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...can we just take a month or two to contemplate him the way we might contemplate a painting by Vermeer or a guitar lick by the early-seventies Rolling Stones or a Peyton Manning pass or any other astounding, ecstatic human achievement? Because twenty years from now, we're going to look back on this time as a glorious idyll in American politics, with a confident, intelligent, fascinating president riding the surge of his prodigious talents from triumph to triumph.

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Obama constantly bares his American teeth. His smile alone could power a Third World country.

Gillard blushes, like a high school girl who has, finally, after much bedroom plotting, captured the gaze of the football captain.

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Barack Obama’s arrogance resides in his eloquence — as a writer, thinker, symbol and story. He’s in thrall to the lyric poem of himself, and that accounts for his aloofness and disinclination to engage as deeply as some of his predecessors did in the muck of legislative politics.