Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, June 17, 2007
WASHINGTON – The busty brunette wriggles around in her pink bikini beside a picture of Barack Obama frolicking in the Hawaiian surf. She continues undulating in red underwear emblazoned with the word “Obama.” And, next to a picture of the senator in a suit, she stands proudly, wearing her own dark suit and a political-helpmate smile.
“Does Barack Obama’s wife have something to worry about?” John Gibson teased on Fox News.
Michelle doesn’t have to worry about “Obama Girl,” the model Amber Lee Ettinger, who stars in the music video sweeping the Web, in which she lip-syncs a song called “I Got a Crush on Obama.” The sultry-catchy lyrics include “You’re into border security/let’s break this border between you and me/universal health care reform/it makes me warm.”
But Obama may have to worry about Obama Girl. For one thing, Amber — whose résumé boasts that she was a “featured cage dancer” in the movie “Uptown Girls” — isn’t even sure she’s going to vote for her video dreamboy. “We’ll see,” she told ABC’s Jake Tapper. “Maybe.”
And for another, Obama has been trying to beef up his image for months — including writing a platitudinous manifesto in the new Foreign Affairs — but the buzz is still about his beefcake side. The Democrat who’s so afraid of looking like a pretty boy is once more drawing attention for his more superficial charms.
When I stopped in a Ralph Lauren shop the other day, the sales staff had just sent off some clothes for an Obama photo shoot for a GQ cover.
At his first news conference after he announced last February, Obama chastised reporters for writing about how good he looked in a swimsuit, and he defended hiring oppo-researchers, saying that it was “essential to democracy” to compare and contrast the candidates on the issues.
So why would his aides send two sneering memos about the Clintons’ finances to reporters this week, on a not-for-attribution condition?
That’s not sleazy so much as stupid.