CULTURE: Obama's Not Sexy Anymore?

Barack Obama’s lost something much worse than political capital in his first term: He’s lost his sex appeal, writes Tunku Varadarajan at the Daily Beast. “Not so long ago, Obama’s sex appeal lay at, or near, the top of a list of his attributes that turned America on,” he writes. It was “cerebral, languid, unconventional—and complex, too, in that it was hard to demarcate his sex appeal from his political aura. In other words, he was erotic, not merely sexy.”

But now he’s “had to fill the seductive, pulse-quickening profile with presidential substance,” and it hasn’t gone well. The economy, Iran, Afghanistan, the Tea Party, and more have combined to make him look positively impotent. “Failure is not sexy,” says Varadarajan. In response, Obama “has given speech after speech … like a man trying to ‘talk’ about the relationship when a girl wants to be ravaged.” The country is thus “without a single politician of stature with any sex appeal at all. It’s enough to make one weep.”