Was Barack Obama terrible to date? An investigation š
Barack Obamaās memoir, A Promised Land, is, at last, out in the world and itās a 700-page exercise in painstaking legacy-burnishing. Obama, with his characteristic deliberateness, relitigates every decision he ever made in the White House, but if he wanted to focus my attention on how evil Senate Republicans actually were or if it was really necessary to deport all those people (it wasnāt), he should have not BEGUN in the first chapter with this riveting yet completely unnecessary revelation:
This paragraph, itās art. The labored euphemism ofĀ āwomen I was attempting to get to know.ā The descriptions of these sweet Occidental co-eds as ālong-leggedā āsmooth-skinnedā and āetherealā (???), that would make Danielle Steel blush. The very thought of Obama, future leader of the free world, poring over Marx and Fanon, so he could drop a casual but incisive observation betwixt the stacks.
Which brings us to the question that has been plaguing me for more than a decade, ever since Barack Hussein Obama burst onto the national stage. What was it like to date our unquestionably hottest and coolest living president (with apologies to Jimmy Carter)? Was it possibly... a little bit terrible? Blessedly, we have a voluminous body of work to consult.
Look, do I think itās good that my brain is so addled, that my worldview is so inflected by Nora Eprhon and also the patriarchy, that American political culture encourages us to view monstrously powerful people as celebrities that I evaluate many of them on the basis of āIs this person bonable/boyfriend material?ā No, I think itās probably pretty bad, but it is just where Iām at.
Young Barack appears to have had three prior serious girlfriends before Michelle (B.M.), as outlined in āBarack Obama: The Storyā by David Maraniss (big excerpt in Vanity Fair) and āRising Star: The Making of Barack Obamaā by David Garrow.Ā Ā
First, there was Alex McNear, an Occidental student who edited the literary magazine where Barack once submitted poetry and who he reconnected with in New York after transferring to Columbia. Alex and Barry took long meandering walks through Manhattan over the summer of 1982, and after that, when she moved back to California, exchanged long, meandering letters. Their main mode seemed to be to try to outdo each other with their literary prowess. We are going to give them a break because they were 20 years old, and if Iām being honest, I swoon for a man who would read a whole-ass book to get with me, but itās hard to give Barack his props when his love letters are like this:
Remember how I said thereās a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalismāEliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but itās due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.)
A milieu?? Of Yeats, Pond and Eliot? Guess who said it: TimothĆ©e Chalametās character in Lady Bird or a young Barack Obama.Ā
Barack also had writerly aspirations, and YOU COULD TELL. In the same letter:
Moments trip gently along over here. Snow caps the bushes in unexpected ways,Ā birds shoot and spin like balls of sound. My feet hum over the dry walks. A storm smoothes the sky, impounding the city lights, returning to us a dull yellow glow.Ā
There are just so many verbs. Perhaps you knew this try-hard person in your college creative writing class and maybe, you were dumb enough to find that person a little bit sexy. Perhaps you WERE this try-hard person in your college creative writing class and no one found you sexy, an injustice.Ā
Barack broke it off with Alex in the same manner as he carried on the romance: verbosely. āWhen I see you, the palpitations of the heart donāt boil to the surface,ā he wrote. āWhen I sit down to write I no longer feel the need to bleed for brilliance on the page.ā Ouch.Ā
The romance: šššš
The terribleness: šš½šš½
It didnāt take long for Barack to rebound. A few months later, at a Christmas party in the East Village, he struck up a conversation with Genevieve Cook, an Australian grad student. āIām pretty sure we had dinner maybe the Wednesday after. I think maybe he cooked me dinner,ā Genevieve later told Maraniss. āThen we went and talked in his bedroom. And then I spent the night. It all felt very inevitable.ā The moves!Ā
Genevieve was an avid diarist who documented their relationship in intimate detail. Thatās how we know that Barack liked to lounge around on Sunday mornings in a blue-and-white sarong and do the NYT crossword. Itās how we know he was an āearthyā lover, as Cook described it. (What does this mean? I donāt think Iām ready to know what this means.)Ā Ā
One time, Genevieve challenged Barack to a friendly sprint in Prospect Park. She beat him, he did not take it well:
Barack couldnāt really believe it and continued to feel a bit unsettled by it allĀ weekend, I think. He was more startled to discover that I had expected to win than anything else. Anyway, later in the shower (before leaving to see The Bostonians) I told him I didnāt feel that good about winning, and he promptly replied probably cos of feelings of guilt about beating a man. In which case, no doubt, heād already discovered the obverse feelings about being beaten by a woman.
A bad look. He was this also this guy, again per Maranissās biography:
When she told him that she loved him, his response was not āI love you, tooā but āthank you.āĀ
This dynamic portended trouble ahead for the young couple: Genevieve became increasingly frustrated at how Barack kept himself at a cool remove. They moved in together, briefly, while he was in between jobs and apartments, but their relationship had deteriorated so much during this period that she told a friend, āI just wanted to chop his dāk off.ā I donāt know what he did to prompt this reaction and but I am firmly team Genevieve.
The romance: ššš
Terribleness: šš½šš½šš½
Finally, there was Sheila Miyoshi Jager, an anthropologist who he fell in love with while working as a community organizer in Chicago and nearly married. Sheila and Obama had what sounds like a lovely relationship and then one that was messy as hell, as Obama tried to square his race, identity and political aspirations with being with another biracial woman (Sheila was half-Japanese and half-Dutch). I do not have the wherewithal to pass judgement on a situation this thorny but I do want to tell you that he waffled forever about marriage culminating in a protracted fight at their friendās weekend house that went like this, according to Garrow:
From morning onward āthey went back and forth, having sex, screaming yelling, having sex, screaming yelling.ā It continued all day. āThat whole afternoon they went back and forth between having sex and fighting.ā Others remember āmoving around to the other side of the porch just to be able to talk.ā It āwas a long weekendā and āan incredibly unpleasant one,ā one person recalled. āIt was so stressed and tense.ā
This is just bad manners!!!!
Romance: šš
Terribleness: šš½šš½šš½
We know the rest: Sheila and Barack broke up, he went off to Harvard Law School and took a summer internship at Sidley Austin in Chicago, where he was assigned one Michelle LeVaughn Robinson as a mentor. On their first date, they went to the Art Institute, took a walk, and saw Do the Right Thing. āTake tips, gentlemen,ā the president has said, ever so humbly.
Barack has transformed into a full Wife Guy nowāhis pithy Instagram captions about how Michelle is the smartest, the prettiest, the best are better than all those old love letters. A weary nation rejoices.
Was it ultimately terrible to date Barack Obama? I think Iād say if you can at all swing it, best to avoid dating future presidents.