Ford, Nixon, LBJ, Ike, Truman—even the two Bushes—to name other postwar presidents, all count as Real Men in one way or another. Clinton and John F. Kennedy, however, have been the only two postwar presidents apart from Obama whose persona has had an indisputably sexual component—Kennedy’s sleekly glamorous, Clinton’s cheerily priapic. Obama’s sex appeal, while it lasted, was more cerebral, languid, unconventional—and complex, too, in that it was hard to demarcate his sex appeal from his political aura. In other words, he was erotic, not merely sexy. There was something about him that was both clean-cut and revolutionary; and it was no doubt electrifying that many millions of American women were so openly adoring of a black man.

All that steaminess has come to an ignominious end. In office, as his political aura diminished, so did his sexual magnetism. In fact, it was at about the time when the Gulf of Mexico first came to be awash in BP oil that the rig of Obama’s sex appeal collapsed, too. With presidential impotence so plain to behold, no amount of political Viagra could have done the trick…

The promise of “otherness” and change that had made Obama so sexy to so many stands shorn of its magic. He has tried to do too much, and as a result has done too little well: and failure is not sexy. He has given speech after speech to a restless, increasingly irritated nation, like a man trying to “talk” about the relationship when a girl wants to be ravaged; he has been a preachy, professorial windbag—in a word, charmless. This hasn’t merely diminished his sex appeal; it has killed it stone dead. Obama now looks more like tank-commander Dukakis than the George Clooney of our national narrative…