Inauguration Night. I have two remote controls, a bag of Smartfood, a gallon of aspertame. Really psyched. I’m eagerly channel surfing the coverage, CNN, CBC, CPAC, CTV. I know what the game is. I am to fall. I should fall. I want to fall. Last summer I was so thrilled watching the Democratic Convention. I had tears watching Wrigley Stadium on November 4^th. But something slows me now. I’m a wallflower. I can’t join in with Will.I.am’s tears tonight. I’ve come down with something and I believe it’s a case of Post Republican Stress Disorder.

I call a girlfriend I know will be watching. “It came on all of a sudden,” I tell her. “I just don’t think I can make the jump. Eight years of Bush and I may be too cynical.” She tells me to give it up. Face it. The Obamas Might Be Cool. I know it but I just can’t do it.

The symptoms of PRSD include a feeling of reeling from 30 years of presidents past. Feverish euphoria and suspicion alternate. You’ll ask, “can I trust again?” But, be gentle on yourself. After all it’s been awhile. Carter was the last president you could trust. For 30 years, the least cool person on earth was always the President.

I reel off to the first, the Neighborhood Ball. The trouble is I sniff the air and it smells, it feels, well . . . twee.

The Neighborhood, referenced in his speech as the place he started community organizing, does look awfully rich and white. Isn’t there a crack team of Democratic Party PR yuppies somewhere in the background organizing all this? JFK and Bill had a lot of Hollywood hangers-on. Can Obama keep his distance? Didn’t Obama campaign on the fact the Washington world is as phony as Hollywood’s?

Now the disease has you oscillating again. It’s not just his blackness that makes Obama cool. He’s an Ivy League feminist married to the same. Barack introduces Michelle at each ball with yet another message in the jokes: “I want to dance with the one that brung me: the one who does everything I do, except backwards and in high heels.” Bam. Totally cool. He isn’t threatened by feminism. He brings it. I even forgive him for forgetting some parts of the joke at several of the balls.

He is delivering a message and The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart makes the point in his own coverage of Inauguration Night. One of his “correspondents,” Samantha Bee, announces, “eight years of frat boy culture in Washington is done” and Stewart responds with ironic frat boy teasings of the double entendre kind.

The presidency hasn’t been cool since JFK. Not since JFK have we seen both “hot” (“good looking” and “sexy” are terms used at CNN) and “cool” together in one First Couple. Their handlers have pushed their marital romance out front and centre just as Jack and Jackie’s was. Unfortunately, according to Seymour Hersch’s interviews with JFK’s Secret Service eight years ago, Jack found hundreds of targets much hotter, constantly. Jackie found panties in her bed all the time that weren’t hers. Bimbos were whisked in by conspiring press and secret service alike. It is a delicate fact that the highly saleable Camelot marriage was just smoke and mirrors. Their daughter is, I don’t know, still alive to, I dunno, protect. Sooooo…. in fact the Obamas are the Hottest First Couple Ever.

I’m enjoying the info on Michelle’s designer, the looping montages of her sophisticated fashion sense, grace, and beauty, in the past two years. This isn’t a marriage of convenience or political expedience, or one in which you have to pity the woman. (The Reagans were probably passionate about one another too.) Look at Barack and Michelle during the ten dances, we’re asked to feel, while the First Couple sashays. They obviously have sex.

You’ve entered the illness. The brain won’t stop. It cries, “hey, for a political party that succeeded in convincing even the most pro-Hilary feminist, Gloria Steinem, that we should set aside the Gross-Out Factor that Bill Clinton threw into the ether, there seems, this Inauguration Night, a lot of well-staged focus on the marriage, the romance.” Didn’t the Democratic Party, after the revelations of JFK’s and Bill Clinton’s “Zippergates,” once convince us that the condition of the marriage of the President was no indicator of his character as President?

Don’t get me wrong. I’d love to fall hard and fast. Obama, a little nerdy at the same time, is cool. Everyone thinks it. Even Anderson Cooper calls him cool. The most respected of CNN’s anchors recounts Barack telling his 9th band that night, when he wanted to start the First Couple’s “At Last”, to “Kick it!” “’Kick it’ isn’t something we’ve known a president to say before,” Cooper marvels. Even Anderson Cooper has drunk the purple koolaid! He’s got the first stage of the bug and it’s PRSD.

Rising fever. I see it in Cooper, and in me, and it seems harmless enough. Gee, Inauguration Day is so cool, so thorough in its planning, in its coordination. A critical thought arises: Gee, more famous stars are appearing than those that are spangled on their banner. Unhealthy thoughts arise: “Isn’t it dangerous for a population to be so universally approving of any leader? Isn’t mass hysteria, the screaming of the billions of fans, rather dangerous in the history books about big world leaders?” If you hear yourself wonder like this, stop. Don’t panic. Gradually you will experience a slow-building paralysis of the “critical” glands, and you’ll be out of the woods.

The oscillation indicates the presence of the PRSD’s accompanying symptom, ‘cognitive dissonance’, a term from back in Psych 100. Your brain is confused because the old belief has to take in the new one, and they aren’t yet in proper relation to one another in your values system.

Obama even dances cool. I had thought for sure, given his general gravity and posture, that he’d be dancing what Billy Crystal, in When Harry Met Sally, called the “White Man’s Overbite,” so I am pleasantly surprised by his freestyle dancing at the Neighborhood Ball. Candy Crowley, asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper to comment on their dancing, didn’t balk at the frivolity of the question, and gave a generous review of their dancing and mutual affection, and what makes their relationship work.

I think that’s nice. If it turns out I’m wrong you can find me easily. I’ll be over in intensive care. Nursing my disease. Hope it gets no worse. They say it easily can morph into a much worse syndrome: Post Republican Toxic Shock.

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Tags: barack obama, inauguration, white house

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Foreign Affairs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.