VIVA AMERICA!

Sorry I was away for so long. I was busy putting the "jive" in "jive turkey."

While we are on the subject of Thanksgiving, I would like to show you why I love America. In the course of oh, about 14 hours and a single mile, I encountered both Kevin Federline and... Barack Obama!



This is KFed on Friday, November 17, at the club Mansion on South Beach, where he was hosting a party. All he did was stand there like this with the bottle in his hand. Now, I think KFed is pretty cute, and that he gets a bad rap, but I will say this: the man sure knows how to blow an opportunity. Not only did he mess up the whole Britney marriage thing, but he did not sing, did not perform, did not play any of his music, did not even speak, and did not in any way use the chance to show the world that he is something other than the former Mr. Britney Spears. And he certainly did not use the opportunity to show the judge why he should have custody of his children.


Now, if you read the New Times last week, you may have seen my piece titled "Barack Obama Is Stalking Me." Here is proof:



Yes, just hours after my KFed encounter, I went to the Miami Book Fair. Who was there? Yes -- ol' B.O. himself. It is hard to get away from him these days. The senator from Illinois is riding this rock-star aura all the way to the bank, and maybe the White House. Outside the theatre where B.O. was to speak, there was a very long line. People had been waiting for four hours to get standby tickets; the line snaked around the block. Now, I went to President Clinton's inauguration, I was at the presidential primaries in New Hampshire in 2000, and I've seen old ladies throw themselves at President Bush. Political fervor is such a funny thing. The unabashed way that people were fawning over Obama -- you'd have thunk you were at a Beatles concert. Here are some of Barack's fans -- a teacher and a promoter of reggae bands. Do they look stoked or what?



These ladies said they like Obama's "vision" or his "ideas" -- but could not say which ideas specifically. For the record, Obama wants to get out of Iraq in stages; he wants a better education system; and he wants health care for all Americans (although I was surprised to hear him say "I still struggle" with the issue of gay marriage or civil unions). He said nothing specific nor disagreeable.

I don't totally trust Obama (he talked about living on "the south side of Chicago"... but did not mention that his house cost $1.65 million), but I did like him (in response to a teenage girl who said she wanted to grow up to be Speaker of the House, Obama said he would tell Nancy Pelosi not to mess anything up before then). 2008 is still along way away, so I'm not going to get into whether Obama is qualified to be president; whether paying for his neighbor's lawn to be mowed counts as a shady real estate deal; whether he has any specific solutions or just looks good on TV; whether Americans are ready to elect a black president; or whether his name sounds too much like "Osama" (I won't even mention that his middle name is Hussein!). But I do know it's kind of cool that we're all even considering electing, as Obama put it, "a black man with a funny name, born in Hawaii of a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas." As he has said, it's hard to believe that he even won election to Congress -- unless you think about that another guy -- "a child born in the backwoods of Kentucky with less than a year of formal education" -- Abraham Lincoln. Like I said... Viva America!