OPINION:HE WAS a terrific candidate, professorial but with that flashing grin and a buoyancy that you get from working out in the gym every morning, writes Garrison Keillor.
He spoke well and didn't sound senatorial at all. He relished campaigning. He accepted adulation with genuine grace. He brandished his sword against his opponents without mocking or belittling them.
He was elegant, unaffected, utterly American, and now (Wow) successful, a president-in-waiting, and suddenly America is cool. Chicago is cool. Chicago!!! America threw the dice and we won big.
We elected a black guy with a Harvard degree, the middle name Hussein, and a sense of humour - he said: "I've got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I've got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher." The French minister of human rights said: "On this morning, we all want to be American so we can take a bite of this dream unfolding before our eyes." When was the last time you heard a Frenchman say he wanted to be American?
The world expects us to elect pompous yahoos and instead we have us a young prince from the prairie who cheerfully ran the race and when his opponents threw acorns at him, he just smiled back. Not a golfer - that's for rotund men in yellow plaid pants - he plays basketball.
He'll be the first president in our history to look really good making a jump shot.
He is 47. He loves his classy wife and his sweet little daughters. He looks good in the kitchen. He can cook Indian or Chinese, but for his girls he is not above making mac and cheese. At the same time, he knows constitutional law.
I can't imagine anybody cooler. And as soon as they get over the shock, the Europeans are going to want one too.
Look at a photo of the latest international conference of poobahs and potentates - the big glum Scotsman, that goofball Berlusconi, Putin with his B-movie bad-boy scowl, and Sarkozy, who looks like a district manager for Avis - you put Our Man in that bunch and all eyes are going to be on him.
It feels good to be cool and all of America can share in that, even grumbly right-wingers and blottoheads and beer bellies. Next time you fly to Heathrow and hand your passport to the man with the badge, he's going to see "United States of America" and look up and smile at you.
Even if you worship in the church of Fox, everyone you meet overseas is going to ask you about Obama and you may as well pretend that you like him because, my friends, he is your line of credit over there.
And the coolest thing about him is the fact that back in the early 1990s, given a book contract after the hoo-ha about his being the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review, instead of writing the basic exploitation book he could've written, he put his head down and worked hard and wrote a good book, an honest one, which, since his rise in politics, has earned the Obamas enough to buy a very nice house and put money in the bank. A genuine entrepreneur.
The last American president to write a book by himself, I believe, was Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote The Naval War of 1812, and in my humble opinion, Obama's is the better book for the general reader.
Our hero who galloped to victory has inherited a gigantic mess. The country is sunk in debt. The treasury announced it must borrow $550 billion to get the government through the last three months of the year - that's more than the entire deficit for 2008 - so he is going to have to raise taxes and not only on bankers and lumber barons.
So enjoy the afterglow of the election awhile longer. People in Copenhagen and Stockholm are sending congratulatory e-mails - imagine! We are being admired by Danes and Swedes! And Chicago becomes the First City. The midwest is cool now.
The mind reels. Have a good day. - ( Tribune media services)