Slick Obama

Our new President is a smooth character.

He goes on Leno. He goes to basketball games. He's the regular Smith everybody wanted and wants to go to Washington, but he's also the Arthurian Knight of our dreams, an icon so bright that he remains quite popular in the midst of a number of cabinet appointments gone sour, and an at best loathsome economy.

And now he's kicked the dust off these traditional, meddlesome news outlets and has gone straight to the people.

The President is hosting an online town hall meeting. Rather than taking questions from the press, he's taking them from the people.

Never mind that there are already close to 70,000. Never mind that there's no way he can possibly answer every one of those questions, and that the filtering process might be, I don't know, favorable to him, maybe even pre-scripted for him.

He'll get asked tough questions. He'll give straight answers. He'll be praised by some. He'll pass praise to someone else in his cabinet, spreading it around with thoughtful magnanimity. He might even let some criticism get through. He politely crush it.

He'll walk away being a new politician, a true man of the people, connecting with the commoner in his own medium.

On Bill Clinton, I heard a wise sage ask a question about his sincerity in light of his obvious political savvy.

"So there you sat in the audience, asking yourself yet one more futile time whether this was an instinctively good man or a consummate political being, and whether this person or any person could possibly be both."

I'm not about to compare Obama to Clinton in the dawn of his administration, but I think this is a good question of all politicians. And, after all, the President is now under the 24-hour surveillance of the people's now technologically advanced eye.