Meaning it

“Obama grabs babies and lifts them up on almost a daily basis. About time he got a taste or his own medicine.”  New York Magazine editor Dan Amira on Twitter.

This is what I was talking about the other day, the kind of thing you have to do if you run for office.  And like I said, you don’t have to like it, you just have to mean it.

Somehow, though, I think the President likes it and means it.

The President got hugged while campaigning in Florida, but as any good reporter will tell you, there’s always a local angle.  Jeremiah Horrigan found it for our local paper, the Times Herald-Record:

He was in his sweats, swinging away on a driving range Sunday when he got an excited call from the manager of his pizzeria.

"The president's coming here, in like 18 minutes!" the manager said.

"The president of what?" a mystified Scott Van Duzer wanted to know.

As all the world now knows, the president whom Van Duzer immediately ran off to greet was the president of the United States, Barack Obama.

You could say, as most already have, that Van Duzer's greeting was an uplifting experience for President Obama: after high-fiving him, he gave the president an exuberant bear hug and lifted him off the floor of Van Duzer's Big Apple Pizza and Pasta Italian Restaurant.

<snip>

But who, you might reasonably wonder, is Scott Van Duzer? The short answer is he's a local boy — he was born in Cornwall and lived there until he was 7.

Read the whole story, Ex-Cornwall man surprises Obama with big bear-hug.  (Registration suggested but not required.)

You may have heard that vindictive Right Wingers with too much time on their hands decided to try to punish Van Duzer for the sin of liking it that the President of the United States visited his pizza joint by hate-spamming Big Apple’s Yelp entry.

Fortunately, sane and decent-hearted people have been coming to the rescue. At the Atlantic wire, Adam Clark Estes reports that The Boycott Against Obama's Bear-Hugging Buddy Is Failing Miserably.

Both photos by Doug Mills of the New York Times.

Comments

[El Jefe]

When I sit quietly, on my lunch break (it's nice working here in town) and listen to the breeze of a still-unseasonably and delightfully autumnal day in the Willamette Valey, I can hear the gentle blooping sounds of Republican aneurysms popping. Yes Mittens is terrible at this, for many reasons intelligently highlighted by OGH and pretty much every steady commenter round here. But more than that, for all his not-yet-tenured-professorial bearing and rebelling in a family of rebels by being the straight-laced kid (the only thing he actually shares deeply with Jimmy Carter), you can see how Obama enjoys it. He has a thoroughgoing inner humanity that should be let out for a walk more often (of course there's a steady but quiet effort to manage images in the media that denies that opportunity -- reminds me of when Dubya's people set up a movie-camera 101 foreshortening shot of Brian Williams interviewing ol' I Can Has Preznit just after Katrina. That way you don't notice Williams towering over the, well, shrubby younger Bush. But Williams, thoroughly Republican in general but incensed by the handling of Katrina, must've tipped the camera guy to shoot their feet as well so that, instead, it just made Dubya look that much tinier.)

And then there's another element of course. Van Duzer looks -- is, simply -- the guy a few stools down the lower-end bar from Joe the Plumber, and The Sherriff's A ...!!! (h/t Molly, NYC), yet here he is bear-hugging him in all honestly and then treating him to properly-made pizza two thousand miles away from its natural home :) Yet again, with another hat tip this time to Ta-Nehisi Coates' typically unmissable little entry last week, there are combinations of image and deed and circumstance that happen around our current president for which many, especially older, modern Republicans simply lack a mental and emotional vocabulary, black swans that cloud the skies with unparseable impossibility. And those two shots are great examples.

Also on the Human Thing: Lance, did you see or read Uncle Joe's delivery at Shanksville today? Whew. I like him in his old age. More than I'd ever have thought.