Barack in a flash

Laurie
Barack in a flash
Starbucks, February 25, 2008

Barack Obama is strolling down a corridor in a TV studio. Beside him a young woman with glistening brown hair and an impish smile twitters, a little star struck, and the tall man has to stoop to hear her, bend at the neck and look up because a camera is trained on him. The reporter asks what phone number of a celebrity people would be surprised to find in his cell, and he squints, concentrating. He’s not annoyed that the question might trivialize him. In his well tailored suit, nothing could have that effect. He’s not slumming or truckling the way, during his first bid for President, Bill Clinton, appearing on MTV, came off uncool because he wanted to fit in. Neither need nor embarrassment rearranges Barack’s thin-cheeked composure. His hair is close cropped, revealing a skull you can call handsome, though that word isn’t easily attached to someone so gaunt and lanky, a man whose calves you can picture as tight little balls. There’s the swinging grace of him, the ease that doesn’t seem smug but almost shy. He considers the reporter’s question and in that moment he takes shape. Slowly, and a little hesitantly beause it's his manner to reflect carefully before answering a question, he says, "Well, I'm not sure if people would be surprised by this, but I have Jay-Z’s number in my phone.” The reporter beams and her hair swings, and she asks how they met, and Barack says at a fundraising event, which isn’t a surprise, really, when you consider that Jay-Z is one of the richest entertainers in music and the CEO and founder of two record companies, Jay-Z being worth around 600 million dollars although he grew up poor in the BedSty section of Brooklyn. When Barack mentions Jay-Z, we’re shown a clip of the rapper with jabbing hands and a gansta scowl. Barack says that Jay-Z is talented and intelligent. He’s not saying, “You might not think this but . . . .” He speaks about him as presidential candidate referring to successful rapper—peer to peer. In the way he regards this other young African-American striver—Barack’s education at Columbia University and Harvard Law School glinting from his intelligent eyes—in the seriousness with which he takes Jay-Z who is expressing an interest in electoral politics, maybe for the first time in a long while or for the first time ever, in the way he sails unruffled through this spot on an entertainment news program, he shows how he is captivating a generation of voters who do not want to be talked down to, who want to think that the man who might be president is someone who could get them. A smile forms slowly on his face, a patented smile, and his thin cheeks are etched with two deep creases that speak of late nights and worry. The viewer has no idea what he is really feeling, only sees that he is polite. The gentleness is compelling. It is very attractive. There is nothing of the snake about the long-limbed man.