With all due respect, Cecily von Ziegesar, I must dispute your contention that Barack Obama is Blair Waldorf. He is so totally not Blair. I realize that I could not be writing this post at all had you not blazed the trail by authoring the transcendent works of literature on which the meta-popular Gossip Girl television series is based, whereas I have watched said derivative television show exactly once. But perhaps in that relative ignorance I can claim a kind of wisdom you are too enmeshed, too beholden, too blinded by detail and deep-seated loyalties to your own creations, to possess. In that way you would be not unlike ex-Hillary Clinton aide Howard Wolfson, who last month described awakening "Rip Van Winkle"-like after his boss finally conceded to her charismatic young rival "to a world transformed by political currents we had stood against." Wake up and smell the green tea mimosas, Cecily! Like the country, Gossip Girl is bigger than you now.And when you glibly state, pollster-like, that "the truth is, Barack is just not blond enough or vague enough to be a Serena" as if that is just the accepted truth, like "America is not ready for a black president" or "socialism is for Europeans", you are failing to detect the paradigm shift underway that had the "smart money" backing the Serena as Obama metaphor all the way back in Season One:

Not simply because they both share bad-kid pasts. But because Serena, like Barack Obama, dreams of her father. Notice how both are so bludgeoned by the worlds they straddle: the Palace, Brooklyn, Hawaii, Indonesia, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, the television. See their soft, lovely skin, and know that when Barack Obama speaks of ending racial hatred, he is speaking not only as a black man but as a blonde.

I would not have expected you, a clearly sentimental backer of your super-organized little machine patrician Blair, to have endorsed this analogy back then. You see Serena as fundamentally lacking in ambition, a lightweight. But maybe that guise is just the most constructive way of sparing the rest of humanity her kind of pain. Perhaps initially, Serena's equanimity toward that audacious little Sarah Palin of a hussy pawn Amanda seemed off-putting to you. (BTW, "I guess that's like being a community organizer" — that is so totally something Amanda and her fucking BANGS would think she could get away with saying. But I digress.) In any case, Serena swung into action when she had to. As Bill O'Reilly himself said just the other week of Obama after the presidential candidate went on his show and laughed off his suggestion that he ought to be "preparing to use force" against Iran: "He's no wimp. He's a tough guy, that Obama." The same, we learned last week, goes for Serena van der Woodsen. She'll use force when necessary. And when she does, we won't be left wondering if it's just because she's fallen under the pernicious influence of some Karl Rovian dandy eunuch Chuck Bass.