Like the beat beat beat of the tom-tom, like the tick tick tock of the clock, like the drip drip drip of the raindrops, a voice within me keeps repeating, Obama Obama Obama.
With all due apologies to the author, Cole Porter's lyrics of "Night and Day" make a point lost on the president. No matter where he is, the Oval Office or Jay Leno's studio set, addressing Congress or holding up traffic in a motorcade on his way to a PTA meeting, the president is not an ordinary citizen. Like it or not, those days are behind him. The private man and the public man become as one in a president. What he does, says, or doesn't say or doesn't do, he does it before an audience.
Obama goes out of his way to seek a celebrity's attention, and he's still in his first hundred days. When he makes an off-hand jest about his bowling score and the Special Olympics -- the sort of tasteless attempt at dark humor that anyone might make within a tight circle of good friends -- the whole world hears it, and the pundits can't wait to leap. We should all "lighten up," but if a president can't resist going on television to banter with a comedian, he ought to leave the comedy to the comedian, who gets paid for sarcasm and irony.
It's a shame that the eye of the camera tempts presidents to try to be the entertainer in chief. Michelle might emulate Bess Truman after Harry couldn't resist playing the piano with Lauren Bacall in fetching repose atop the upright. Mr. Truman, on a night out at the National Press Club, was only doing what any red-blooded man might, but Bess was not amused. She told him it simply wasn't dignified, that he was definitely not to "play it again, Harry."
Dignity, of course, isn't what it used to be. Indeed, the concept seems faintly quaint in an era when almost anything goes. As comfortable as the president may look on the CBS show "60 Minutes," with Jay Leno or in a primetime press conference, he's spending valuable emotional and intellectual capital with the relentless exposure in the modern media. Confident and cool, he's nevertheless beginning to look a lot like a man afflicted with the hubris of show biz.
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