He may not have healed the planet or made the oceans recede yet, but Barack Obama has definitely brought sexy back for some fawning lefty writers. Just check out these headlines: “Have the Obamas Spawned a Sex Frenzy?” and “How long has it been since a first couple seemed to want each other?”
The American left – particularly women writers on the American left – have conjured up the idea that the relationship between President Barack Obama and his wife is somehow novel. Stacy Schiff of New York Magazine writes “…only now are we discovering what a functioning marriage between equals actually looks like.”
Seriously? The marriage between Barack and Michelle is the best and most recent example she can come up with? Schiff is obviously smitten, but before she reached for her smelling salts, she did manage a swipe at the Bush administration.
“After decades of fake financials and fictitious balance sheets, WMDs that weren't there and detention centers that were, our new First Lady is the genuine article,” Schiff writes. “She has a real body—arms! Legs! Curves! And she has a real marriage. Here are two people whose bodies speak as eloquently as their words, who hold each other up, who between them get the temperature just right.”
Harlequin writers, watch your backs!
But Schiff isn't alone in feeling frisky over the first couple. Susannah Breslin at Slate.com also picked up on the sexy theme. Her latest blog entry in “The XX Factor” titled “Have the Obamas Spawned a Sex Frenzy,” highlights the myriad sex-related stories that have cropped up since the election and she asks, “But it seems like ever since—well, I want to say ever since the Obamas got elected, it's all sex all the time…but I expected at some point for all the sex stories to stop,” Breslin writes. “But they haven't. They keep, well, coming. So, did the Obamas spawn this mini-sex revolution—or was it all that hope—or is it just me?”
To give this Obama pheromone frenzy an exotic, foreign allure, let's turn to the British newspaper The Daily Mail, where Sarah Sands seemed to be dreaming of an Obama-trois: “Barack and Michelle Obama are a diversity department's dream - two brilliant, sexy, black Harvard lawyers committed to public service. They epitomise style and taste. Barack would be perfect on the cover of Men's Vogue, while Michelle is a role model in a way that Condoleezza Rice has never managed.”
As Warner Todd Hudson wrote on Newsbuters.org, For Schiff and the others to suggest that “love's been reinvented by Michelle and her beau, The One,” Is ridiculous. He rightly points out that Schiff skips right over the past presidents and their wives, many of whom have had healthy, loving relationships.
But that doesn't matter to the giggly “Obama Girls.” Why intrude on the fantasy?
Erin Brown is a CMI intern.
