When she told him she loved him, he replied, “Thank you.”
Op-Ed Columnist
Seeking Original Bliss
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 12, 2012
WASHINGTON
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
In 1983, Genevieve Cook brought a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream to a
Christmas party in the East Village. She left with 22-year-old Barack
Obama’s phone number.
The lithe Australian assistant teacher at a Brooklyn grade school was soon in a romance with the lithe future president.
In the diary entries she shared with David Maraniss, whose new
biography, “Barack Obama: The Story,” is excerpted in the June Vanity
Fair, Cook presages Obama’s relationship with bedazzled American voters:
passion cooling as he engages in a cerebral seminar and a delight in
doubt.
Sunday, Jan. 22, 1984: “A sadness, in a way, that we are both so questioning that original bliss is dissipated.”
Thursday, Jan. 26: “Distance, distance, distance, and wariness.”
Saturday, Feb. 25: “His warmth can be deceptive. Tho he speaks sweet
words and can be open and trusting, there is also that coolness — and I
begin to have an inkling of some things about him that could get to me.”
When she told him she loved him, he replied, “Thank you.”
President Obama is still a cool customer. He has a rare gift: Even when
he does the right thing, by the time he does it and in the way he does
it, he drains away excitement and robs himself of the admiration he
would otherwise be due.
Why doesn’t he just do the exhilarating thing immediately? Why does he
always have to be dragged kicking and screaming to principle? Not
everything is a calculation.
His embrace of gay marriage was not a profile in courage. It was good,
better than continued “evolving,” but not particularly brave. He has
been in office three and a half years and he is running for re-election,
trying to bring back the thrill with a lot of constituencies and donors
who felt let down by his temporizing. Who knows how long he might have
kept evolving, while his advisers gamed it out, if Joe Biden, Arne
Duncan and Shaun Donovan hadn’t forced his hand by speaking out in such
an unabashed way in support of same-sex marriage.
Obama told ABC’s Robin Roberts that Biden “got out a little over his skis.”
The controlling Obama team did not like the fact that the uncontrollable
Biden’s forthright statement to David Gregory about being “comfortable”
with gay marriage left the president looking like an equivocator, once
more lagging in the leadership department.
So Obama aides began anonymously trashing the vice president, not a
pretty spectacle given how loyal Biden is to the president.
They told Politico that Biden’s getting the jump on Obama was
particularly annoying given that Biden had backed the Defense of
Marriage Act as a senator in the 1990s while Obama “has actually taken
steps to repeal the Clinton-era law that defined marriage as something
that could only take place between a man and a woman.”
“And it chafed Obama’s team,” Politico said, “that Biden had, at times,
privately argued for the president to hold off on his support of
marriage equality to avoid a backlash among Catholic voters in
battleground states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania.”
Biden felt compelled to apologize to the president for inadvertently nudging him to do the right thing.
David Plouffe, the senior adviser, Jim Messina, the campaign manager,
and others in the petty Obama sewing circle might want to remember that
the opponent is Mitt Romney, not Joe Biden.
The vice president was his usual sentimental self on “Meet the Press”
last Sunday, praising the influence of “Will & Grace.” He recounted
the story of meeting the two children of a gay couple at a political
powwow three weeks ago in Los Angeles, and saying about the two dads, “I
wish every American could see the look of love those kids had in their
eyes for you guys, and they wouldn’t have any doubt about what this is
about.”
The men told me that Biden had bonded with the kids, bringing them
stuffed dogs and showing them pictures of his family on his phone.
President Spock, on the other hand, spoke at the George Clooney
fund-raiser and called gay marriage “a logical extension of what America
is supposed to be.”
In the end, Obama had to rip off the Band-Aid and take a stand, because
if his campaign depends on painting Romney as a bundle of ambiguous
beliefs, the first black president can’t be ambiguous himself on a civil
rights issue. Not to mention that big bucks from gay backers will be
needed to replace the lost bucks from alienated Wall Street donors.
The gay community, forgiving all prevarication, was electrified. As
the “Will & Grace” co-creator Max Mutchnick put it on the CBS
morning show, there are now little boys who can dream of both being a
president and marrying a president.
As Obama is reminded of what it feels like to generate excitement, what
it feels like to lift the spirits of a demoralized country by using the
bully pulpit, maybe he can start occasionally blurting out something he
feels strongly about.
It’s humanizing.
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