Barack, Meet Jackie

I just need to say this to my man Obama:Dear Mr. President,Don't take this the wrong way. In my book you’re great. I voted for you in ’08 and I intend to vote for you next year but I think you have to get some serious coaching for your speeches because you sound like such an insufferable  smarty-pants. I’m not sure if it’s the way your voice goes up at the end of certain sentences and down at the end of others but the net effect isn’t good. You sound like a know-it-all, an intellectual, or “pointy-head” which in this country is not the way you want to be perceived. (Look at how they  sneered at Adlai Stevenson. At Woodrow Wilson, former president of Princeton.)I’ve been listening over and over to the voice of “our” Jackie, in this audio tape made when she he spoke to Arthur Schlesinger Jr. just four months after the death of the husband Jack whom she so obviously loved despite his rabbity ways. She says,

I was so happy that I could do something that made [Jack] proud of me because I’ll tell you one wonderful about him: I was really… I was never any different once I was in the White House than I was before but the press made you different. Suddenly everything that had been a liability before -  your hair, that you spoke French, that you didn’t just adore to campaign and you didn’t bake bread with flour up your arms…. You know everyone thought I was a snob and hated politics. Well Jack never made me feel that I was a liability to him but I was!

You have to listen to this, Mr. President, even if you did see last night’s Diane Sawyer special.. My point is that here she was, the child of immense privilege and she seems so humble and down to earth. And here’s you, raised by a single mother, visited only once by your grandiose and overbearing father after his abandonment of you as an infant,  moved from one part of the world to another.... Why can’t YOU talk like a regular person if even Jackie could? I think you can. I seem to remember you doing it that long-ago Time Before.      It took like 500 years of history to get you and your wonderful family into the White House, Mr President. I can’t bear the thought that you might only have only one term there.