Obama's Indelicate Exposure

Friday, March 27, 2009
by Suzanne Fields

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. the rest