Girls outside our gym nowadays seem to be occupied with Barack Obama's campaign. I see them holding up posters, hawking T-shirts, screaming praises. They usually begin at evening, when the day has wound down to the extent that we are at our most vulnerable. They pepper us with feminine entreaties. "Are you an Obama fan?" "Care for a bumper sticker?" Obama -- knowing his guile -- may have picked these women himself: prepossessing, but not to an intimidating degree; unassuming, but also forceful; blonde, but not platinum. We cannot help but fall prey to their croons.
Or can we? Obama has apparently spent a lot of money this past week trying to woo the middle-class Texan. It's clear he wants to win; it is also clear that he knows he will. How else can we explain the larger-than-life-size posters that herald B.H.O as the symbolism of hope/peace/change? How else can we explain the sudden increase in rhetoric? How else can we explain the demagoguery?
I am wary of such bombast. I do not think that Obama represents a significant improvement over H.R.C, and any advantage he did have before Texas was purely oratorical. The advent of this new-look, bejewelled Barack only convinces me that he may not after all be what we thought he was. It is one thing to base the entire first half of your presidential campaign on an understated intellectuality, and it is quite another to sustain this sensibility through the no doubt hubris-heightening final stages. Whether Mr. O is a victim of the circumstances, or whether he is (and always has been) acting his part, is not clear. What is clear though, is that he is at heart just another politician; subject to the vagaries of public opinion, and swaying like a bent tree under its influence.
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