President Obama (Part 2)

Mr. Remnick, in his extended piece on Obama's day-to-day life and philosophy, also gives us some good discussion on comparative leadership skills. It can be noted that Obama's philosophy is rather technocratic and passive. In this excerpt we are presented with a contrast in Lyndon Johnson.

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The biographer Robert Caro has also been a guest. Caro’s ongoing volumes about Lyndon Johnson portray a President who used everything from the promise of appointment to bald-faced political threats to win passage of the legislative agenda that had languished under John Kennedy, including Medicare, a tax cut, and a civil-rights bill. Publicly, Johnson said of Kennedy, “I had to take the dead man’s program and turn it into a martyr’s cause.” Privately, he disdained Kennedy’s inability to get his program through Congress, cracking, according to Caro, that Kennedy’s men knew less about politics on the Hill “than an old maid does about fucking.” Senator Richard Russell, Jr., of Georgia, admitted that he and his Dixiecrat colleagues in the Senate could resist Kennedy “but not Lyndon”: “That man will twist your arm off at the shoulder and beat your head in with it.”

-- David Remnick at The New Yorker

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Lo (1,10) My Lolita

In this excerpt, Humbert is still awed by his first glimpse of the little Haze girl by the piazza. Although Humbert is now a middle-age man, and hence a pedophile, we are bid to remember that, at heart, he is still only a young teenager himself, living out his first, interrupted romance, and Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee” continues to serve as the background music in his tortured and over-excited mind. It only looks perverted and wretched from the outside.

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I find it most difficult to express with adequate force that flash, that shiver, that impact of passionate recognition. In the course of the sun-shot moment that my glance slithered over the kneeling child (her eyes blinking over those stern dark spectacles - the little Herr Doktor who was to cure me of all my aches) while I passed by her in my adult disguise (a great big handsome hunk of movieland manhood), the vacuum of my soul managed to suck in every detail of her bright beauty, and these I checked against the features of my dead bride. A little later, of course, she, this nouvelle, this Lolita, my Lolita, was to eclipse completely her prototype. All I want to stress is that my discovery of her was a fatal consequence of that “princedom by the sea” in my tortured past.

-- “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov

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