obama is like Bush (78)
Obama is like Carter (15)
Obama is like Nixon (35)
Obama is like Reagan (4)
Obama is like Sarah Palin (4)
Obama's umbrella (5)
Obama says something strange (1)

Hillary "should have run as a woman in 2008, when she was beating back a feminized antiwar candidate."

"And she should have run as a man this time, when Americans feel beleaguered and scared and yearn for something 'big and masculine and strong,'" writes Maureen Dowd, paraphrasing and quoting Matthew Dowd (the former George W. Bush strategist).

Dowd continues:

Since we cannot know if a woman is going to overcompensate on machismo — as Hillary did on the unjustified Iraq invasion — we may want to look at it a different way. It may be more relevant to ask if someone is a cat or a dog....

Ugh. I don't need cutesy animal stand-ins for masculine and feminine stereotypes. You've already made it clear that you think and want to write in terms of these stereotypes (with the understanding that a man can be "feminized" and a woman masculinized).


Farther down in the column, female/cat becomes head and masculine/dog becomes gut.

W. was all about the gut and Obama is all about the head and now Donald Trump is soaring by being the opposite of Obama, all about the gut again. Both Hillary and Trump have been emphasizing that they will do a lot more schmoozing with lawmakers and others who disagree with them, vowing to be dogs with a bone, eager canines offering paws, and not a cool cat stalking away at the first sign of difficulty or when affection is most desired....

Hillary is like Trump? If that's where your framework gets you, you need to question the framework. Those two are so different! Hillary is planned, programmed, and controlled. That doesn't seem Trump-like... or dog-like.

ADDED: Speaking of dogs, remember "Wally meets the press"? "What? My position? (Uh oh, here it comes) On what? — my position on CATS ??? Uh... well, cats are... uh, cats are... wait, hold on a sec... (must check with advisor).... My position is that cats are people too and that cats are equally deserving of living their lives with dignity, care, and happiness."



"There. I think I handled that well....."

Obama rambles, dredging up his old line "I don't get too high when it's high and I don't get too low when it's low."

From the full transcript of the BBC interview:

You know the - it's interesting - that one of my - every president, every leader has strengths and weaknesses. One of my strengths is I have a pretty even temperament. I don't get too high when it's high and I don't get too low when it's low. And what I found during the course of the presidency, and I suppose this is true in life, is that investments and work that you make back here sometimes take a little longer than the 24-hour news cycle to bear fruit. So some of this is just some serendipity and convergence of a lot of things that we had been working on for a very long time coming together. But some of it is I also believe a recognition that the kind of gridlock and obstruction that that Congress and the Republicans in Congress too often have engaged in is something that we just can't afford at a time when the world is moving so fast and there are so many challenges. And the robust exertion of executive authority within the the lawful constraints that we operate under is something that we've been spending a lot of time thinking about....

 Here's my blog post from April 2008, "I don't get too high when I'm high, and I don't get too low when I'm low."

That's Barack Obama, on "Fox News Sunday," responding to the prompt: "What have you learned about running for President? What have you learned about yourself?" He says: "I've learned that I have what I believe is the right temperament for the presidency."

The line has one odd change. Back then, he said "when I'm high" and "when I'm low," and now he's saying "when it's high" and "when it's low." A meaningful change? The conditions of highness/lowness are now externalized, an "it." Before, he was referring to the low-to-high range within himself. But we can see that through all these years, he's treasured — or wanted us to treasure — this quality of temperament. 

"He was kind of an interesting mutt."

"But to really be in the presence of somebody who is the president and has been for eight years ... and to feel the incredible charisma and ease at which this guy handles himself..."

"I was a bit of a nervous wreck and he immediately put me at ease. I don't know how, I'm not easy to put at ease. I'm a nutbag." [Afterwards:] "I cried a little bit, right in front of Brendan. It was a weird moment for us, he handled it pretty well. ... A crew of people came and they started disassembling the tents that were on my driveway and then all the Secret Service got their stuff and they just were gone, it was all gone. I let my cats out of the bedroom ... and they were like, 'Can we have our house back, please?'"

Marc Maron recovers. 

ADDED: At The New Yorker, Sarah Larson wonders whether Maron could get to "the heart and soul of things" as he has with other guests:

Maybe. A President’s heart and soul tend to consist of deeply reasonable sentiments, unless he’s Lyndon Johnson. Obama is by nature rational and pragmatic.... His conversation, humor, and revelations are all intelligent and uncontroversial. Part of what has become second nature to him is speaking so reasonably that it’s almost aggravating. What does he do for fun? Watch his daughters grow up; he finds them spectacular. Play basketball, but he’s not as young as he used to be. When he mentioned parental craziness and the desire to not pass your own craziness on to your kids, Maron said, “How are you crazy?” Well, he isn’t.... He may have been as real as he gets....

"Six years into my presidency some people still say I’m arrogant, aloof, condescending. Some people are so dumb."

See, that's funny. It uses truth and self-deprecation — traditional attributes of humor — in a fresh enough, edgy enough way.

I also liked:

I have to stay focused on my job. Because for many Americans this is still a time of deep uncertainty.  For example, I have one friend just a few weeks ago, she was making millions of dollars a year and she’s now living out of a van in Iowa.

He takes a shot at Hillary that minimizes her current "Clinton Cash" catastrophe and relaxes us into laughing by opening up a channel to that dark place in our souls where we harbor disgust for the poor.

SEE: "Lessons Learned From A Year Living In A Van":

Prepare to be judged: By your friends, your family, co-workers. Both past and present. And pretty much everyone you'll meet along the way....

"Edward Snowden couldn't be here for some treason," said Neil Patrick Harris, the Oscars host, when the documentary about him won an award.

The award — for best documentary — to "Citizenfour" was expected, so the scriptwriters had plenty of time to come up with that joke. It's a neat joke, with its language precision. Or near-precision. The New Yorker's Amy Davison says:

Treason isn’t one of the crimes Snowden has been charged with—the government wants to prosecute him under the Espionage Act—but both the praise and the joke point to why this Snowden Oscar mattered. What he did was useful, and dangerous.

That wouldn’t have been enough if the movie were bad. But "Citizenfour" is worth watching....

Worth watching... in my book, that's a high standard. And "Citizenfour" didn't meet it, nor did the Oscars show, nor did any of the movies that were nominated (except one, "Grand Budapest Hotel," which I noticed in the HBO "On Demand" listings).

I liked the joke, because of its language precision and because it seemed at least a tad risky in the context of Hollywood celebrating itself. Or maybe it wasn't. Having given the award to "Citizenfour," Hollywood may have needed to get right with the Obama administration. "No, I don’t think Mr. Snowden was a patriot" is what Obama has said.

To get a link for this post, I googled "treason" and "patrick" — "patrick" because I didn't want to risk misspelling "neil" and I stopped before adding "harris" because I knew "treason" and "patrick" were enough to pull up the quote from last night in Google. This is pure happenstance:



And isn't Obama's "No, I don’t think Mr. Snowden was a patriot" a fascinating quote to recall after a week of chewing over Giuliani's Obama-not-a-patriot remark?

"Scott Walker feeling the heat" — says Politico, but how does Politico know what Scott Walker feels?

Ironically, the assertion is that he feels the heat over his statements that he doesn't know how Barack Obama feels — doesn't know whether Obama feels love for his country and doesn't know whether Obama feels in his heart that he is a Christian.

It's easy for me to see the simple accuracy of Walker's statement that he doesn't have access to the interior sensations of another human being's body, and I'm having difficulty understanding why Politico imagines it knows that Scott Walker is feeling heat.

Maybe MSM are feeling the heat as the kind of questions that used to generate heat aren't heating things up like they used to. They've been hoping to have some fun watching Republicans self-incinerate, after all these years dutifully admiring the cool character they call "No Drama Obama."

ADDED: "Scott Walker feeling the heat" resembles the schoolyard bullying that comes in the form of taunts like: "Oh, the little baby got his feelings hurt! He's going to cry! He wants to run home to mommy!"

Obama goes to the bookstore with his daughters.

He checks out and comments on how sad he looks in the photograph on the cover of Chuck Todd's book ("The Stranger: Barack Obama in the White House"):

"I have never seen a president in exactly the position Mr. Obama is, which is essentially alone."

Writes Peggy Noonan in "The Loneliest President Since Nixon/Facing adversity, Obama has no idea how to respond."

He’s got no one with him now. The Republicans don’t like him, for reasons both usual and particular: They have had no good experiences with him. The Democrats don’t like him, for their own reasons plus the election loss.... No one at [his post-election lunch with congressional leaders] looked at him with colder, beadier eyes than outgoing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who clearly doesn’t like him at all. The press doesn’t especially like the president; in conversation they evince no residual warmth. This week at the Beijing summit there was no sign the leaders of the world had any particular regard for him....

The last time we saw a president so alone it was Richard Nixon, at the end of his presidency, when the Democrats had turned on him, the press hated him, and the Republicans were fleeing.... But Nixon had one advantage Obama does not: the high regard of the world’s leaders, who found his downfall tragic (such ruin over such a trifling matter) and befuddling (he didn’t keep political prisoners chained up in dungeons, as they did. Why such a fuss?).

How does Jonathan Gruber feel?

Contemplate the possibility that he feels good.

He didn't lie. He experienced discomfort with the lying nature of others and his own implication in it. Consider the possibility that he didn't get caught telling the truth: He felt a drive to tell the truth and he is immensely, awesomely satisfied that his truth-telling has burst out and is dominating the American consciousness.

This is just a theory. I don't know how the man really feels, and I acknowledge that my theory may conflict with what I presume is his policy preference — the success of Obamacare. This is simply a line of thought that occurred to me the moment I said: "I wonder how Jonathan Gruber feels."

Sudden fame is an interesting phenomenon. I was just reading this NYT article "Alex From Target: The Other Side of Fame," about a 16-year-old boy who got famous suddenly one day when a picture of him that had been taken without his notice got tweeted by a girl with the one word caption "YOOOOOOOOOOO." It can be surreal and upsetting to get a fame surprise.

But Gruber is not a teenager. And he wasn't just minding his own business. He's a professor who thrust himself into the political policy sphere. He got his work — Architect of Obamacare! — and he had his effect, but he had his outsider observations too, and he felt distanced and above it all, and he wanted to disclose his perspective to others. He spoke openly, in an academic setting, to others who feel distanced and above it all.* And now the whole world is listening in. Gruber didn't say it directly to us, which would have been rude. He confided to like-minded confidantes, and we overheard. The American people are the distanced observers of his sphere of activity — the professors. And I want to suggest that he's energized and alive and joyous to get his message across to the vast classroom that is all of America.

______________________

* I think Barack Obama himself is that sort of person, but he's taken that manner and repurposed it for general consumption. The manner often works for him, perhaps because it plays against a racial stereotype that Americans don't like to believe they harbor. But it doesn't always work, and it must be a very strange experience for Obama, if he has the time and disposition to notice his feelings and reflect upon them. And I think he does. That's the Obama memoir I want to read. And I bet he's writing it, and we will read it some day.

ADDED: And then there's Rich Weinstein, the "nobody... the guy who lives in his mom’s basement wearing a tinfoil hat." How does he feel?

"It’s terrifying that the guy in his mom’s basement is finding his stuff, and nobody else is," he says. "I really do find this disturbing."