Barack Obama was that college boyfriend you hated.

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So everyone remembers that boyfriend they had in college. I had him. You had him. You know the one I’m talking about.

Back in college, you thought a life of literary intellectualism was infinitely appealing. Because, obviously, you were exactly like that girl in Breathless and you were totally going to get your hair cut really short and wear nothing but striped boatneck shirts and live in a studio in Paris and sell New York Times in English to unsuspecting foreigners who thought they looked smarter with an English newspaper and you were going to date French assholes who may or may not have killed people and always smell like they’ve eaten a pack of cigarettes. Because you were that awesome and intellectual and amazing. And then, one day you look back and realize that that dude you dated wore ridiculous scarves and corduroy blazers was just kind of a dick who liked foreign films and sad things and dumped you in front of his parents. And he totally f***ing looked like Newt Gingrich in the 1960s.

But back to the point. Everyone had that pretentious idiot they dated in college who wrote them poetry and wore cheap cologne and acted like he was way smarter than the rest of the world even though he lived with his parents and got so drunk on weekends he puked on their bathroom carpet.

Yes. I said bathroom carpet.

And Barack Obama was totally that dude.

Today, Vanity Fair released an excerpt from a new biography of Barack Obama by David Maraniss. The excerpt discusses Barack Obama’s first love affair, with a white Australian woman named Genevieve Cook. It’s a telling examination of who Obama was as a young man — and it shows a self-absorbed “internationalist” with delusions of grandeur.

Pshaw. Everyone in college is a self-absorbed internationalist with delusions of grandeur. That’s what college is for. To give you the self-esteem you’ll spend the rest of your life losing. But Barack Obama was truly a piece of work. Not only did he wear Brut cologne and spend his Sundays sitting around his apartment doing the New York Times crossword in a sarong (a sarong, people, like the one your neighbors wear when they’re getting drunk on cheap whiskey on their “verandah”) and say “thank you” when his girlfriends said “I love you”, but he wrote poetry to his college girlfriend (who may or may not have existed as more than a “composite” of all the women he’d ever met and Jane Seymour) that reeked of a rudimentary liberal arts education.

Check this out, people. Because you’re going to need to know what it looks like in case a rogue English professor with tenure totally one day sends it to you and you need to seek cover in the witness protection program or the arms of Vin Diesel.

Moments trip gently along over here. Snow caps the bushes in unexpected ways, birds shoot and spin like balls of sound. My feet hum over the dry walks. A storm smoothes [sic] the sky, impounding the city lights, returning to us a dull yellow glow. I run every other day at the small indoor track [at Columbia] which slants slightly upward like a plate; I stretch long and slow, twist and shake, the fatigue, the inertia finding home in different parts of the body. I check the time and growl—aargh!—and tumble onto the wheel. And bodies crowd and give off heat, some people are in front and you can hear the patter or plod of the steps behind. You look down to watch your feet, neat unified steps, and you throw back your arms and run after people, and run from them and with them, and sometimes someone will shadow your pace, step for step, and you can hear the person puffing, a different puff than yours, and on a good day they’ll come up alongside and thank you for a good run, for keeping a good pace, and you nod and keep going on your way, but you’re pretty pleased, and your stride gets lighter, the slumber slipping off behind you, into the wake of the past.

He seriously stole this from a Woody Allen movie. And not even like, Manhattan, or one of the good ones. This can’t be for real. I would totally write this drunk on a “chalkboard wall” and forget about it until the morning and then freak out. Did someone hold a gun to his head and force him to assume nearly every pretentious cliche in existence? This could only be worse if he were bemoaning the distresses of the artistic life and the horrific nature of humanity.

Oh wait. He is.

F**k. He’s just a loser, isn’t he? And, Jesus. Those hats.

Well, I suppose the good news is he met a woman who set him straight and stopped him from hanging his ridiculous poetry on the refrigerator and he directed his energy into community organizing for the betterment of humanity or something. The bad news is, I suppose, that he became President and now you totally know exactly how you feel about him.

Yeah.