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By Root 903 0

“rock star” surpassed “perfect storm” as the most irritating cliché of the century. (In fairness, if “rock star” means someone who sleeps with countless groupies, then Bill Clinton was a rock star.) Newsweek reporter Eleanor Clift described the doughy Clinton-Gore team as “the all-beefcake ticket,” gasping that she was “struck by the expanse of their chests,” and saying “they could do cameo appearances on ‘Studs.’ ”6 The Washington Post’s Sally Quinn said women identified with Clinton because of “the softness, the sensitivity, the vulnerability, that kind of thing.”7

An infatuated Jonathan Alter babbled in Newsweek about the Clinton hug: “Bill Clinton hugs other men. It’s not a bear hug, usually—more like a Full Shoulder Squeeze. Women get it, too, but the gesture is more striking in its generational freshness when applied to the same sex. He softens the old-fashioned backslap into something more sensitive. These guys are touching each other! It’s unselfconscious, gender-neutral, very ’90s.”8 Either that or it bolsters my theory that Clinton would have sex with anything that had a pulse.

And it wasn’t just Alter and the other ladies swooning! Newsweek’s Howard Fineman called Clinton the “first sensitive male chief executive,”9 while Peter Jennings said Clinton “has the kind of hands that people respond to.”10 Time magazine’s Walter Shapiro said that “for the first time in more than 30 years the nation has elected a President with sex appeal.” Shapiro quoted The Boomer Report editor Cheryl Russell saying, “Every woman I know is having sex dreams about Bill Clinton.”11 (If you call nightmares about Bill Clinton dropping his pants “sex dreams,” I guess I was, too.)

When Obama came along, guess who liberals started having sex dreams about? Yes, the big-eared beanpole. The New York Times’s Judith Warner reported, “Many women—not too surprisingly—were dreaming about sex with the president.” Warner confessed, “The other night I dreamt of Barack Obama. He was taking a shower right when I needed to get into the bathroom to shave my legs.” (Judith Warner, Chris Matthews—what is it with liberals and their legs?) The Obamas, Warner wrote, were “a beacon of hope, inspiration and ‘demigodlikeness.’ ”12

NBC reporter Lee Cowan—biologically, a man—said he could hardly contain himself when told he was to cover Obama: “When NBC News first assigned me to the Barack Obama campaign, I must confess my knees quaked a bit.… I wondered if I was up to the job. I wondered if I could do the campaign justice.”13 (Cowan then spent the rest of the day scribbling in his reporter’s notebook, “President and Mr. Barack Obama … Barack and Lee Cowan-Obama … Lee Obama … Mr. and Mr. Obama … First Lady, Mrs. Lee Cowan-Obama.…”)

NBC’s Matt Lauer noted that “people” have called Obama “ ‘The Savior,’ ‘The Messiah,’ ‘The Messenger of Change.’ ”14 Try to imagine conservatives coming up with such honorifics for Dwight Eisenhower. Being rational individuals, conservatives don’t turn their political leaders into religious icons. Liberals, by contrast, having all the primitive behaviors of a mob, idolize politicians.

Obama was also—in the fresh, pioneering words of NBC’s Andrea Mitchell—“a rock star!”15 To Newsweek’s Joe Klein, Obama was “the political equivalent of a rainbow—a sudden preternatural event inspiring awe and ecstasy.”16 (If Joe got out of Manhattan more, he’d know rainbows are perfectly natural.)

In one of his more balanced formulations, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews babbled, “They’re cool people. They are really cool. They are Jack and Jackie Kennedy when you see them together. They are cool. And they’re great-looking, and they’re cool and they’re young, and they’re—everything seems to be great.” Strangely, he also said, “If you’re in [a room] with Obama, you feel the spirit. Moving.”17 What is it about the Obamas that reduces cable news hosts to babbling, pimple-faced losers at a Star Trek convention?

It is impossible to imagine any conservative describing any Republican in such teeny-bopper patois. Haley Barbour is like totally the dreamiest! And did you