Drinking Martinis With 'Obama Girl'

"I'm Amber," said a petite woman with a cheery smile. She was very very thin and very very tan, though too naturally olive-complected to be called tanorexic, too compactly curvy to be "anorexic." Her white skirt stretched across an ass that was difficult to look away from, except when she smiled and flashed the flawless teeth of a sixteen-year-old cheerleader. It was the Obama Girl, and she was spectacular. "I've got a crush on Obama girl," my friend Crowley said at her sight. "I'm just going to repeat that until funny." We were at Arianna Huffington's apartment, and there was so much free booze everything was funny.

As inconceivable as it may sound to anyone who has marveled over Amber's God-ordained perfection in the role of Obama Girl — the star of the esteemed "I Got A Crush On Obama" series of pro-Barack slow jam videos designed to give cable news outlets something about the presidential campaigns to report on when nothing is actually going on besides the counting of money and realizing that McCain doesn't have any — Amber ALMOST WASN'T OBAMA GIRL. "I almost didn't call them back," she confessed of the creative team behind Barely Political, which produces the Obama Girl songs and found her on Howard Stern.

Amber was not exactly what you'd call politically informed prior to the Obama girl videos. She had never, for instance, voted, not that we asked but you're going to have to trust us on this one. Born in the Amish-y part of Pennsylvania to parents of descent she ticked off as "Italian, Irish, Swedish, German and Native American" (genius question of the night award goes to The Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar: "Oh, do you speak Swedish?" Uh, yeah), she came to New York seven or eight years ago to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology and somehow along the way became Miss Howard Stern. Do you have to be a stripper to do that? Did you ever work at Hawaiian Tropic Zone? Have you ever masturbated to the sight of your own video? You know, with the sound off? These are questions I am ashamed as someone who used to be a journalist not to have asked. Instead I queried, because I wanted to be all cool and shit: "What do people usually ask you?"

"How did I get the job, what do I think of Obama, whether I think it's good for politics, whether I think it's good for women..." she ticked off. I stopped listening. I did not care what she had to say about those things, mostly because, duh, neither did she. And the thing I love about socializing in Washington is that everyone there is smarter than me, and here I was, talking to one of the lone New Yorkers at the party, killing brain cells as usual. I began talking to a brunette journalist from the American Prospect whose card I somehow lost.

"Want another drink?" I asked rhetorically.

"I've got work to do," she replied.

"Oh, me too. Thank god for stimulants!"

"You're not from here, are you?" she replied.

Embarrassingly, she had read the site. Mercifully, Obama Girl was still there to distract her from engaging me in debate on the "Global Cummit."

"She's so tiny," said the brunette journalist. "Celebrities are always so much shorter in person."

Tiny, perhaps, but outfitted in an ensemble that could only be called "not Brooks Brothers" (wait, not true, it could also probably be called "Bebe") did not exactly go unnoticed at the party, because it took place in Washington D.C., where the summer dress code generally ranges from "khakis" to "chinos."

(I for my part, had come to the party in the same jeans and American Apparel tankdress thingy in which I had been sweating profusely since Friday night, but Ms. Sklar had met me in the lobby and shooed me away to a broom closet with a dress that rendered me fairly unnoticeable.)

In New York I think anyone who dresses deliberately is a douche, especially if he is male and the offending store is Barney's Co-op. But in DC when you see a guy in a shirt from Barney's Co-op you pray to high heavens he is not gay. Which he is. Which is why you don't ask.

"Who's that guy?" I asked Crowley of the one specimen of such a man, a tall gentleman with a soft white shirt with thin orange stripes ever so casually unbuttoned to reveal a good-for-Washington tan.

"David Plotz. He writes for Slate."

"Okay, I know that."

"He's one of those guys who grew up in Washington and, like, listened to Fugazi. So he can dress a little, you know, edgier because he's not trying so hard to fit in."

At this point we probably blacked out, but the next thing I found myself conversing with Matt Cooper, one of the very special Washington journalists who had to endure years of hanging out with lawyers because the Bush Administration was really jealous of that hot spy and her muckracking husband Joseph Wilson (who I do not think is hot but Anna does.) Like me, Matt Cooper had just joined Facebook, and received a friend request from the NPR anchor Carl Kassel, even though they are not actually friends. Unlike me, Matt Cooper did not take the opportunity presented by this new internet friendship to write on Carl Kassel's wall:

Moe Tkacik wrote
at 7:23pm on July 15th, 2007
Hello, friend! Um how do I know you? Did we have sex or something? I feel like I would remember sleeping with the wait wait don't tell me guy. Because it would be all "Guess who I had sex with last night?" Wait, wait...

But he was so totally charmed. Um, then I saw Terry McAuliffe and Ana Marie Cox, to whom I did not speak, and Howard Kurtz, to whom I also did not speak, and Amy Argetsinger, a gossip columnist for the Washington Post, who was very nice, and a leading advocate of ignoring Southerners named Thomas Schaller, who was smarter than me, and Rachel Sklar tied a cherry stem with her tongue, and somehow we ended up sitting on the floor with Arianna Huffington, who told me Jezebel was her favorite new thing on the internet, and then we all spooned. Kidding! She couldn't possibly believe that, but you know, they linked to us today and sent us like eighty thousand hits.

Eager to get back to New York, Obama Girl and her handler paid $750 for a car service, which seemed a bit douchey. I left and met up with dumbass Alex Pareene of Wonkette, who couldn't come to the party on account of a "visitor" (yeah, his period!) at the bar The Raven, where the second most popular woman in Washington, Republican daterapist chronicler Angela Valdez, was hiding out. Needless to say, I am still here in D.C.. Let's get drunk!

Actual pictures by someone who is almost as good a photographer as me [Fishbowl DC]

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