Posted by JumpyPants
As someone who scratches out a living casting feelings into words, I feel a certain kinship with the president-elect, and though I would not deign to compare my skill as a writer with his, I take a modicum of pride in the fact that it's a gift and gig we share. I will go further to suggest that having a president who knows how to write better than most people will go a long way to inspiring a nation of school children, and sets a pretty inspiring bar for them. I gave my 11-year old African-American nephew Dreams from My Father for his birthday this year, and I think he was more excited about that than all the Nintendo DS games he got.
The excerpt below is from the Newsweek article Bob's been praising, with good reason, and in it, Obama acknowledges, with typical candor, his writing skill and also the struggle he has with the bullshit that accompanies American political campaigning in the current fallen age. This events in the excerpt took place in the early days of the primary campaign, and I'm pretty grateful that Obama never got "better" at being like everyone else, just better at changing the whole stupid game while never losing himself.
"I'm still wrapping my head around doing this in a way that I think the other candidates just aren't. There's a certain ambivalence in my character that I like about myself. It's part of what makes me a good writer, you know? It's not necessarily useful in a presidential campaign."These candid remarks were taped at a debate-prep session at a law firm in Washington. The tape of Obama's back-and-forth with his advisers, provided to NEWSWEEK by an attendee, is a remarkably frank and revealing record of what the candidate was really thinking when he took the stage with his opponents.On the tape, after Obama's rueful remark about the mixed blessings of his detached nature, there is cross talk and laughter, and then Axelrod cracks, "You can save that for your next memoir."Obama continues: "When you have to be cheerful all the time and try to perform and act like [the tape is unclear; Obama appears to be poking fun at his opponents], I'm sure that some of it has to do with nerves or anxiety and not having done this before, I'm sure. And in my own head, you know, there's—I don't consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. When you're going into something thinking, 'This is not my best …' I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, 'You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.' Instead of being appropriately [the tape is garbled]. So when Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, 'Well, I planted a bunch of trees.' And he says, 'I'm talking about personal.' What I'm thinking in my head is, 'Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I f–––ing changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective'."