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I keep thinking about our president’s hilarious Special Olympics remark on “The Tonight Show,” and I’m actually taking it personally. I’m not developmentally disadvantaged, exactly. Or mentally challenged. But I do kind of suck at bowling (not as bad as Obama). Plus, I’m lousy at tennis, embarrassing at basketball, can’t catch a pop fly to save my life, never played actual golf, etc. I have recently come to realize that I hate skiing. I used to be halfway decent at ping pong, but probably not anymore. Last week, when I filled out an NCAA bracket, I did so purely in order to give one of my colleagues $10 and perhaps avoid being banished from the country.
I do like beer, support Obama, and like most Americans would like to have a beer with our generally personable commander-in-chief. But I thought we got rid of the frat boy in January. Turns out Obama is another towel-snapper, who’s spent too much time in front of ESPN. A guy so competitive and accustomed to coming out on top that one lousy bowling frame is still gnawing at him months later?so much that he’s got to trash a bunch of retarded kids to soothe his wounded ego. Isn’t this the same impulse that got us into Iraq?
It’s being called a gaffe, but the joke is actually a rare window into a part of the man’s psychology we hadn’t seen before, his deep insecurity. What’s shocking about this isn’t that he said it?the heir to Camelot, yuk-yukking about the Kennedy family’s most sainted legacy?but that he thought it. The man’s self-deprecation is usually so artfully deployed, it seems genuine, or nearly so. True, Michelle’s comment about his bad breath had a Coneheads, trying-way-too-hard-to-appear-human quality. But this quip is more telling, a twist of the kaleidoscope that casts the president in a truly unflattering light, reminiscent in its off-handed cruelty of Bush’s mockery of Karla Faye Tucker (“Please, don’t kill me…”), the woman he’d put to death while governor of Texas. Guys, they only call it the bully pulpit.
What this ugly little moment revealed is that while Obama understands the political uses of modesty, he hasn’t quite come to terms with his own shortcomings, maybe his own humanity. Dude, it’s only bowling. If you save the world, I think we can accept a few gutter balls. And if we ever do have a beer together, please don’t bring up the Big Dance.
2 Comments
It might be even worse – what if he planned it, it was a calculated move to prove himself a “guy’s guy” and win over a few more of his opponents? He did after all call the Special Olympics head to apologize for it before it even aired, no? Coulda been a slip of the tongue or coulda been a ploy from the outset. Jay’s pretty irreverent and appeals to frat boys, often has them sitting in the front row, so he might have been pandering to Jay’s base.
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