Obama's loss of sex appeal

When Americans elected Obama, his admirers called him hot, cool, and sexy, says Tunku Varadarajan in The Daily Beast. But "no amount of political Viagra" could bring that back now

Is the President's public sex appeal forever diminished? 

The past 20 months have transformed President Obama from sex symbol to "floundering" politician, says Tunku Varadarajan in The Daily Beast. Unlike John Kennedy's "sleekly glamorous" sex appeal, or Bill Clinton's "cheerily priapic" magnetism, Obama's sexiness was "cerebral, languid, unconventional." And it couldn't survive the BP oil spill, the economy, Iran — or his obvious devotion to his wife. All this "hasn't merely diminished his sex appeal; it has killed it stone dead." Here's an excerpt:

The promise of “otherness” and change that had made Obama so sexy to so many stands shorn of its magic. He has tried to do too much, and as a result has done too

little well: And failure is not sexy. He has given speech after speech to a restless, increasingly irritated nation, like a man trying to “talk” about the relationship when a girl wants to be ravaged; he has been a preachy, professorial windbag—in a word, charmless.

This hasn’t merely diminished his sex appeal; it has killed it stone dead. Obama now looks more like tank-commander Dukakis than the George Clooney of our national narrative.