Local Tomato Lover Sees Barack Obama as a Plump Tomato

When local tomato connoisseur Doug Schroeder took a little time off work to go watch presidential candidate Barack Obama deliver his stump speech in Iowa City yesterday, he wasn’t sure exactly what to expect. After watching the man for a few minutes, he knew that Obama had clinched his support.

“He just looked like the most ripe tomato I’d ever seen up there on that stage. Big, and juicy and round with a bright green stem for a head. That’s exactly the kind of candidate I want to assume the presidency.”

Political pundits claim that this kind of phenomenon isn’t all that rare.

“Because Obama hasn’t had time to be defined by the media during his blindingly rapid rise to super stardom, people can actively decide who they want him to be. It's like he's a blank canvas on which activists of all kinds can paint their aspirations. Or maybe he's a Rorschach Test, where people see what they want to see," said National Journal correspondent Steven Sax, who became just the 1,435 journalist to compare Barack Obama to the famous inkblot personality test since the beginning of 2007.

Sax claimed that some politicians have identities that are pretty much set in stone. “John McCain is a straight shooting maverick, for example; John Kerry is a white Ivy League liberal; Al Sharpton is a quick-witted black man. Well, Obama is a straight shooter, a white Ivy League liberal, a quick-witted black man, and pretty much anything else that people want him to be,” he explained.

Local hippy Mitch Carlson also saw something interesting in the speech, swearing that Barack Obama looked exactly like Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio as he spoke.

“Barack was jamming for like 25 minutes on health care, and taking it in some directions that I didn’t think he was going to go. Then all of a sudden, wham! he started talking about separation between church and state and it was like twice as fast, like everything had been sped up. It wasn’t planned either; I know for a fact that it was all improvisation. Any politician with chops like that has got my vote.”

Obama was also seen variously as the human incarnation of a lollipop, a soccer ball, an unspoiled beach, a suitcase full of cash, a ring of singing children, a glass of cold milk, the Easter Bunny, and a cloudless day.