Still Walking on Clouds

President-elect Obama.

I've gone from getting verklempt at hearing it to merely giggling like a schoolgirl. 

I have the most unusual impulse to write a fan letter to Michelle Obama. I want to nominate her as First Girlfriend. I really feel like she's one of us. I was a newspaper editor, unfazed by celebrity. What has happened to me?

And I nearly swooned at Friday's press conference. He understood all the questions. He answered all the questions. He thought about his answers. He cared about the press corps. I've never enjoyed a press conference so much.

Of course, I worried about how tired he looked and how much gray was in his hair. Afterward, C-SPAN showed a roast of then U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) given by CURE, an advocacy group for curing epilepsy. It took place in 2005 and featured such illuminaries as Hillary Clinton, William Saffire, Chris Dodd and a junior senator from Illinois named Barack Obama. It was so much fun listening to Obama and Emanuel take shots at one another. My favorite was Obama's comment that Emanuel would never get anywhere with that funny name. It was easy to see that the two men have an easy rapport.

Of course, he seems to have an easy rapport with another friend.

It's good to live in America.