It’s touching. Barack Obama still thinks he can walk down the street with his kids on Halloween, and be ignored. He was taking his girls home to a party at a friend’s house, and started getting photographed by the pool photographers. Here’s the story from MSNBC:
“… Barack Obama got annoyed with the media Friday as he tried to walk down a Chicago street with his 7-year-old daughter, Sasha, who was dressed up in a shiny costume for Halloween.
A pool of national photographers, reporters and a video crew traveling with Obama quickly covered the spontaneous moment.
“All right guys, that’s enough,” said Obama, wearing a casual outfit and sunglasses in the early evening.
He and his daughter were walking right toward the media on a public street.
“You got a shot,” he told the photographers. “Leave us alone. Come on, guys.”
He told the media to get back on the bus, referring to the vehicle where the traveling press pool often waits for him.
Obama then crossed the street with Sasha. At least one video cameraman who was not part of Obama’s traveling press corps followed him for a while. Obama grew visibly irritated.
He and his daughter then began jogging, and even running, to get away from the media.
They ended up out of sight at a friend’s house, where they were headed all along…”
It’s all been so fast for him. Most Presidents arrive at the job fully inured to the incessant publicness of their lives. Eisenhower ran the world’s largest army through its victorious European invasion. Kennedy was raised in a patrician family, walled off from infancy from the real world. Johnson began stealing elections in college, and was in Congress by age 30. Nixon, recluse though he was, had been a Senator and Veep since 1946. Reagan … well, he’d lived with paparazzi in Hollywood, and eight years as California Governor. Clinton had been governor for 18 years. And Bush had been an idiot all his life.
But Barack, well, he is a doting father with young children who still thinks he can have a little private time out in public. Even so, we have watched him evolve over the past two years. He started his campaign with the quaint notion that has driven him his whole life – our success as individuals depends on our success as part of a group. And the broader and bigger the group is, the greater the chance for success for all. So understanding and accepting differences among people, and using those differences to drive positive changes, is central to his desire to lead.
During the past two years, though, he has needed to translate that vague aspiration into specific direction. What impresses me the most is that he has moved towards the right goals: everyone should be able to get healthcare; buying oil in the Middle East and from tinpots like Putin and Chavez is dangerous for our security; finding new sources of energy, especially ones we make at home, will boost the economy and improve the environment. And I hope he will make a similar directional choice about how to regulate financial transactions – a Bretton Woods for the 21st century.
His wife understood the finality of his decision to run – she knew their lives could never be the same, that they would lose their privateness to the larger mission of leadership. She urged him not to run, or at least be very clear about the effects on them as people. His kids won’t care – they’ll have fun. But he’s not the sort of man to easily give up his pick-up games of basketball or, apparently, to have an Easter egg hunt on the White House lawn. His great skill, though, has been to mold himself to be whatever is needed to become the aspirational leader we want. So I will look next Spring for pictures of a smiling Barack with Malia and Sasha all in frills and lace, and a watchful Michelle behind them, as they entertain the “neighbors’ kids” on their front lawn. And then he’ll go back inside, and get on with cleaning up the mess we’ve left for him.