“In the Star Trek prequel, Spock’s father tells him, ‘You will always be a child of two worlds,’ urging him not to keep such a tight vise on his emotions. Mr. Obama is also a control freak who learned to temper, if not purge, all emotion. But as a young man of mixed blood, he was more adept than Young Spock at learning to adjust his two sides to charm both worlds, and to balance his cerebral air with his talent for evoking intense emotion.

“Just as President Spock pledged to make hope and government cool again, JJ Abrams said he wanted his movie to make optimism cool again. Commanding his own unwieldy starship of blended species, with Cheney, Limbaugh and other pitiless Borg aliens firing phasers from all sides, Mr. Obama has certainly invoked Mr. Spock’s Vulcan philosophy of ‘Infinite diversity in infinite combinations.'” — from Maureen Dowd‘s 5.10 Sunday column, titled “Put Aside Logic.”