Bush's facility for remembering names or Bill Clinton's talent for spewing out worldly minutiae. His talent with words is widely acknowledged, but that skill is often regarded as more instrumental than essential, a kind of handy tool for a politician, like George W. Yet the president's writing life has gotten surprisingly little notice. In the years since his '04 Democratic-convention keynote speech opened Obama's biography to mass consumption, we've picked through nearly every theme-the biraciality, the absent father, the community organizing, the deft navigation of the political minefield that is Chicago-as a way of explaining What Makes Obama Obama. The author in Barack Obama never really left the room. Five weeks later, he stands in a hotel conference room in Hyde Park, and before a crowd of 200-a gathering far greater than any he has seen on the promotional circuit-he announces his candidacy for the Illinois State Senate. Obama thanks her for the compliment, not letting on that he's been thinking the same thing himself. "You know, I've never said this to anyone," she tells Obama, "but you would have a terrific career in politics." At the conclusion of the interview, she leans over to the young man in the sport coat and slightly askew tie. He sits in a chair in front of a copy of his book while Martinson pronounces his memoir "wonderful." But she is at least as impressed with her guest's articulate, engaging personality. Here at Eso Won, Obama smiles modestly at the nine strangers and, wholly unaccustomed at this stage of his 34-year-old life to adoring crowds, says, "Why don't we sit in a little circle?"īefore heading back to Chicago, Obama does the only TV appearance of his modest book tour, a thirty-minute cable-access show in L.A. The tiny gathering at his book-signing party in Chicago consisted largely of folks whom the hostess, Valerie Jarrett, Obama's friend and one of the Chicago mayor's top advisers, had personally begged to drop by. The reading at his neighborhood bookstore in Chicago-57th Street Books, a Hyde Park co-operative of which he was a member-drew at most thirty, including only one colleague from the University of Chicago, where he teaches constitutional law. None of his former classmates from Occidental College have shown up. Tonight they hand Barack Obama a glass of water and bring him to the back of the bookstore, where his audience awaits him. The owners serve wine and cheese when famous writers such as Maya Angelou and Walter Mosley come by to read. Their store, Eso Won Books, is the leading African-American book vendor in Los Angeles. The other has not: He found it too long, especially all that stuff about the author's time as a community organizer in Chicago. One of them has in fact read the book all the way through. The store's two owners greet him with the usual congratulations. He is a lanky young fellow, with shirtsleeves rolled up and no tie. I suppose we’re just lucky she didn’t call herself an attack helicopter, but don’t worry-that was only ten minutes, there’s another fifty where she might still be able to fit it in somewhere.The author shows up at the bookstore just before seven in the evening. The clip finishes with Roseanne triumphantly declaiming that her pronouns are kiss/my/ass, to thunderous applause from her Fox brand audience, as if this is a clever, new idea and not a variation of the same sad attempt at humor found in every other transphobes Twitter bio. Roseanne knows what a woman is though-it’s Roseanne! With five ungrateful children and a prolapsed uterus! This does raise rather more questions than it answers, however, such as what gender a person who has only birthed four children or whose uterus stubbornly stayed in place after releasing ungrateful brat number five might be? Truly, we should be so grateful to have a font of wisdom such as Roseanne to guide us through this tricky gender minefield. Why, according to Roseanne we don’t know what a woman is! Apparently we’re always asking, which is odd because the only people I ever see asking are transphobes presenting it as a gotcha question and then getting mad when we’re able to answer it without excluding trans women. Truly though, it’s young people who “live in a bubble” and “have no concept of reality”. I suppose finding a new way to correlate young people’s supposed lazy fecklessness with their having a case of The Genders might pass for clever among right-wingers these days. “Your gender is get a job,” Roseanne sneers, thinking she’s done something very clever here.
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