When my clock radio switches on in the morning and I hear the newscaster on NPR talking about President-elect Obama, I smile and get out of bed in a blissed-out mood. Reading The Times with breakfast, I enjoy tracking the cabinet appointments, the Great Puppy Debate, the transition from the Bush to Obama White House (I admit I’m going to be a sucker for any and every detail I can find about Michelle and those two adorable girls moving in).
But then, when I sit down to my computer, the letdown descends. No updates on Sarah Palin’s latest shopping sprees or bloopers. No Sarah Silver videos or YouTube replays from SNL. Worst of all, my boyfriend Barack has stopped writing! I admit it, I’m totally crushed out on the guy. He’s articulate and smart and has a killer smile and looks terrific in jeans and that black jacket. And for a while there, I thought he had a thing for me, too. All those emails and letters! What, now that he’s gotten what he wanted, he’s going to just move on and move up? Does anyone else feel this way, as if you actually know the guy, he was your roommate’s best friend in college, but now he’s moving on to better things and you’re never going to get to hang out with him again?
On the other hand, I love knowing that I have a friend in high places. I can’t remember ever feeling as if the country were being run by someone like me, as if, instead of being some misfit outsider, I’m actually represented by the person in the White House. (Maybe this isn’t that much different from the way conservative voters felt voting for George W. because they could imagine inviting him to a barbecue or sharing a beer with him at their favorite bar, or, God help us, voting for Sarah Palin because they could imagine standing next to her at the rink as they cheered on their hockey-playing sons.) Not that I’m anywhere near as smart or talented or photogenic as Barack Obama. Not that I could ever work as hard as he worked to organize and run such a powerful campaign. But as Nicholas Kristof said in his column in The Times a few days ago, Obama is our first openly intellectual president. Although he got labeled as an elitist early in the campaign, he managed to pull off his election anyway, in part because most voters couldn’t imagine that such a cool black guy could also be an egghead. Of course, most of us who are eggheads know that unless you were born into a family of intellectuals and were aware from an early age that once you got to college, you would never need to get along with regular people but could hang out with other geeks and intellectuals, you worked hard to develop camouflage, such as an ability to play hoop with the other guys.
At any rate, even if I don’t really know Barack, I know a lot of people who do (he lives only six blocks from my son, who’s a freshman at University of Chicago), and I’m hoping that Barack will continue to use his address book to keep us informed as to what’s going on in his administration, to ask us for our opinions and support. How cool would that be, getting an email from the President of the United States and writing him back? Months and months ago, I was eating dinner with a college student in Gainesville, Florida, and she told me that she was voting for Obama rather than Hillary in the primaries because Hillary made her feel as if she (Hillary) could take care of everything on her own while Barack seemed to be saying that he needed her, the student, to help him fix the country and improve everyone’s lives. She said that if Obama won, she would try to find a way to volunteer, to do something to help America. That’s how I’m feeling, too. All I need is to get another few emails, giving me a push and telling me what to do.
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