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The mystique of cult Obama, the rockstar politician who emails, will eventually corrode. It is the nature of all politicians to eventually tarnish, no matter how much spin can polish.
Where will this corrosion first take hold?
I think I see where it might.
In the United States, the head politician, the president, will be immortalized, go down in history, have his name ranked in encyclopedias for easy reference, During his term he will personify the country itself. For good or ill, the country will be a reflection of the president. He will become his time. His image will be the image of the country.
Think of FDR. Dashing, jaw jutted, confident, cigarette holder in bared smiling clenched teeth. Truman. Quick stepped, deliberate, decisive, reporters on the run to keep up with him as he walked each morning from Blair House, where he lived, to the White House where he worked. Calvin Coolidge, quiet, reserved, lassez-faire, hands off manager of a country of unregulated and unbridled confidence that would run into a wall to end the roaring 20s. Kennedy, a superstar politician who challenged America to go at least to the moon in an era where America seemed capable of anything.
Was it Leacock who wrote about the 1930s banker, who was asked, as he rushed into a restaurant from his limousine how the depression had affected him.
“Terrible, just terrible,” he said on the fly.
Like that banker, we have seen Obama less in the oval office, where he is needed, and more in exotic locales. He is needed to repair America’s damaged self among its allies, and he is doing, it seems, a refreshingly remarkable job.
But the image of the president on an endless honeymoon, flying off to Broadway on a jet from Washington and back for the only and specific purpose to date his wife in the middle of a recession laying off millions, may be the chip in the mystique that eventually begins the inevitable corrosion.