Published August 9, 2009
New York Times Magazine
It’s hardly fair, this thing we do to our politicians: when they refuse to depart from their carefully worded scripts, we deride them as wooden, fraudulent, synthetic. When they dare to reveal genuine passion or irreverence, though, we pound away at them for displaying insufficient self-control. Such was the case with Barack Obama’s recent and calamitous news conference, when the president plunged headlong into a debate over race relations.
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