It’s Getting Creepy Out There V: Nightmare On Obama Street
If you’re in need of a fresh reality check on just how downright creepy the Obamist media cult has become, there’s no better example than this, from today’s San Jose (California) Mercury News:
The political contrasts between Obama, who arrives in Washington with the largest electoral plurality of any Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and George W. Bush, who will slink out of office with history’s most abysmal approval ratings, are stark. But as the nation’s first African-American president, and the first post-baby boom chief executive, Obama will doubtless influence Americans in ways never seen before.
Jolt of vitality
“It’s going to be fascinating to see how that spins off in terms of movies that people watch, music that becomes more fashionable, even the clothes that people wear,” says Chris Lehane, who worked in the Clinton White House and is a close confidante of Obama’s expected nominee for secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. “When you move from one era to another, you usually have all these cultural issues that accompany the transition.”
Just as 43-year-old John F. Kennedy brought an electrifying jolt of vitality ‚Äî or “vigah,” as he called it ‚Äî when he introduced the country to its new first family in 1961, much of the excitement about the Obamas swirls around 7-year-old Sasha and 10-year-old Malia, the first pair of young children to move into the White House since Caroline and John Kennedy Jr. Even hardened Washington veterans still talk mistily about those touch football games at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port.
The prospect of having a youthful first family again in the White House has set the nation’s capital aflutter with talk of the torch being passed to a new generation, a whole new black-inflected White House of Style. Robin Givhan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning style writer for The Washington Post, has referred to the adorable Obama brood as “Camelot with a tan.”
“They’re good-looking, stylish people, with attractive children,” says Letitia Baldrige, White House social secretary to Jackie Kennedy and a lifelong Republican. “And Americans like attractive people. They just do. The Obamas are going to bring a whole new style, start a whole new national conversation. And it’s going to be a wonderful thing for the country.”
‘The Obama Show’
Obamastyle is already taking hold in the capitals of fashion, media and music. If the TV audience for Obama’s campaign infomercial (34 million viewers) and the first postelection interview he and Michelle gave to the CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes” (25.1 million viewers, the biggest audience for any prime time show this season) were treated as a series, “The Obama Show” would be the top-rated program of the fall.
On Election Night ‚Äî with 71 million people watching on TV, another ratings smash ‚Äî former Bush adviser Karl Rove asserted that the Obamas will not be America’s first “first family” of color. “We’ve had an African-American first family for many years in different forms,” Rove said on Fox News. “When ‘The Cosby Show’ was on, that was America’s family. It wasn’t a black family. It was America’s family.”
The Huxtables first appeared on NBC in 1984, midway between the gathering of the Kennedy and Obama clans at the White House. By presenting an intact black family as successful, and unthreatening to a broad swath of white America, Bill Cosby’s hugely popular TV series helped build a bridge for the Obamas to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., says psychiatrist Alvin F. Poussaint of Harvard Medical School, an African-American and the script consultant for the program.
“That show represented a breakthrough in sending the message that we are just like all other American families, that we have the same concerns for our children,” Poussaint says. “It was a black family that was different from most of the portrayals people had seen on TV before.
Here, it deteriorates further:
One way Cliff Huxtable differed sharply from the characters on those shows also happens to be one of the big differences between George W. Bush and Barack Obama: their skill using the language.
As Andy Borowitz noted last week on Huffington Post, Obama “has broken with a tradition established over the past eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences. … Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama’s appearance on CBS’s ‘60 Minutes’ “… witnessed the president-elect’s unorthodox verbal tick, which had Mr. Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually every time he opened his mouth.”
In other ways great and small, what comes out of the new president’s mouth ‚Äî and evidently out of his wife’s closet ‚Äî will likely make the Obamas the center of attention no matter where you look the next four years. Michelle Obama’s election night dress ‚Äî a black and red number by designer Narciso Rodriguez ‚Äî ignited a fashionista firestorm worthy of any Oscar-night red-carpet controversy, a designer dust-up that was taken by some fashion followers as an encouraging sign of life in the capital.
“When was the last time people even cared what the first lady wore, and were dissecting it?” asks Pamela Keough, author of the book “Jackie Style,” which unraveled the mystique of Camelot’s high-threadcount queen. “That hasn’t happened since Jackie.”During the campaign, Michelle Obama appeared on “The View” in an off-the-rack outfit she bought for under $150 at the aptly named chain White House/Black Market. Within 24 hours of her appearance, the dress had sold out nationwide.
Until now, Oprah Winfrey was the only black woman in America who has exerted that sort of powerful influence in matters of style, taste and professional aspiration. But with her confident parenting style, political acumen and that strand of Jackie power pearls, Michelle Obama is about to become the “O” the country looks to first.
Michelle Obama has also disarmed the fashion world by frequently going sleeveless. “Forget her husband, I want her arms,” Keough says. “She has gorgeous, gorgeous arms. I think we better start doing push-ups and getting our arms in shape, because sleeveless is back.”
All the early attention to what the Obamas are wearing suggests a hunger for glamour ‚Äî even, or maybe especially, if it’s done on a budget ‚Äî following an era of staid pantsuits worn by Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush. Nancy Reagan’s expensive designer wear was nice if you happened to be a size 2.
Hip Lincoln bedroom
On the social front, longtime Washington hands are anticipating the return of glittering state dinners ‚Äî Obamastyle, of course ‚Äî that should go a long way toward banishing the gloom that’s lingered over the town during George W. Bush’s ghastly second term. At times, the White House incumbent has felt less like an occupant than occupier.
“Forget the Oscars,” Keough says. “I think state dinners are going to be big national social events. With the Obamas, there’s clearly a renewed sense of optimism and style, just a sense of joy that we’re back from the wilderness.”
Amazingly, that’s just an excerpt from this work of art.
It’s one thing to support a candidate and wish him well once he has achieved victory, but this is positively, stunningly creepy coverage.
Will it be possible to deprogram these people? Could modern medical treatment save them?
And with these weirdos in control, what happens to our country?
5 comments November 23rd, 2008