On Center Stage, a Candidate Letting His Confidence Show : "a touch of cockiness"

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: Reporter’s Notebook
On Center Stage, a Candidate Letting His Confidence Show
By MICHAEL POWELL
Published: February 24, 2008

AUSTIN, Tex. — Barack Obama has a Barcalounger manner about him these days, padding about those campaign stages like a man commanding his den. Mr. Obama is on an electoral roll, polls show him pulling closer in Ohio and Texas, crowds show him the Big Celebrity Love, what’s not to like? A touch of cockiness is discernable in his manner now; he is like a gambler convinced his every dice roll will come up double sixes.

His rally in Austin, Tex., on Friday evening fitted his hoped-for-narrative. Fifteen-thousand people, maybe 20,000, jam into the streets in front of the soaring State Capitol, with the usual Obama-as-electoral-rave giddiness. University of Texas guys with painted faces flash the longhorn symbol with their fingers, red-white-and-blue beach balls bounce through the crowd, a band plays “Obama-alujah” and thousands stand in the chill night ready to be rapturous....

***

This audience offers no hint of those oh-so-picky folks in New Hampshire. These are paws up, gooey in love, read his books and quote the passages back at you voters. The other day a Texas crowd cheered his sneeze. Charles Fannin and Katy Orell, two fiftysomething white professionals, hang over the rail on Congress Street, a blanket wrapped around them. Why Obama? What do you know of him? “Well, both of us have read his books, so we got to know him as a person,” Ms. Orell said. “And we realized how much simpler change is than we thought. He could lead our nation in a way no one has seen.”

The trouble with electoral fevers is that they can burn out. Mr. Obama himself has written of this risk with an out-of-body coolness. “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views,” Mr. Obama wrote in “The Audacity of Hope, his I’m-running-for-president book. “As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them.”...

***

So cool to be so lionized; one might not guess that off stage Mr. Obama can act like an elusive starlet of late. When the press approaches, he rations words like gold. He held a brief news conference on Saturday to respond to a passionate attack from Mrs. Clinton, who accused him of distorting her position on trade. But that was his first nonscripted encounter in five days....

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/us/politics/24obama.html

[Botany]

1. Barack Obama has a Barcalounger manner about him ...

:wtf:

[DeepModem Mom]

2. LOL, Botany! You're the best. nt

[libbygurl]

3. Indeed.

“I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views,” Mr. Obama wrote in “The Audacity of Hope, his I’m-running-for-president book. “As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them.”

That's what's so worrisome to me about the guy. What does he really stand for? Unlike his massive hordes of adoring fans, I am (strangely?) immune to his alleged 'charisma'. His speeches bore me to tears. The facile, hackneyed words sound like Bush speak, only delivered with more articulation. Still, a hollowness is all I perceive in him and his campaign.

Of course, I am almost always wary of huge, mass movements. It gets scary to me when millions show such disturbingly worshipful adoration for one person who has really shown no genuinely persuasive evidence of any will to 'change the usual way of doing things in DC'. Hell, the guy IS part of DC, has been there for a few years now - what change did he really foster while he was there, while being a non-noticeable part of the Inside-the-Beltway crowd? Why does he pretend now to be this 'Mr Smith Goes to Washington'-type of outsider determined to 'change' the culture of Washington? Good grief.

Thanks for the heads up on this, DMM!