The man who (accidentally) elbowed President Obama in the face during a pick-up basketball game today — requiring a dozen stitches to the presidential upper lip — has come forward.
Rey Decerega, who is the director of programs for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, issued this statement:
“I learned today the president is both a tough competitor and a good sport. I enjoyed playing basketball with him this morning. I’m sure he’ll be back out on the court again soon,” Decerega said.
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First Lady Michelle Obama, daughters Sasha and Malia and family dog Bo will fly to Hawaii on Saturday for a winter vacation, Politics Daily has learned, while President Obama remains in Washington to deal with Congress.
In a pre-emptive move — remembering the stinging criticism of her lavish vacation to Spain last summer — the East Wing volunteered that Mrs. Obama will be flying to Hawaii in a military version of a business airplane — not the jumbo jet that flew her to the Mediterranean coast in August.
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Trotter, who is plenty black, got 7 percent. In fact, Obama may be lucky he didn’t win. It’s harder to get to the U.S. Senate — or the cover of Men’s Vogue, or the drawing rooms of Manhattan donors — from a black-majority district.
Obama returned to Springfield a loser. The week of his defeat, he sat down to his regular poker game at the home of state Sen. Terry Link, a fellow Democrat from the Chicago suburbs. The same words were on the lips of every pol at that table: I told you so. Obama didn’t need to hear it. He knew he’d blundered.

“He made a lot of mistakes, and he learned,” Link says now. “He forgot who he was. That he’s Barack. He tried to sell to a crowd who wasn’t buying.”

Around that time, Obama also had a soul-searching drink with Miller, the Capitol Fax publisher. He was upset about the way Miller had characterized him, but “he took that criticism the right way,” Miller remembers six years later, “and he could have taken it the wrong way.”
“A lot of politicians, they know that they’re smart,” Miller says. “They know that they’re capable. It messes with their minds. Politics is not a game of qualifications. It’s a game of winning. That congressional campaign really showed that to him.”
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When reporters go one on one with Barack Obama, they end up writing things they’ll regret in the morning papers. It’s a phenomenon called “drinking the Obama juice.” One besotted scribe called him “tall, fresh and elegant.” And the august Atlantic Monthly mooned about Obama’s “charisma, intelligence and ambition, tempered by a self-deprecating wit,” titling its article “The Natural.”

OK, Obama is tall (6 feet 2 inches), intelligent (Harvard Law, two bestselling books), and damn, he’s ambitious (running for president after two years in Congress). But he’s no natural.

As a correspondent for the Chicago Reader, I covered Obama’s 2000 campaign to unseat Bobby Rush, the ex-Black Panther who’s been a Democratic congressman from Chicago’s South Side since 1993. It’s the only election Obama has ever lost. As even one of his admirers put it, “He was a stiff.” You think John Kerry looked wooden and condescending on the campaign trail? You should have seen this kid Obama. He was the elitist Ivy League Democrat to top them all. Only after losing that race, in humiliating fashion, did he develop the voice, the style, the track record and the agenda that have made him a celebrity senator, and a Next President.
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Stress and pressure as a president we couldn’t imagine, it might be the reason why we almost never heard a president relaxing. And this fact might be the first and memorable trip that Barack Obama and his family ever had. Spending weekend to a spectacular national park on the coast of Maine, no doubt hoping this latest jaunt doesn’t fall victim to the Obama family travel hex.

In a mere 18 months on the job, Obama has rolled up an impressive record of diversions, interruptions, delays and outright cancellations of planned family travel all thanks to the nonstop demands of a turbulent presidency.
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