What It Really Means When The Media Decides An Obama Official Is "Sexy"

So Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe is getting a job in the White House. Does this mean you might be getting the Administration you voted for, finally?

To venture “yes” to this question would require no small degree of (ahem) audacity. Larry Summers hasn’t “resigned” yet. And I haven’t read the memoir Plouffe was writing while he was not working in the first year of the Obama Administration, but I know it is filled with the sort of jargon and platitudes beloved by MBAs and others who prefer to refrain from words with actual meanings. Paul Volcker‘s plan to reinstate Glass-Steagall is a relief, but also, kind of woefully inadequate to rein in a financial landscape so thoroughly infested with special interest vehicles and dark pools and tax shelters and the revolving door of lobbyists and Hill staffers and think tanks and politicos all too ready to trade fairness and transparency for moderately affluent lifestyles rarely more than a couple percentage points as costly as those of the speculators and arbitrageurs whose mega-mortgages and Net Jets accounts they continue to bankroll.

But you know, at least no one is trying to convince us of Plouffe’s undeniable (dubious) “sex appeal” the way they did with Tim Geithner and Peter “Inveterate Multitasker” Orszag. Because I think I have figured it out what it means whenever the press anoints one of those insipid technofratboys the new “Leading Wonk.” It means he is probably so smug and condescending to all he encounters that someone has been forced to plant a bullshit story about his purported “sex appeal” to distract the public from the real source of this supposed “populist’s” inflated sense of entitlement, which is more likely to be something along the lines of:

Orszag, despite his image as a number-crunching technocrat, considers himself an activist. He has always been interested in the intersection of economics and politics, rather than in economics as a purely academic or ideological pursuit. As a high-school student at Exeter, when all his political friends wanted to intern for the liberal hero Ted Kennedy, Orszag went to work for a far less glamorous figure-Tom Daschle.

Yes wow, that guy was slumming it. Plouffe at least is a state school dropout who managed not to leave his wife after they gave birth to a kid two days after the election, so maybe there’s still hope, so to speak.

(And for what it’s worth, the fact that Plouffe’s post-Scott Brown advice to the Dems advises “no bed wetting” suggests he is thinking in little kid metaphors, which is a good sign in people who have little kids. Now, go neglect them and save that socialist agenda, Plouffe!)