If you would like your hands to smell like 275 pages of cologne ads, pick up a copy of Vanity Fair RIGHT NOW and read Todd Purdum’s piece on the raising of Barack Obama. A lot has been written about Obama’s upbringing, mostly by Obama himself and deranged conservative commentators, but this one warrants your attention for a few delictable nuggets. A sample:
Furishima also showed me, but asked me not to quote verbatim, the tender inscriptions in her yearbooks from Obama, who, in tiny, precise architect’s printing, expressed regret that they hadn’t gotten to know each other better, and the hope that someday he might be worthy of her attention. He signed one of them, at the very bottom of the page, with a squiggly cartoon of a mound protruding from the edge of the paper, and these words: “my afro stickin’ up over the top again.”
And also, if you had any doubt that he’s extraordinarily cocky, there’s this, from the day before his speech at the Democratic convention:
“We were walking down the street in Boston, and this crowd was growing behind us, kind of like Tiger Woods at the Masters. And I turned to Barack and I said, ‘This is incredible. You’re like a rock star.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘If you think it’s bad today, wait till tomorrow.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean?,’ and he said, ‘My speech is pretty good.’ ”
Can’t really argue with that, I guess. There’s a lot more in there, including his conversation with Emil Jones where he persuaded the Illinois Senate President to make him a U.S. Senator. You can read it all here, cologne-free.
