There’s a profile of the Obama marriage by Jodi Kantor coming out in this Sunday’s NYT Magazine which, while I can’t recommend it due to the incredibly high stultification factor of its subject and prose, I did find compelling on account of a) its confirming what I have thought about the two of them, and particularly the spear side, since they appeared meteorically on the scene, namely, that they are a pair of self-regarding pompous bores — he a worse one than she, I think — with little to recommend them as president and first lady other than the historic fact of their being elitist leftists of color; and b) its manifesting everything that’s causing the New York Times to slide slowly like melting ice cream dripping off the counter into dull obsolescence, in this case by sending the woman who trolled Facebook during the campaign looking for high school friends of Bridget McCain who’d be willing to dish on her mother to seize on the insipid details of its favorite politician’s marriage and proffer them as journalistic gold. “Theirs is by no means a co-presidency,” Ms. Kantor writes.
I awake from a deep sleep: Little engagement with banking reform and nuclear disarmament? Am I relieved or disappointed? Don’t know. But it’s bracing to learn Mrs. Obama’s got her finger on the pulse of Washington outsiders. Oh, at first, like the skeptical denizens of Hyde Park, the Upper West Side, and Beverly Hills, she had her doubts:
The possibilities of what might be. Yeah, this could work. That’s a story worth repeating! And so, if you are still awake, is this: “What I value most about my marriage,” says the president of the United States, “is that it is separate and apart from a lot of the silliness of Washington, and Michelle is not part of that silliness.”
