Michelle-Style

Quoted via Slate:

It came a week late, but President Obama did win the gold. Last Friday, the International Olympic Committee stiffed him. Today, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. He should probably leave his schedule open next Friday, because apparently anything can happen.

It was the second time in three years that the peace prize went to someone trying to create a new international climate. In 2007, Al Gore shared the prize for his efforts to combat global warming. Explaining this year's selection, the committee credited Obama not for concrete accomplishments but for atmospheric ones. "Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future," the committee said. "His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population."

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Quoted via The Daily Beast:

Anyone wanting to write about Obama’s second one hundred days in office might call the account “From Leno to Letterman: A Presidential Odyssey.” Obama’s performance on Leno’s old Tonight Show six months ago couldn’t have been more different from his appearance on Letterman last night.

On Leno, Obama was self-deprecating and almost boyish, telling stories as if looking at himself from outside the “bubble,” as he charmingly called it—anecdotes about being followed by a doctor with a defibrillator, about Secret Service men who wouldn’t let him walk alone for “750 yards,” and so forth. Without sacrificing the dignity of his new office, he bent it toward ordinary life. He bantered with Leno, even seeming to have a turn at playing comedian himself.

But last night on Letterman, for all his smiles and seeming bonhomie and that bit of business about the heart-shaped potato—if only the heartland would embrace him like that! you felt he was thinking—the president wasn’t about to play along with the comedy. In reply to Letterman’s (uncharacteristically) earnest question about the bitter opposition to his proposals for health-care reform, Obama said, almost as an admonition to his host: “That’s why I end up having to be on the David Letterman Show.”

That is to say, Obama’s goal last night was to cast the recent town-hall and tea-party turbulence as tired summer reruns of historical American opposition to change.  . . . more