"Now we’re feeling what not having hope feels like."

Said Michelle Obama to Oprah.

Trump's response:



Transcript:

“Michelle Obama said yesterday that there’s no hope. But I assume she was talking about the past, not the future, because I'm telling you, we have tremendous hope and we have tremendous promise and we have tremendous potential. We are going to be so successful as a country again. We are going to be amazing. And I actually think she made that statement not meaning it the way it came out, because I met with President Obama and Michelle Obama in the White House. My wife was there. She could not have been nicer. So I honestly believe she meant that statement in a different way than it came out, because I believe there is tremendous hope and, beyond hope, we have such potential. This country has such potential. You watch. It's going to be so special. Things are going to happen like you haven't seen happen in many decades."

Things are going to happen like you haven't seen happen in many decades.... I think I know what the Trump-is-Hitler contingent will say about that. But everyone will load whatever meaning they want into high abstractions like "tremendous promise," "tremendous potential," and "tremendous hope." I get that it will be big, but big what? You watch. Just wait and see. It's going to be so special. Special, eh? Special. Do I want something special? I might want something normal. I'm a little worried about special.

Of course, Obama's "hope" was always an abstraction that absorbed whatever meaning people saw in it. He's leaving now, having fulfilled some hopes and not others. One hope he has not fulfilled is the perpetuation of his party's power. He's as responsible as anyone for laying the foundation for Trump's campaign. He didn't mean to do that — I don't think! — but he never had the ability to control what was in the minds of the people who responded to his idea of hope, and now there will be a new President, bringing a different version of hope, and the old President's wife chooses to say that "we" are feeling the absence of hope.

Who's that "we"? The Democrats or the woeful people of America who — despite 8 years of Obama — still had to hope. Let's take a closer look at what Michelle Obama said to Oprah:

“So your husband’s administration, every -- everything, the election, was all about hope,” Winfrey said in a clip that aired Friday on “CBS This Morning.” “Do you think that this administration achieved that?”

The first lady responded in the affirmative. “Yes, I do,” she said, “because we feel the difference now.”

All right. That addresses my first question. Obama should already have fulfilled the hope he inspired.

“See, now we’re feeling what not having hope feels like. You know? Hope is necessary. It’s a necessary concept,” Obama continued. 

Now, she's disengaged from Oprah's question. Instead of talking about what President Obama achieved, she's talking about the ongoing feeling that people ought to have. But hope is future-looking and based on continuing need. If Obama had achieved what some of those he inspired were hoping for, would hope still be the important concept? Wouldn't we transition to preserving what we have?

“And Barack didn’t just talk about hope because he thought it was just a nice slogan to get votes. I mean, he and I and so many believe that if you -- what else do you have if you don’t have hope?”

You have all those things you've achieved! Health, happiness, security, understanding!

“What do you give your kids if you can’t give them hope?” said the first lady. 

You give them a safe, secure, loving home, a good education, solid character. What you give them, they have received. They have it. I wonder if I'm arriving at what Trump was groping toward when he said "I assume she was talking about the past, not the future."

Michelle Obama seems to confuse the past and the future in a strange way that relates to a criticism of Democrats one often hears: Their political strategy relies on maintaining economic dependency and feelings of victimhood. To say you must have hope is — think about it — a euphemistic way to say you must continue to feel needy.

"You know, our children respond to crises the way they see us respond. You know, it’s like the toddler that bumps his head on the table...they look up at you to  figure out whether it hurts. And if you’re like, oh, my God, they’re crying. But if you’re like, you know what, babe, it’s okay.... I feel that Barack has been that for the nation in ways that people will come to appreciate,” she said. 

We, the people, are children.

“Having a grown-up in the White House who can say to you in times of crisis and turmoil, hey, it’s gonna be okay."

So Obama has been the good father, calm in a crisis. That says nothing about whether Trump will be an equally good father figure or whether the father/children metaphor is ideal. I think Michelle is drifting back into a comfortable meditation on her husband's much-admired temperament. She doesn't leap into saying that Trump's demeanor is distinctly different from Obama's or that Trump's approach to fatherhood would be bad. There's no reason to think Trump would be an "oh, my God" type of parent, the one model Michelle seems to believe would not work.

"Let’s remember the good things that we have. Let’s look at the future. Let’s look at all the things that we’re building. All of this is important for our kids to stay focused and to feel like their work isn’t in vain. That their lives aren’t in vain. What do we do if we don’t have hope, Oprah?”

None of that is Trump-specific. It's thoroughly abstract. But the main thing I see in her words is a wife's anxiety to protect her husband's reputation. The press has cherry-picked words that seem to denounce Trump as the end of all hope. That's not really what she was saying. I suspect she's upset that all of her husband's achievements will be undone and that he will be blamed for failing to preserve them, for allowing the election to be lost. But that's only an inference, not even a stated abstraction.

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"):

Michelle, Malia, and Sasha "have made a lot of sacrifices on behalf of my cockamamie ideas, the running for office and things."

Said Barack Obama (talking about staying in Washington after his term in office, especially given Sasha's interest in completing high school at Sidwell Friends).

"Michelle makes me tidy up, admits messy President Obama."

Actual headline at The NY Post for an article about how the First Lady is on the cover of Vogue again.

“I had this little bachelor apartment that Michelle refused to stay in because she thought it was a little, uh . . . you know, pizza boxes everywhere... When she came, I had to get her a hotel room.”

That's a very casual revelation that she would have slept overnight with him if only he'd had a nicer looking place. There's zero regard for the folks in this country (and world) who think you shouldn't have sex until you're married. And he's going out of his way to make her sound snooty. I had to get her a hotel room.

“And what Michelle has done is to remind me every day of the virtues of order,” the chief executive said. “Being on time. Hanging up your clothes. Being intentional about planning time with your kids.”

Why would a man say that about his wife? It makes it sound like they have a mother-and-son relationship. And what woman wants to be thought of as a stickler for order? It's not sexy, and it's not  respectful. Plus, from a political standpoint, it sounds fascist, and it prompts us to think about her efforts to tell us what we're allowed to eat. Does she care about our health, or is it — as the right-wingers like to say — all about control?

He added, “We’re very different people, and some of that’s temperamental, some of it is how we grew up. Michelle grew up in a model nuclear family: mom, dad, brother. I had this far-flung family — father left at a very young age, a stepfather who ended up passing away as well. My mother was this wonderful spirit, and she was adventurous but not always very well organized.”

So your wife is the mother you never had, and your mother sounds like the sex partner an adult male would want!

“Ninety percent of our conversation is about these girls: What are they doing? And who’s got what practice? And what birthday party is coming up? And did we get a gift for this person?” the first lady said.

90%? If true, that's terrible. Where is their relationship as adults? I have trouble believing it's true, since I assume Michelle has people to handle the girls' social schedule and gift-buying. Whether it's true or not, it's a choice to present us with this picture of their relationship, all about fussy household details, short on wide-ranging conversation, and utterly unsexy. It's in Vogue, so it must be what they think women want to hear. They must think women love the idea of a man tamed by his woman. Or maybe they are revealing how they think ordinary couples behave and they're posing as just like you.

President Obama admitted that he benefited politically coming into the public’s eye as a young parent. He and Michelle looked like any other husband and wife struggling to make ends meet:

“We had to figure out how to make a mortgage, payin’ the bills, goin’ to Target, and freakin’ out when . . . the woman who’s looking after your girls while Michelle’s working suddenly decides she’s quittin’.”

You've got to give him some credit for genuineness amid the fakery. He admits he's using this material for political benefit, and the pose is so exaggerated that only a nitwit would fail to see that it's posing. In that sense, we can see that he is an ordinary guy... if the ordinary guy is a self-advantaging faker. But is that what women want? A man who exploits his family life for careerist goals?

The use of children in politics — if you find it persuasive, you'd better sharpen up.

Drudge is doing propaganda here:



But it's very heavy-handed propaganda deployed to critique propaganda. You won't slip into falling for Drudge's propaganda, because it's so obvious. It's ridiculous to equate Obama to Hitler and Stalin, but Obama is using a form of propaganda that should be considered not merely ridiculous but repulsive. For us today to see Hitler and Stalin using children is to easily perceive the absurdity of promoting a political agenda juxtaposing it to a lovely, innocent child.

Who falls for that? No one should! The implicit argument the political leader makes, in all 3 of these pictures, is: I'm making the country good for the sake of the children. The child can't vouch for the policies. The child hasn't competently requested anything. The child is merely a prop representing goodness, innocence, and the future.

I've had a "using children in politics" tag for a while. I've made it part of my work here on the blog to notice this phenomenon, to help you see it, and to build widespread resistance to it. Remember the "children of the future" blaming us? The children taught to chant "Hey hey, ho ho, Scott Walker has got to go"? The children delighted by the "Voter Report Card"?

Drudge links to a collection of "Tyrants Who Have Used Children as Props." It's not hard to dig up these things. All politicians pose with children.



Baby-kissing is a campaign cliché.



It's a way of saying: I'm a real person. I'm normal and empathetic.

No reason to condemn that. It's too late to reject the kind of old-fashioned political kitsch that goes in the same category as eating regional food. You know, what Bob Dylan was singing about in "I Shall Be Free":

Now, the man on the stand he wants my vote
He’s a-runnin’ for office on the ballot note
He’s out there preachin’ in front of the steeple
Tellin’ me he loves all kinds-a people
(He’s eatin’ bagels
He’s eatin’ pizza
He’s eatin’ chitlins
He’s eatin’ bullshit!)

Don't you eat the bullshit!

Is Trump's bombshell old divorce papers of Michelle and Barack Obama?

That's what the Daily Mail is rumoring. Unless there is a revelation of some significant misbehavior, this isn't big at all. It mainly makes Trump look small. And it's not helpful to Romney's cause for Trump to claim the spotlight, in the last 2 weeks of the campaign, over this.

Who cares about the internal workings of a political marriage? I always assume there's some phony PR to it. But the fact is they are together, they've played the public role of married couple, and they have 2 very real little girls who don't deserve to be hurt. And because of that, Trump's news, if this is what it is, will only make moderate, middle-of-the road voters feel compassion for Obama.

Trump should crawl back into his hole right now, before he does any damage.

"I come to them not so much as president as I do as a father and as a husband."

Well, what was he supposed to say? If you think Obama has exploited the Aurora murders, you have to posit an alternative response that would have been both nonexploitative and duly presidential.

ADDED: Romney says Obama did "the right thing." And saying that is also the right thing. What else could he possibly have said?

Now, the candidates need to get back to normal. Life goes on, and their work is with the living.

Obama's cookie controversy.

Asked by a girl to name his favorite Girl Scout cookie, Obama says "“I’ve gotta say that I’m pretty partial to those mint..." and somebody booed....

"I didn’t mean to create controversy here,” Obama responded. “Did you hear, there was somebody booing? What was your choice? Who was booing up there? He had a different opinion. What are you, oatmeal? Peanut butter is quite good too. But I’m going with the mint.”

But isn't it refreshing — as we fight about everything — to fight over something inconsequential? To play-fight. It's like sports and games. Keeps us from getting too frustrated and mean.

IN THE COMMENTS: rhhardin said:

He's lying about the mint. He lies about everything.

Imagine if he told the truth:

Cookies! I don't eat cookies. You see how skinny I am? I was a pudgy kid [like you], and I ate plenty of cookies in my day, especially in those days when I was chooming. But now I smoke the right stuff: good old tobacco cigarettes. The kind of cigarettes that don't make you want to eat. The kind that keep you thin. That's the secret.

I know, you expect me to say "Thin Mints," because that's the favorite Girl Scout cookie, but I'm not going to lie to you. It's ridiculous to use the word "thin" in the name of a cookie. Cookies make you fat. I am skinny. I don't eat cookies. I smoke cigarettes. It's a choice you make, and I decided a long while ago that it was worth the risk, the risk of lung cancer, to control my weight, because weight'll kill you too. Plus, it's hell on your political career. The fat Barack Obama would not be President Obama. That's just the way it is.

And by the way, if I did eat cookies, I'd eat better quality cookies. I mean, I've got an executive pastry chef in the White House. This guy used to be the pastry chef at Montrachet Restaurant in New York City. Can you picture the cookies I have access to?

But good for you, little Girl Scout, good for you trying to better yourself by getting some door-to-door sales experience selling cookies to the bitter small town folks who cling to their Do-si-dos and Tagalongs. As they say in the Girl Scouts: Thank U Berry Munch. Barry Munch... would've been a great nickname for me, back in my chubby, chooming youth.

"George Zimmerman is as black as Obama's son would have been had Obama married a white woman."

Says commenter Hari, at the post "George Zimmerman is 'one-fourth black, four times as black as Warren is Indian, though the New York Times describes him as a "white Hispanic."'"

See also, "Who is this woman?"

Don't you think Genevieve resembles Obama's mother, who was white? Imagine being a heterosexual man and feeling that you weren't supposed to be attracted to a woman who reminds you of your mother. There's this alternate never-to-be-written Obama search-for-identity book titled "Dreams From My Mother."

And "Obama — trying to be 'careful' — addresses the Trayvon Martin killing": "You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon."

***

By the way, I assumed it was conventional wisdom that men tend to feel attracted to women who remind them of their mothers, but I can see that I'm being mocked over at a blog I won't link to for referring to that relatively banal reality. Oh, hell, I don't care: here's the link.

It's really astounding how prissy lefties have become over the years. I remember when folk of the left-wing persuasion loved to delve into Freudian analysis. Now, they're so strait-laced about sex. They hew to politically required points about sexual/reproductive freedom, but there's no curiosity, no depth, no originality, no exploration of ideas. So dull!

"President Obama, who took office pledging to put science ahead of politics, averted a skirmish with conservatives in the nation’s culture wars..."

"... by endorsing his health secretary’s decision to block over-the-counter sales of an after-sex contraceptive pill to girls under age 17."

So begins the New York Times report, and it's hard not to read this as criticizing Obama, who phrased his support Sebelius in terms of his role "as the father of two daughters."

“And as I understand it, the reason Kathleen made this decision was she could not be confident that a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old going into a drugstore should be able — alongside bubble gum or batteries — be able to buy a medication that potentially, if not used properly, could end up having an adverse effect. And I think most parents would probably feel the same way.”...

Odd that all the attention is on the child's health. Who is impregnating 10- and 11-year olds? We're talking about serious crimes! One reason very young girls shouldn't be able to purchase this drug on their own is that it prevents criminal behavior from coming to light. The Times quotes James Trussell, director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University saying “Where is an 11-year-old going to get the $50 to buy this product?” What willful blindness! There is a male in the picture somewhere, a male facing a severe criminal penalty.

The NYT refers to "[s]ome Democrats" offering reasons for "avoiding a divisive debate over teenagers’ sexuality." Teenagers' sexuality? When we talk about the Penn State scandal, there's no discussion of the "teenagers' sexuality." What "divisive debate" are these Democrats talking about?

Obama goes to the bookstore...

... and — using the credit card he only uses about 3 times a year — buys:

1. "The Bayou Trilogy."

Det. Rene Shade, an ex-boxer turned cop...  with a 10-year-old daughter and a killer on his trail. There's poetry in Woodrell's mayhem, each novel—and scene—full of gritty and memorable Cajun details. 

I don't know enough about this to speculate about whether Obama identifies with Shade, but I will note that Sasha is 10. 

2. "Brave New World" ... which is a book I carry around in my iPad and dip into frequently for inspiration. I know Obama is thinking about jobs as he vacations, and perhaps there's something in "Brave New World" about jobs. For example, there's the idea of depriving relieving people of the competition for better jobs and keeping 8/9 of the population in childishly simply low-level jobs where they will be happy:

No strain on the mind or the muscles. Seven and a half hours of mild, unexhausting labour, and then the soma ration and games and unrestricted copulation and the feelies. What more can they ask for? True... they might ask for shorter hours. And of course we could give them shorter hours. Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they wouldn’t. The experiment was tried, more than a century and a half ago. The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day. What was the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma; that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take a holiday from them. The Inventions Office is stuffed with plans for labour-saving processes: Thousands of them... And why don’t we put them into execution? For the sake of the labourers; it would be sheer cruelty to afflict them with excessive leisure.

So... 1 + 2... the boxer and thinking outside the box.

ADDED: Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little soma...

"What if the people who hate government are good at it and the people who love government are bad at it?"

Maureen Dowd observes that "Obama and John Boehner have been completely outplayed by the 'hobbits'":

Consider what the towel-snapping Tea Party crazies have already accomplished. They’ve changed the entire discussion. They’ve neutralized the White House. They’ve whipped their leadership into submission. They’ve taken taxes and revenues off the table. They’ve withered the stock and bond markets. They’ve made journalists speak to them as though they’re John Calhoun and Alexander Hamilton.

That term, "hobbits" (for tea partiers), comes from the Wall Street Journal and John McCain. I'm not sure what hobbits — the actual literary characters — have to do with "towel-snappin" and "whipping" anybody "into submission."

Dowd is not kind to President Obama:

As one Democratic senator complained: “The president veers between talking like a peevish professor and a scolding parent.” (Not to mention a jilted lover.) Another moaned: “We are watching him turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes.”

Obama’s “We must lift ourselves to a higher place” trope doesn’t work on this rough crowd. If somebody at dinner is about to kill you, you don’t worry about his table manners.

Kill you?! The hobbits?

From that Wall Street Journal article:

The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a default crisis or gradual government shutdown will ensue, and the public will turn en masse against . . . Barack Obama. The Republican House that failed to raise the debt ceiling would somehow escape all blame. Then Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced-budget amendment and reform entitlements, and the tea-party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor.

Sorry, but I don't remember all that "Lord of the Rings" stuff enough to understand that. Mordor is a place, right? Yes. "Mordor was the realm of the Dark Lord Sauron. It was a terrible land of darkness and fear, inhabited by Orcs and other evil creatures." Does that make Obama the "Dark Lord"? I understand the Journal's hope that the Tea Party will go back to their modest home towns after they do whatever they think is their mission in Washington, that "terrible land of darkness and fear."

"Don’t call my bluff."

It's what Obama said when he stormed out of the debt-talks yesterday. Let's analyze it. Glenn Reynolds says:

UM, ISN’T THIS A CASE OF CALLING YOUR OWN BLUFF?... I mean, I’m not a big poker player, but I thought the point of a bluff is not to admit it’s a bluff . . . .

UPDATE: “I’d love to play poker with him. Does he know that it’s played with cards?”

I'd say the biggest problem with the poker metaphor is that it characterizes the talks as a game... and, more particularly, a game in which, on any given hand, somebody wins the whole pot. At the point in poker where you make a comment like "Don’t call my bluff," you are trying to lure the other player into making the wrong decision so you can win it all. In the ultra-serious debt negotiations, where supposedly the 2 sides are engaging in give and take to reach a consensus for the sake of the people, it's bad to reveal that you see it as a game and you're trying to win it... for yourself.

Now, there's also the question whether someone who plays poker competently would use the phrase "Don’t call my bluff." Glenn is right that you don't want the other player to know when you are bluffing, but saying "Don’t call my bluff" isn't admitting you're bluffing. Indeed, if you were playing with someone who thought it was, saying "Don’t call my bluff" would be a great way to get them not to fold when you have an excellent hand. You could just as well say the opposite — "Call my bluff" — in the same situation for the same reason. The other player has the same problem he has when you don't say anything at all — when you keep a poker face: He doesn't know what you have.

Think about when someone outside of a poker game might use the phrase "Don’t call my bluff." Meade and I were talking about that and he said: It's something a father would say. "Son, don't call my bluff." In other words: Do you think I'm kidding? Try me. Within some father-son relationships, that's a very powerful move. The father is demanding obedience, and the son is afraid of what will happen if he does not accede to his father's demands. The father isn't saying what the consequence will be, but the fear of the father's power is enough to make the son comply. He can't risk finding out. It's a test of parental authority.

And we know Obama would like us to see him in that fatherly role. He would like to have our compliance because he knows best. Eat your peas.

Indoctrinating children.

I'm working on editing some video I took at the Capitol today, showing the political indoctrination of children. It pains me to see children taught to intone or chant things that should be understood first. When you think of things like that, what comes to mind? Maybe you think of the schoolkids taught to sing "Mmm mmm mmm/Barack Hussein Obama." Maybe you think about making kids say the Pledge of Allegiance, about which Justice Frankfurter wrote:

The wisdom of training children in patriotic impulses by those compulsions which necessarily pervade so much of the educational process is not for our independent judgment. Even were we convinced of the folly of such a measure, such belief would be no proof of its unconstitutionality. For ourselves, we might be tempted to say that the deepest patriotism is best engendered by giving unfettered scope to the most crochety beliefs.... But the courtroom is not the arena for debating issues of educational policy. It is not our province to choose among competing considerations in the subtle process of securing effective loyalty to the traditional ideals of democracy, while respecting at the same time individual idiosyncracies among a people so diversified in racial origins and religious allegiances. So to hold would, in effect, make us the school board for the country. That authority has not been given to this Court, nor should we assume it....

(Details on that case, Gobitis, here.)

I'll have my video up in a separate post soon.

UPDATE: Here.

IN THE COMMENTS: What Irene thinks of is "The old country."

President Obama's back to school speech contained blatant lies...

... and if there were any students not bright enough to notice that they were hearing lies, the lies, in their particular cases, were, ironically, bigger lies. Check it out:

Nobody gets to write your destiny but you. Your future is in your hands. Your life is what you make of it. And nothing -- absolutely nothing -- is beyond your reach, so long as you’re willing to dream big, so long as you’re willing to work hard. So long as you’re willing to stay focused on your education, there is not a single thing that any of you cannot accomplish, not a single thing. I believe that.

If you believe that, you are so dumb that your chances of controlling your own destiny are especially small. But it's absurd to tell kids that if only they dream big, work hard, and get an education, they can have anything they want. Do you know what kind of dream job kids today have?  A recent Marist poll showed that 32% would like to be an actor/actress. 29% want to be a professional athlete.  13% want to be President of the United States.  That's not going to happen.

Even young people with more modest dreams — like getting a decent law job after getting good grades at an excellent law school — are not getting what they want. To say "nothing -- absolutely nothing -- is beyond your reach" is a blatant lie, and Barack Obama knows that very well. The assertion "I believe that" is on the level of Tommy Flanagan, the Pathological Liar, adding "Yeahhh! That's the ticket!"

And even if economic times were not so miserable, Barack Obama's political philosophy would not be "Your future is in your hands. Your life is what you make of it." That's the sort of thing Rush Limbaugh likes to say. If Obama believed that, he'd be all about reducing the role of government and unleashing private enterprise. He'd be a big right winger. Does he look at a poor person and say, his life is what he made it? Of course not.

Obama, speaking of his family's financial situation: "We’re not that far removed from what most Americans are going through."

From an inane interview with ABC with consumer reporter Elizabeth Leamy, who makes a lame effort to convey the impression that she's going to enlighten viewers about the new financial reform law. Leamy exclaims that Americans don't know what's in the law, as if she's about to extract that information from the President. Spoiler: She's not.

Laughing, she hefts the 2,000 pages and shakes them at the President, and he laughs too and jokes "Don't hurt yourself." She laughs more. Ha ha. Isn't funny?! She recites a seemingly memorized question that ends with "Persuade me that this law matters to ordinary Americans," and then she lets the President gets away with simply asserting the purpose of the law: consumers will have lots of new "security and protection." But what's in the 2,000 pages that gives "security and protection"? Obama doesn't have to say.

Leamy cites some examples of "unintended consequences," and Obama looks a little uncomfortable but quickly plugs in a sound bite about how consumers are going to get "more information." Why is that an answer? There will be unintended consequences, but somewhere, in writing, you will get told about them? And that's it for the subject of what's in the law, as the interview moves on to whether Obama will appoint Elizabeth Warren — Leamy calls her "Elizabeth Warden" — to head the new agency.

At this point, less than 3 minutes into a 6 1/2 minute segment — did ABC edit out some more substantive material? — Leamy slips into the subject of what it all means for Obama and his family.

"What are you and the First Lady teaching your daughters about money?" That has nothing to do with the 2,000 page law that we've learned nothing about. We're into the touchy-feely, news-for-women part of the morning show. For the first time in the interview, Obama compliments Leamy on her question: "You know, it's a great question." Ha. Translation: Oh, good, we're through the hard part of the interview. Obama says that the girls get an allowance and "may be able to earn some of their own money babysitting." How could that possibly happen? How many Secret Service agents would have to come along? Anyway, Leamy is reduced to giggling and raising her hand in a silly, girly "pick me!" gesture as if Malia or Sasha would babysit her kids.

Leamy asks about Obama's own retirement fund. "Can you feel the pain?" Oh, lord, does she  think she's interviewing Bill Clinton and that Obama would emote "I feel your pain"? I imagine he's thinking: You know, that's a stupid question. Do you have any idea what a fountain of wealth I am? If I ever ran short, I could hire a ghostwriter and do another autobiography or 2.

But he has to be nice and he has to take the political opportunity. He rambles through an answer that includes the quote I put in the post title. Yes, we laughed when he said that, but, seriously, what was he supposed to say? It's Leamy's fault for not asking serious questions about how the new law would work and for indulging herself and disrespecting her viewers with mushy family stuff about the Obamas.

Barack Obama plays peek-a-boo with a child.

For Halloween, the First Lady is a leopard and the President is "a middle-aged dad."

"The first lady was dressed as a leopard, with a smear of eyeliner, fuzzy ears and a spotted orange-and-black top. The president was dressed as a middle-aged dad, with a black cardigan, checkered shirt and sensible brown slacks. Together they handed out treats on the steps of the north portico of the White House last night, sending some trick-or-treaters into fits of shock and joy."

But the President is a middle-aged dad. And how does leopard go with middle-aged dad anyway?

The First Family got way more kids coming to the door than Meade and I did. They got 2,600! Did we even get 26? We did this routine in which Meade, wearing a mask and werewolf gloves would attack me while  I was giving out the candy — traditional Milky Way bars. The Obamas gave "a plastic baggy containing White House M&Ms, an orange sugar cookie in the shape of the residence, and clumps of desiccated apricots, apples and papayas." No word on whether they did a leopard-attacks-middle-aged-dad routine.

Should the President be insulting pop stars?

Obama called Kanye West a "jackass." Which he is, but what business is it of the President's?

The Bush twins, Barbara and Jenna, taught the Obama girls, Sasha and Malia, how to jump on the White House beds.

First Lady Laura Bush verified the story, and added that there was a real trick to proper White House bed-jumping: "They're really tall beds; you need to get a running start."

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In some families, you can jump on the beds, and in some, they tell you no jumping on the beds. Both the Bushes and the Obamas allow bed jumping. Or, no, maybe Barack and Michelle are the no-jumping-on-the-beds kind of parents. And Malia and Sasha will say but Jenna and Barbara jumped on the beds -- they showed us how to jump on the beds. And Barack and Michelle will be all: The American people voted for change. No more of the failed policies of the Bush years. No more jumping on the beds.