Here’s another dispatch from the Vote-from-your-emotions political desk. The headline says it: “Women ‘falling for Obama’”. While some of the “falling” is normal political support, there’s also the dewy-eyed, weak-in-the-knees celebrity gushing too.
You can see it in their flushed-face smiles and hear it in their screams. They say the phenomenon is difficult to describe, but once they experience it they tell their friends, sisters, mothers and daughters, and they come back for more if they can.
“He’s very charismatic. It was a ‘you-had-to-be-there’ kind of experience,” said Lolita Breckenridge, 37, after hearing Democratic White House hopeful Barack Obama address a packed rally at the University of Maryland on Monday.
A dedicated supporter, she brought two of her friends to hear the Illinois senator deliver one of his much-talked-about speeches.
“Not too much of the speech was new to me,” she admitted. “But hearing him live…” she trailed off, shaking her head and grinning.
And from his reaction, he’s just eating it up: “He did not flinch when women screamed as he was in mid-sentence, and even broke off once to answer a female’s cry of ‘I love you Obama!’ with a reassuring: ‘I love you back.’”
I wonder, though, how long this sort of thing will carry him through. Will Obama the Rock Star and Obama the Messiah have the staying power to make it all the way through November? I’d like to think the American electorate is smarter than that.
