IT takes Maureen Dowd, America’s best newspaper columnist, to capture the moment for the man of the age dancing the tango.
“Barack Obama,” she writes in The New York Times, “is tangoing into history—and there’s something perfect about that.”
She explains: “The tango has been described as vertical solitude. And this president is all about vertical solitude.”
There is his height, his leanness, his chiseled face, his unswerving stand on issues whatever the blow back from ignorance, fear and racial prejudice—and there is his cold and silent contempt for less-than-intelligent reaction to events. Indeed, the thing about tango, which I struggled in vain to learn, is that less is more.
The male dancer mostly stands, imperturbable, while his sexy companion drapes herself on his shoulders, falls back on his arm in blindly faithful surrender to its strength, or wraps her leg around him. But he does not seem to care.
His attention is all on himself, on the sparseness of his movements, and on how economically he dances to the end—not one unnecessary step: no flourishes, no hesitation. Obama had politely told the professional dancer at the Argentine state function—after she asked permission to dance with the American president: “You lead; I will follow.” Yet, he pulled her along, the dancer confessed, to the end. That’s Obama: The man who strode down the White House red carpet to the lectern virtually holding bin Laden’s severed head in one hand, to announce he had dropped bin Laden’s bullet-riddled body in the Indian Ocean.
“That’s how he’s been,” Dowd said. The young black man who said “it is time to move beyond colors, blue and red, black and white, the man whose flesh creeps at wearing a flag pin on his lapel,” when he can be serving America with his whole being and not just with a fashion accessory
of clothing.
At the end of his second term, he shared a bench with Raul Castro at a baseball game in Havana—unthinkable to three generations of Americans. Back on the mainland United States, two Cuban exiles beat themselves silly in the Republican primaries. Baseball in enemy country was just another step in the presidential tango. Buenos Aires next.
Before that, he swept unheeding “through the British Petroleum oil spill, James Foley beheaded by ISIS, the Paris attacks, the San Bernardino attacks and Brussels” airport suicide bombing; which he discussed rationally and briefly while watching the Cuban game with Derek Jeter, whom I had the privilege to watch on the sidewalk most mornings when he stepped out of his Trump Tower digs in New York.
“More people die from slipping in their bathtubs than from terrorism,” Dowd said, an observation that must have been running through his head.
So when Ted Cruz vowed to carpet bomb ISIS and Trump to nuke the Middle East, Obama kept a cool eye on the ball in Cuba while his men, the same who had dropped bin Laden into his watery grave in the Indian Ocean, killed two top ISIS leaders that day.
In a roomful of Republican savages dancing without rhythm for rain, Obama is the tango dancer. Thank you, Maureen Dowd, for the last fair portrait of a great American president.
No thanks, Obama, for setting the bar of leadership too high for anyone anywhere after him to reach.