Yesterday, in the shadow of Karl Rove's resignation, GQ debuted their September cover story: A profile of Barack Obama by the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza (though when he wrote the piece he was TNR's Ryan Lizza, though for the purposes of this article I suppose he is GQ's Ryan Lizza. Whoa, dude, Lizza gets around!). In any case, this profile is notable for a few reasons, one of which being that it is the magazine's first political cover since 1992, when GQ featured Clinton & Gore (FishbowlDC has it here. Oh, Mr. Vice President, rawr!).

Other notes of interest include Team Obama's targeting of Hillary Clinton (well, of course), and of his struggle to maintain his authenticity (and audacity, natch) in the face of the scrutiny and the strategy and the eyes-on-the-prize pressure to win ("The danger is that you start becoming so risk-averse that you become canned and scripted, and I'm resisting that, which means there's still gonna be some times when I want to push the boundaries a little bit"), as well as his avoidance of all things populist, which is just as much a fundamental question of Obama's electibility as anything else: "Obama seems to willfully resist the temptation to change his cerebral, sometimes off-putting style."

But the point that seems to have been seized upon so far (cf. Wonkette and the Daily News) is how Obama's aides "struggled for weeks before deciding to agree to let him grace the cover of this magazine." Great quote from David Axelrod:

He's an incredibly magnetic and also photogenic person, and so he lands on the covers of a lot of magazines. And that had its utility at one point, but it can get overdone. This is a really profound guy in many ways, and you don't want him trivialized.

Which means that it makes perfect sense to have him on the cover of a magazine under the coverline "Dress Like A Winner - 50+ Pages of the Best Fall Clothes."

Above the Fray [GQ]
They Fear Obama's Too Hot! [NYDN]
Obama First Pol To Grace GQ Cover In 15 Years [FishbowlDC]

Comments for this post are now closed