What if President Obama wrote an advice column?
Q Dear President Obama, My white shirt has chewing gum stuck to it. Any suggestions?
Vanessa Phelps, Stevenage, Herts.
A Let this be known. Where there is chewing gum, there shall always be a problem.
But let there be no doubt. It is a problem we shall overcome.
Be that gum on the lowermost reaches of the heel of your shoe, or be it on the uppermost reaches of your beehive hair-do, let this be known.
We shall not rest in our struggle for its removal.
The piece is pretty good about picking up on the rhythms and phrasings of Obama's overblown rhetoric, which once passed for eloquence in many quarters. But it misses one important Obama trick -- the ubiquitous "false choice" framing, as in:
"There are those who say we cannot be bothered with chewing gum on our shirts in today's crisis-filled world, and there are those who say we must spend every waking minute determining how to eradicate chewing gum from every shirt on the planet. I reject such false choices perpetuated by those who refuse to act like adults and give up their partisan posturing."
