'He Doesn't Need People'

Leave it to Matt Drudge to find the real lede, buried 565 words into the boilerplate of an article on Obama’s frosty relationship with his cabinet:

In the main, Obama relates to his Cabinet the way he relates to the rest of the world. “He’s a total introvert,” the former adviser told me. “He doesn’t need people.”

And this is in Vanity Fair, the sister publication at Condé Nast to Vogue, edited by Anna “Nuclear” Wintour, who has personally saved a seat for you — yes you! — at Obama’s next fundraiser. (With friends like these, no wonder Obama’s deep into Nixon levels of introversion — or, God forbid, worse.) After playing that now infamous video begging for Obamacash in her frosty British accent, Rush Limbaugh quipped yesterday on his show:

WINTOUR:  These two wonderful women and I are hosting a dinner, along with the president, in New York City to benefit the Obama campaign on June the 14th.  It will be a fantastic evening, and you can join us.  We’re saving the two best seats for you, but you have to enter to win.  You can enter right now by going to BarackObama.com/NewYorkNight.  Sarah Jessica and I both have our own reasons for supporting President Obama, and we want to hear yours, so please join us.

RUSH:  Right.

WINTOUR:  But just don’t be late.

RUSH:  Two of you.  Two of you who Anna Wintour wouldn’t give the time of day to if she saw you on the street. In fact, you’d get fired if you looked at her. She’d send the cops after you if you looked at her.  She’s not on the street.  She leaves the building, gets in the car, goes where she’s going. This is such a divorce from reality.  So they’re having this big dinner party for you, two people.  You go to this website, you register, you make a donation, you could get chosen to have dinner so that Obama and Michelle and Anna Wintour and Sarah Jessica Parker can find out what you think.  (interruption) All right, all right, all right, I’m glad you did this.

The staff on the other side of the glass are telling me they don’t know who Anna Wintour is.  They know who Anna Wintour is.  You’re telling me you don’t know who she is?  Well, that picture, I mean she looks like the Beatles out of the sixties, Helmet Head, little Bobby. You really don’t know who she is?  Well, now, I’m a little embarrassed that I do, then.  She’s the editor of Vogue magazine.  Well, that’s why I said it’s a magazine for elites.  It’s a fashion magazine.  Very few people actually read it.  It’s one of these things, the right people read it.  But I guarantee you, whoever’s gonna end up having dinner at her house, this whole thing is a fraud.  Anna Wintour doesn’t want to meet these people.  She’s not interested in what they think.  Neither is Obama or Michelle or Sarah Jessica.

Just watch The September Issue on Netflix to get a sense of (a) how divorced from reality the journalists working in the offices of Vogue (and Vanity Fair) are, and how the Vogue staffers walk on eggshells around the notoriously aloof and brittle Wintour. As Moe Lane added yesterday, the RNC didn’t have to do much to Wintour’s ad to illustrate the oikophobia lurking just under the surface:

You know how people would joke that it was going to be incredibly easy for the RNC to do campaign ads this election season, because they’d write themselves?  That in fact the GOP would just have to show Obama and the Democrats being… Obama and the Democrats?  That we might not even have to do more than cut and paste?

Yeah.  As God is my witness, we were JOKING about that last part.  We didn’t think that our opponents were going to be that dumb.

In a way, with their matching aloofness, Obama and Wintour are the sort of yin and yang of each other — except that, say what you will about her pretensions and hauteur, Wintour and her staff have managed to successfully run a business, and produce a product on a regular basis that appeals to a certain demographic. That’s more than Obama — or his staff — can actually say.

Update: Publicist for the World’s Biggest Celebrity “Suffers Massive Butthurt From Rush’s ‘Barack Hussein Kardashian’ Jab.”

And speaking of not needing people, “President Obama is a selfish, faithless, and soon-to-be friendless embarrassment. Tom Barrett was one of Obama’s earliest, most prominent supporters in the Democratic primaries during 2008 cycle. In fact, Barrett presaged Obama’s eventual 2008 slogan by declaring in 2007 that Obama was the candidate who would ‘create hope in this country.’ Obama repaid Barrett’s early, crucial support by virtually ignoring him during the recall election.”

More: At Power Line, Scott Johnson writes, “Someone with an attitude seems to have gotten hold of the video invitation to the special dinner with a few of Barack Obama’s closest friends. We wrote about it here. That certain someone has mashed it up to good effect:”

Update: Welcome Instapundit and Rand Simberg readers. When you’re done here, click over to the Belmont Club, where Richard Fernandez explores the Vanity Fair article in depth in “A Flock of Flunkies.”