Hawaii: A Cure For ‘Obama Fatigue’…?

US presidential candidate Barack Obama returned to the islands of his birth on Friday and began a much-deserved week-long family holiday. His wife, Michelle, said that you ‘can’t really understand Barack until you understand Hawaii’, reports The Times.

His half-sister, Maya, whom he will be seeing in Honolulu this week, calls Hawaii “such a generally sweet place… you can come back here from almost anywhere and refresh yourself mentally”.

“In his memoir Dreams from My Father, he (Barack) painted a lyrical portrait of his upbringing with Gramps and Toot, the white grandparents who raised him…. ‘Even now, I can retrace the first steps I took as a child and be stunned by the beauty of the islands… the trembling blue plane of the Pacific… the moss-coloured cliffs… the North Shore’s thunderous waves’.

“It sounds the perfect place to cure a dangerous affliction that is becoming known as ‘Obama fatigue’. It is not just that the 47-year-old Illinois senator is weary after a year of campaigning; it is more that America seems to be wearying of too much news about Obama.” More here…

The NYT reports: “Mr. Obama, who is staying at a rented home on the windward, or eastern, side of Oahu, has already visited his 85-year-old grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, twice, played 18 holes of golf and dined with his family at Alan Wong’s, a top Honolulu restaurant…” Read the full story here…

I think one of the reasons for fatigue among leaders, especially in the US, could be that they talk too much, and go on and on…It is obvious that when one talks too much the content gets diluted, and people begin to yawn. I wonder why the leaders can’t be brief and to the point instead of rambling on and on.

Here are some of my favourite quotes on the subject: “They never taste who always drink; They always talk who never think.” - Matthew Prior,Upon a Passage in the Scaligerana

“In general those who nothing have to say
Contrive to spend the longest time in doing it.” James Russell Lowell

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–
Of cabbages–and kings–
And why the sea is boiling hot–
And whether pigs have wings.”
- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (ch. IV)