Peggy Noonan, who has occasionally worked both sides of the street since her days as a Reagan speechwriter, perfectly captured the essence of Barack Obama in a piece she wrote recently for the Wall Street Journal. The piece was entitled "The Loneliest President Since Nixon," and today's quote, taken from it, will raise a chuckle in the mind of anyone who has been paying attention to the president during his not perfectly scripted interviews.
Noonan writes: I mentioned last week that the president has taken to filibustering, to long, rambling answers in planned sit-down settings—no questions on the fly walking from here to there, as other presidents have always faced. The press generally allows him to ramble on, rarely fighting back as they did with Nixon. But I have noticed Mr. Obama uses a lot of words as padding. He always has, but now he does it more. There’s a sense of indirection and obfuscation. You can say, “I love you,” or you can say, (and here's the quote)
“You know, feelings will develop, that happens among humans and it’s good it happens, and I have always said, and I said it again just last week, that you are a good friend, I care about you, and it’s fair to say in terms of emotional responses that mine has escalated or increased somewhat, and ‘love’ would not be a wholly inappropriate word to use to describe where I’m coming from.”
