Imagine my surprise, amusement and satisfaction upon reading an Associated Press story in the Tuesday (12/1/2009) Washington Times entitled “Obama seen not unlike Mr. Spock.”  You see I had been claiming that President Obama resembled a Vulcan for about a year-and-a-half – that is long before he was elected president.

The only problem with the A.P. story is that the president doesn’t resemble Spock – he resembles the Vulcan Tuvok from a later iteration of the show.  (Yes, that would be the indescribably terrible Voyager. The show with Captain Janeway and Neelix — the most P.C. of all.  The one with the Indian shaman.  Didn’t the men wear dresses?  Hide the razor blades.  The memories of it are returning.)

Well, Tuvok was played by an African-American actor, Tim Russ, and Russ bears an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Obama.  One eco-Trekkie agrees; go here and see Obama in Tuvok’s uniform.  Or this on Facebook (“Barack Obama Is Actually Tuvok.”  Yes, we have never seen both of them at the same time.)

Lorne Michaels of Saturday Night Live, give Tim Russ’s agent a call and sign him to a three-year two-month contract with a renewal option.  Russ is your dead-ringer Obama impersonator, but he needs to wear the Vulcan ears when playing the President or the gag won’t work.  (Lorne, it shouldn’t have taken this long to figure this one out.)

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On a more serious note, this Vulcan thing is now having political implications.  So says A.P.’s Seth Borenstein who writes, “President Obama’s Spock-like qualities have started to cause him political problems in real-world Washington. Critics see him as too technocratic, too deliberative, too lacking in emotion.”  No kidding.  (The A.P. article appears to be an attempt to spin Obama’s bloodlessness to be a positive – a nerdy love for science.  It isn’t.)

Obama’s Vulcanism seemed completely obvious to me.  He’s a great orator, but he has none of the warmth of a Ronald Reagan or a Bill Clinton.  They would light up a room when they entered.  Obama’s different.  I was always struck by images of Obama sitting next to some poor shlub in an Iowa diner at breakfast with the other guy looking like he wanted to take his pancakes and run away.  No one-on-one rapport.  None.

That doesn’t make someone a Vulcan, however.  Unfortunately, Obama has a detached, rationalism that is incapable of projecting any empathy.  Combine that with his general demeanor, and you start getting a Vulcan.  Even the patrician Bush the Elder could shed a tear occasionally.  One doesn’t have to go Dick Vermeil to beat the Vulcan tag, but I don’t think I have ever seen Obama come close to choking up.

The greatest example of Obama’s Vulcanism occurred when the president hosted ABC’s propagandistic Health Care Day at the White House.  He told a woman whose 100+ year-old mother had a pacemaker that under his scheme her mother’s zest for life wouldn’t have gotten her the device that kept her alive.  You could almost hear the utilitarian Vulcan maxim: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”  “Your mother’s Death Panel does not approve of pacemaker’s for 100 year-olds.”  “So, we’ll give your mother some painkillers and send her on her way to go die in Vulcan Valhalla.”  (Actually, that’s a pretty close approximation of what Obama did say.)

Who knows how this will all end up, but articles like this one in the Washington Times demonstrate that the public is starting to look at Mr. Obama much differently.  And the media spins on.

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