Off and running
It was a chilly winter for Barack Obama,  politically speaking. For six months, he and his party shivered under  the avalanche that had buried them in November’s midterm election while  Republicans disported themselves on the partisan ski slopes, pausing  only to throw snowballs, some of them dirty, and warm themselves with  nice hot cups of tea. Lately, though, there’s been a change in the  weather. The barometer began to rise on Wednesday, April 27th,  when the Hawaii state health department agreed, per the President’s  request, to bend its rules and release his so-called “long form” birth  certificate. “We’re not going to be able to solve our problems if we get  distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers,” Obama said. “We’ve got  better stuff to do. I’ve got better stuff to do.” What  stuff? Well, by that Sunday, Osama bin Laden had been killed, in  Abbottabad, Pakistan. By last week, Obama’s public-approval rating had  reached sixty per cent, the highest since his sixth month in office. Artículo completo: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2011/05/23/110523taco_talk_hertzberg#ixzz1N0r7hABf