Mr.Baker writes:
Life for the newly chosen president and his family has changed forever. Even the constraints and security of the campaign trail do not compare to the bubble that has enveloped him in the 10 days since his election. Renegade, as the Secret Service calls him, now lives within the strict limits that come with the most powerful office on the planet.
What was it Yeats wrote? Oh yes:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Precisely. Anyway . . . is Sydney Brillo Duodenum to believe that Barack Obama only just began living in a bubble? Really?
After two years of daily speeches and rallies, he has retreated into an almost hermitlike seclusion, largely hidden from public view and spotted only when he drops his two daughters off for school or goes for a workout at the gymnasium in a friend’s apartment building.
Well, flop sweat can be tough to get under control, so laying low is perfectly understandable.
“This is a tremendous personal transition, as well, far beyond what anyone could imagine,” said Alexi Giannoulias, the Illinois state treasurer and a close friend. “Little things, like going to the gym, going to the movies, going to dinner with his wife, none of that will ever be the same again. Things that we take for granted.”It plays for you, sir.
Baker interviews regular people living within His Presence:
“It’s changed. It’s a little inconvenient, just a little, when you have to go around three blocks to go one block. I don’t mind, though, because I got the president I voted for. If the price is a little inconvenience, that’s O.K.” -- Mesha Caudle, 45, who lives a block from the Obamas.Oh, honey, you ain't seen inconvenience yet. None of us have.
But no one has been more effected by the election than Mr. Obama:
For Mr. Obama, it means no more casually stopping by the Medici for pastries or heading over to Valois for lunch or window shopping with the girls at 57th Street Books, at least not without elaborate preparation. He did manage to take his wife, Michelle, on Saturday night to Spiaggia, a four-star Italian restaurant in downtown Chicago, where the future president loves the wood-roasted scallops.Suffer the little pastries. And often times Sydney Brillo Duodenum has "window shopped" for books with his children, hoping one day to actually enter the book store and, perchance, open a long lost favorite, such as Audacious Dreams from My Deadbeat Dad. Still, just a regular middle class day that ends with a $28 plate of scallops. The kind of day none of us will be able to enjoy once Mr. Obama begins - how do they say it? - oh, yes - fucking with the economy.
“He seems to be very, very focused on the transition,” said his friend, John W.Rogers Jr.chairman of Ariel Investments, who lent office space to Mr. Obama until the federal space was available. “It doesn’t seem to have changed him at all. He’s the same relaxed, in-control, engaging Barack that he’s always been. I’ve been struck by that, that it hasn’t shifted him.”As suspected. Everything and everyone must change. Except Mr. Obama. And the wood roasted scallops. Do not fuck with Mr. Obama's scallops.
