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Posted
Thursday, February 12, 2009 4:55 PM
| By
Dayo Olopade
I wanted to flag that touching exchange at President Obama’s town hall in Fort Myers, Fla., on Tuesday, wherein a homeless woman named Henrietta Hughes told the nation of her employment troubles, and begged the president for action: “We need something more than the vehicle and the parks to go to,” she said. “We need our own kitchen and our own bathroom. Please help.” Rather brilliantly, Obama showed he can channel Bill Clinton whenever he wants—as he pulled her close for an embrace, he was definitely feeling that woman’s pain.
But more than showcasing Obama’s talents as both stimulus salesman- and empathizer-in-chief, the video footage of that event reveals a woman, just to Hughes’ right, in, um, well—in heat. Practically. Watch as she aggressively mouths “I love you, Barack” in his general direction. While Hughes is now being trumpeted as “the face of the economic crisis” (which has hit women of color particularly hard), this white, middle-aged, pant-suited, brooched woman stole the show. She just loves him—and, this Valentine's Day, she doesn’t care who knows.
This reminded me simultaneously of two things: One, the absurd Judith Warner column that was essentially an inbox dump of lusty/ envious notes from friends detailing their fantasies—mainly, it seems, sexual—about Obama. Choice excerpt:
Another Washington woman, a global health care consultant, expressed her sense of Obama-inadequacy in a dream: “I dreamed I was an Obama girl. I had a chance to be in the same room with him for the first time. There were dark velvet chairs and he was standing there with all this dark and mist around him. His lips so purple and sensuous as if to be otherworldly,” she wrote to me. “I moved gently toward him and then I said the wrong thing. Obama tamped it down like some vapor that didn’t register. He wasn’t even flattered.”
“Purple?” Must have been from all the grape drink. … But seriously—creep show! During the primary, Web sites encouraging readers to write in their dreams about Obama and about Hillary Clinton served as an entertaining, if voyeuristic testament to the nation’s collective, REM-altering election fatigue (which was only to begin—no word on whether similar sites sprang up for John McCain and Sarah Palin). And the question of whether “Ab-bama” deserves the title will certainly provoke strong responses at your next dinner party. But this is just grist for more inane articles about women fainting and slavering over a mere politician. At least repressed 1960s women kept their feelings toward the last hot president under wraps.
And two: What a weird, yet timely subversion of the old racial fixation with black men whistling at white women—which, when you get down to it, has caused an unbearable share of violence over the years. Now chicks with almost-mullets and in Sidwell book clubs are suddenly hollering back? Sure, it’s change we can believe in—but is this “faux-familiarity,” as Warner puts it, not a little much? Barack is going to get a big head.