How Barack Obama seduced Genevieve Cook – Barry’s four-point plan
AND it came to pass that as Barack Obama vied to be a two-term President the world met his first lover, Genevieve Cook. They met in December 1983. They split in May 1985.
David Maraniss has revealed the love affair in his book Barack Obama: The Story.
We’ve picked out the sections that reveals how Obama pulls and how to pull Obama. Obama met Cook met at a Christmas party in New York’s East Village in December 1983. He was 22. She was 25. Here is that four-point plan:
1. He chats briefly with Cook in the kitchen. She has smokes and booze.
“Hours later, after midnight, she was about to leave when Barack Obama approached and asked her to wait. They plopped down on an orange beanbag chair at the end of the hall, and this time the conversation clicked.”
He noticed her accent. Australian…
Did he read this?
2. Obama can cook for La Cook. He’s in tune:
“I’m pretty sure we had dinner maybe the Wednesday after. I think maybe he cooked me dinner. Then we went and talked in his bedroom. And then I spent the night. It all felt very inevitable.”
3. How to keep her keen:
“She remembered how on Sundays Obama would lounge around, drinking coffee and solving the New York Times crossword puzzle, bare-chested, wearing a blue and white sarong.”
4. An air of mystery:
“His bedroom was closest to the front door, offering a sense of privacy and coziness. Genevieve described it in her journal this way: “I open the door, that Barack keeps closed, to his room, and enter into a warm, private space pervaded by a mixture of smells that so strongly speak of his presence, his liveliness, his habits—running sweat, Brut spray deodorant, smoking, eating raisins, sleeping, breathing.”
So. He never did smell of cigarettes and weed.
The romance won and lost, the book has more to say:
She says Obama “felt like an imposter because he was so white”. She says Obama decided to “go black”.
Alax McNear: “…we sat and talked and ate and drank wine. Or at least I drank wine. I think he drank something stronger. It was one of those dark, old Italian restaurants that don’t exist in New York anymore. It was the kind of place where they leave you alone. I remember thinking how happy I felt just talking to him, that I could talk to him for hours. We walked slowly back to my apartment, on 90th, and said good-bye. After that we started spending much more time together.”
Dating Obama consists of walking – lots of walking – lingering (restaurans), hanging (at home), visiting (museums) and talking (teleprompter).
GC: “His warmth can be deceptive. Tho he speaks sweet words and can be open and trusting, there is also that coolness—and I begin to have an inkling of some things about him that could get to me.”
Obama could write like a 22-year-old American trying to impress a young lover – lots of long words strung together into a deceptive melange of meaningless self-regarding mush:
Here’s Obama on the poet T.S. Eliot, in a letter he wrote to McNear:
“Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance.”
What a startling person Barack is—so strange to voice intimations of my own perceptions—have them heard, responded to so on the sleeve. A sadness, in a way, that we are both so questioning that original bliss is dissipated—but feels really good not to be faltering behind some façade—to not feel that doubt must be silenced and transmuted into distance.
GC – May 23, 1985:
Barack leaving my life—at least as far as being lovers goes. In the same way that the relationship was founded on calculated boundaries and carefully, rationally considered developments, it seems to be ending along coolly considered lines. … Obviously I was not the person that brought infatuation. (That lithe, bubbly, strong black lady is waiting somewhere!)
Posted: 2nd, May 2012 | In: Key Posts, Politicians Comments (7) | TrackBack | Permalink
