Straits of the Union

My boyfriend, who is in every way a better judge, arbiter, and possessor of taste than I am, and who therefore pays exactly no attention to politics except when forced into uncomfortable proximity by my own retrograde little fetish, asked best: "Why does he talk like that?"

While I was always bothered by Obama's fatuous grandiloquence back in the aspirational days of his campaign, it seems to me in retrospect an almost charming affectation, like Bush's phony drawl--a put-on so regularly worn that it becomes habit, and what, after all, is authenticity but the habituation of the self to its own autobiographical invention?  If he never achieved anything even remotely resembling actually compelling oratory, he managed, nevertheless, to do a pretty good impression of an actual orator.  If not a great performer, then at least a competent mimic.

But having taken office, he forsook pantomime for pedagogy, and every word he uttered, even when he attempted to crank up the emotional amplitude, came out clipped, sour, and disapproving; the giddy televangelism of his campaign was replaced by a pale parson right out of Samuel Butler; the change is especially glaring when he attempts to work in the word "folks," which has evidently wholly supplanted the tired "people" as the collective noun of choice in the political lexicon, though Barack Obama saying "folks want to get back to work" is like Bill Moyers saying "truck nutz on my F-150" or Tim Tebow saying "I am a heterosexual"--not so much inauthentic (see above) as implausible given the observable characteristics.

Did he say anything interesting?  Jobs, mortgages, jobs, business, taxes.  I seem to recall some generic bellicosity toward Iran and I definitely remember hearing that hoary Albrightism, "the indispensable nation."  I have always enjoyed that phrase.  It suggests a single, sad bag of Cheetohs resting lazily between the coil and the glass, refusing to fall into the hopper, and a single, sad, very fat man banging a futile palm against the other side of the vending machine.