Barack Obama tries eating for America

Last Modified: 02 Aug 2008
By: Felicity Spector

OK, maybe McCain was right, Barack Obama really is like Paris Hilton after all.

Witness the sudden crop of articles debating whether he's just too skinny to be Prez. But this isn't from the likes of US magazine or the gossip website TMZ. No, it's the once heavyweight financial must-read, the Wall Street Journal.

Thanks, perhaps to its new owner Rupert Murdoch, the Journal has produced a piece of celebtastic tittle-tattle filled with speculation and Fox News style 'some say that...' to mask the fact that it's simply made stuff up.

Here we are then, with the revelations that the reason the bulk of the American electorate (pun intended) isn't warming to Barack Obama is that he's just too fit, and too thin.

This, the WSJ opines, 'when 66 per cent of the voting age population is overweight and 32 per cent is obese, could Senator Obama's skinniness be a liability?'

The answer, according to the Journal's own poll hidden away at the end of the article, is a big fat No, as 81 per cent of respondents said a thin president was electable after all.But who cares about that old chestnut, accuracy?

The Journal ploughs on, quoting a couple of Hillary supporters who insist the Illinois Senator is too much of a 'beanpole guy' and hey, even Obama's own doctor reporting that he has 'no excess body fat' What a freakin' freak, huh?

The campaign trail, as Hillary Clinton could confirm, is hell on wheels for candidates' diets: endless photo opportunities in diners and ice cream shops and pizza parlours, never a juice bar among them. And then there are the mega caloriefests like the Iowa State Fair with more fried pork than you could shake a stick at.

As Iowa's democratic senator Eugene Fraise put it: "We're not going to vote for them if they don't sit down at our table and have coffee."

Iowa seems to be the place for competitive eating. Hillary herself, who keeps husband Bill to a strict diet of lean chicken, fish and grilled vegetables, had to indulge in a concoction called a Drumstick at one ice cream parlour, described as a chocolate-and-chopped-nut-coated vanilla ice cream on a stick, followed by two more ice cream treats in the same 24 hours.

And it doesn't stop there, says Slate Magazine: 'think hero sandwiches, pizza, calzone, ribs, fried chicken, corn on the cob, nachos, fajita-filled tortillas, pancakes, waffles, kielbasa, pirogi, dim sum, knishes, lox and bagels, and more.'

But astonishingly, Barack Obama managed to lose around eight pounds during the primaries, thanks perhaps to all those workout sessions at the gym. As we've reported here, he's been spotted going three times in one day.

That kind of thing obviously doesn't go down well with the blue collar crowd: back in May Obama was caught admitting he was just too skinny, telling voters in Indiana, 'I'm trying to fatten up'.

To prove it, reporters noted that he'd tucked into scrambled eggs, sausages and biscuits for breakfast, followed by chicken wings and lemon pound cake for lunch. But if you think this whole so-called 'issue' sounds like one big parody, you could just be right.

Way back at the beginning of this year, the satirical 'Onion Network' put out just such a piece.

From satire to the Wall Street journal in just six months? You really couldn't make it up.