Obama's Hat Trick

The fashion-conscious Obamas are at it again. This time the closet cigarette smoker and president-elect figured he’d make a fashion statement by turning his baseball cap around Brooklyn style circa 1989. Doesn’t this guy have anybody giving him fashion advice? The style is already so passé that he is bound to be the subject of ridicule the world around. That this should occur at a time when Barry says he wants to increase American prestige in world capitals only adds to a sense of fashion hopelessness for the arrivistes. But why doesn’t the slavish Obama media get it? Could it be that the Big Three Networks, CNN and MSNBC are themselves so heavily nerd-infested that they hungrily cling to yesterday’s moldy sense of cool while the rest of the world is largely embarrassed at the spectacle?

Don’t get me wrong, I love nerds and like everyone else I probably have some nerd DNA mixed in with my other. What I don’t love is nerds who pretend to be anything but. Now what caused Obama to do this? Was it those lame and very nice pictures taken of him bicycling in Chicago on a fat-tire bike with his pants hiked up to his Isod polo shirt ala Steve Erkel? Certainly, there was no shame in that, for those were the photos of an honest man being himself. Truth to tell, Obama looked very much at home in that milieu, rolling slowly past the house he purchased alongside the home of Antoin Rezko, his head cautiously encased in a bicycle helmet lest Americans should worry he would be beating it down the hill on a dirt path like that maniacal George W. Bush who crashed over the top of his handlebars. The bicycle photo may have made Obama a bit news-shy, perhaps, but it was no worse than those photos of John Kerry windsurfing or former Governor Michael Dukakis climbing into the turret of a Sherman tank and trying to look like John Wayne.

Obama, please. Give us a little more substance and a bit less outré style. You’re forty-seven years old now, no longer a boy wonder. America doesn’t need a window or a mirror into yesteryear; it needs a president of sufficient substance to manage two wars, an imperiled economy, and a host of foreign policy challenges.