AP: Obama: Full-on geek or just 'nerd-adjacent?' Some experts contend PE too cool, too athletic, too

Obama: Full-on geek or just 'nerd-adjacent?'
Some experts contend President-elect too cool, too athletic, too normal


A poster of US President-elect Barack Obama as Superman on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, California, one day after Barack Obama won the presidential election.

WASHINGTON - Get ready for the geek-in-chief.
President-elect Barack Obama used to collect comic books, can't part with his BlackBerry, and once flashed Leonard "Mr. Spock" Nimoy the Vulcan "Live Long and Prosper" sign.
That and other evidence has convinced some of Obama's nerdier fans that he'll be the first American president to show distinct signs of geekiness. And that's got them as excited as a Tribble around a Klingon.

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Others see only some geek qualities, qualifying the president-elect as merely "nerd-adjacent." After all, he's an athlete and kind of cool, some experts demur. Still, there's enough there for geeks to celebrate.
Psychology professor Larry Welkowitz of Keene State College in New Hampshire hopefully speculated that there's a shift in what's cool and that "smart can be in. Maybe that started with the computer programmers of the '90s. The Bill Gateses of the world are OK."

The Obama transition team would not comment on the president-elect's geek qualities, even when it was suggested those could be positive. And his old college friends give the geek idea a split vote. While Margot Mifflin, now a journalism professor in New York, said she saw no geeky signs in Obama as a freshman at Occidental College in California, Amiekoleh Kimbrew Usafi recalled it differently, despite the lack of technology back in 1979.
"He's a geek because he was smart," Usafi said, noting that Occidental was a geeky school to start with, billing itself as the Yale of the West. "I remember he would be hitting his books. I would see him in the library. ... There were a lot of girls that liked him because he was cute, but he kept his head in the direction he was going in. I would see him studying all the time."


Barack Obama watches a campaign rally video on a laptop during a flight from Washington to New Orleans on Feb. 6.

Wired magazine first crowed about Obama the geek, complete with five reasons in its GeekDad blog. A lot depends on definition of geek, which to Wired is more a compliment than insult.
GeekDad contributor Matt Blum, a software engineer in Reston, Va., defines geeks as having high intellects, embracing technology, "getting excited about things in the future especially, particularly fiction," having a science viewpoint and being steeped in the geek culture of science fiction and fantasy.

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So a quick geek cultural check for Obama:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28390800/