Move Over, Miley. In Washington, The Obama Girls Are the Latest Craze.

The tween girls of the Washington area have transcended differences of race, class and wealth to reach a single, resounding conclusion: They really, really, really, really want to be friends with Malia and Sasha Obama.

They lap up every shred of information about the first daughters, dream about meeting them and strategize ways to make it happen. Minivan rides and dinner table conversations are dominated by questions about the girls: What’s their favorite food? What kind of dog did they get? Where can I get a coat like Malia’s?

“Sometimes I go up to my room and I just think, ‘I want to meet them, I want to meet them, I want to meet them,’ ” says a desperate Sophie Metee, a fourth-grader at Wood Acres Elementary in Bethesda.

Her mom, Kathy Lindert, just sighs: “Oh, Sophie.”

Lindert has entertained hours of speculation on everything “Obama girls” — what their bedrooms look like, if they like Ledo Pizza and whether they put whoopee cushions on the seats of visiting dignitaries. And this week there was the arrival of the Obamas’ Portuguese water dog, Bo.

“All day long we’ve been looking at pictures of the dog,” Lindert said Wednesday, the day after Bo was introduced to the world at the White House.

In poster-strewn bedrooms around the Beltway, other daughters have been doing the same thing. It struck Lindert as strange at first, but she knows her daughter’s fixation isn’t much different from that of adults across the region who earnestly hope that Barack and Michelle Obama will somehow land at their church or neighborhood dinner party.

Maya Catoe, a sixth-grader from Temple Hills, imagines a friendship blooming through the Girl Scouts.

Maya Laws, from Fort Washington, would rather meet Malia than Miley Cyrus and sleeps with a framed photo of the Obama family in her bedroom.

And Caprice Humphries, a fifth-grader at Beers Elementary in Southeast Washington, writes poems in honor of Sasha and Malia. “Malia inspires me to be proud of myself,” starts a verse titled “My Inspiration.”

Tween girls are expert obsessors, of course, and psychologists say this is a perfect storm to set their minds spinning. The Obama girls are hugely famous in a media-suffused culture that values nothing more than fame. They are adorable and touched with the glittering sheen that envelops their entire family, and yet, as Sophie Metee says, they still seem “like normal kids.”

At the start of adolescence, almost all girls start “looking for role models outside of their own families,” explains psychologist Michael Brody of Potomac. “Whether it’s in terms of friendships or teachers or in terms of identification with certain celebrities — which these kids are — and a certain lifestyle, like living in the White House. It’s a tremendous fantasy.”

And most compelling of all: It seems attainable.

Some Washington girl is going to be Malia Obama’s new best friend, and why shouldn’t it be Sophie? They might meet when the Obamas come to play at Woodacres Park, she schemes, or maybe they’ll be in the same soccer camp this summer.

And if some of Katie McCool’s current classmates end up going to Sidwell Friends, where the Obama daughters attend school, the Arlington fifth-grader could be one friend-of-a-friend away from a White House sleepover.

Soon after President Obama won the election, Marta Gappy, a Woodbridge fifth-grader, made a decision. “She said, ‘I’m going to be [Malia's] best friend. I could be her best friend. She’s moving to Washington,’ ” recalls Marta’s mom, Kaye Gappy. “I thought that was kind of odd, I have to admit. . . . I would’ve assumed Marta would’ve understood the worldliness of this — you know, he’s the president of the United States. And she didn’t. She just didn’t.”

But Marta’s dad works in the military office of the White House, so she gets to go on tours there and, well — it could happen.

There has always been interest in first children, says historian Sanford Kanter, but never with this level of intensity. Chelsea Clinton and Amy Carter both spent formative years in the White House, but before the Internet pushed celebrity mania into its current stratosphere. George W. Bush’s daughters avoided a great deal of media coverage because they were away at college for much of their father’s tenure.

“I think what you’re talking about is something new,” Kanter says. “And it has to do with fame in our culture and the cult of fame in our culture.”

It may also have a great deal to do with President Obama’s popularity in the country and the region — he won an overwhelming majority of Washington area votes and enjoys significant approval ratings. And black girls in the area feel the same sense of pride and connection to the family as their parents. “They’re the first African American family to live in the White House, and I think that’s so cool,” says Maya Laws, of Fort Washington.

Not long ago, Michelle Obama was at a military base in North Carolina reading to preschool children who called out from the floor, “I know Sasha!” “I know Malia!”

“I just think ‘How sweet,’ you know?” the first lady later reflected. “That’s the power of kids connecting with other kids. . . . That little girl knows that there are two little girls like her living in [the White House], so I think for her it creates a connection.”

Still, the White House has aggressively discouraged coverage of Malia and Sasha Obama, asking major news organizations to help protect the girls’ privacy and publish only photos taken at official events. A spokeswoman for Michelle Obama declined to comment on how many fan letters the first daughters have received at their new address.

While fascination with the Obama girls reverberates across the nation — a pair of sisters from Tennessee run the Malia and Sasha Fan Club Web site — it’s especially potent in Washington, where the White House can seem like the center of the universe and its residents the most dazzling citizens.

A group of girls from the Silver Spring Boys and Girls Club asked their leader Barbara Yoffee so many questions about the Obama daughters after the election that she suggested they send letters to their old school in Chicago.

Caprice Humphries, the fifth-grade poet, fantasizes that she will meet the Obama girls after a rally downtown. The connection would be instant, Caprice thinks, because she and Malia Obama “have a lot in common.”

Consider: Caprice and Malia are both in the fifth grade. They both love the Jonas Brothers. They both like to dance. They both have younger siblings, and they’ve both recently been in the market for a new dog. Caprice has decided that she wants a Portuguese water dog like Malia’s.

It’s at age 10 and 11 that girls start latching on to celebrities, says Brody, the psychologist, to inform their own identities — how they want to look, who they want to be. And in the past decade, pop culture has produced an unprecedented generation of female teen idols. It’s as common today for girls to worship Miley Cyrus or Ashley Tisdale as it was for their moms to love David Cassidy or Rick Springfield.

But the obsession with the Obama girls has put parents in a strange position. They can’t buy a concert ticket or a DVD box set to satisfy their daughters’ fixation. Even tickets to Monday’s Easter Egg Roll were unattainable for most.

“There’s not a museum for Sasha and Malia,” says Lindert, mom of Sophie Metee. “Those kids should not be on display, and everybody wants to protect those kids, but yet there’s such a curiosity — from kids in the Washington area, especially.”

Sophie intends to be a professional soccer player when she grows up, or maybe a rock star, but those ambitions are on the back burner right now. At the moment, she explains, “my main, main, main, main, main goal is to meet the girls — the Obama girls. Then the Jonas Brothers.”

What she wants more than anything is a play date. It’d be perfect because she has a little sister, Isabelle, the same age as Sasha. The four of them could play Wii and go on the computer and run around the house playing hide-and-seek. And before it ended, she says, they’d have a game of basketball — “Girls against boy!”

The “boy” in question, of course, is the president.

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After 50 Years, Obama calls for ‘new beginning’ with Cuba

The president signals hope for an end to Cold War acrimony, welcoming Havana’s unprecedented gesture a day earlier.

By Paul Richter and Peter Nicholas
LA Times

April 18, 2009

Reporting from Tobago, Port-Of-Spain, Trinidad, and Washington — The U.S. and Cuba built sudden momentum Friday toward easing half a century of hostility as President Obama met Havana’s willingness to discuss sensitive topics, including human rights, with a declaration that he was ready for a “new beginning” in relations.

One official acknowledged that the Obama administration was caught off guard by Cuban President Raul Castro’s willingness to discuss issues long considered off-limits by the communist leadership. Obama wants Cuba to make the next move, possibly by releasing political prisoners or removing restrictions on the press, the official said.

Cuba’s willingness to talk does not mean it is willing to change policies. But the rhetorical exchange was the most hopeful sign in years of a thawing in relations between the two countries. The possibility of change was emphasized by a friendly greeting between Obama and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a longtime U.S. critic and supporter of Cuba.

Obama and Chavez were among the leaders attending the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, a gathering of 34 democratically elected leaders from the Western Hemisphere. The two presidents shook hands and smiled broadly at each other.

The flurry of overtures represented the latest in the diplomatic choreography since the election of Obama. The U.S. president has called for a new openness with Cuba and has begun easing restrictions on contacts with the island.

Castro responded Thursday at a meeting of leftist leaders in Venezuela.

“We are willing to discuss everything — human rights, freedom of press, political prisoners, everything, everything, everything they want to talk about,” Castro said. “We could be wrong, we admit it. We’re human.”

Obama, in opening remarks at the summit Friday, spoke of the relationship between the two countries.

“The United States seeks a new beginning with Cuba,” Obama said. “Over the past two years, I have indicated — and I repeat today — that I am prepared to have my administration engage with the Cuban government on a wide range of issues — from human rights, free speech, and democratic reform to drugs, migration and economic issues.”

Analysts and lawmakers who favor expanded U.S. contact with Cuba cautioned that at least three attempts in the last 35 years to relax tensions collapsed in acrimony.

But Castro’s explicit offer to discuss issues such as political prisoners and human rights with U.S. officials was apparently a first for a top Cuban official, and White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama administration officials were “particularly struck” by that concession.

Arriving at the Summit of the Americas, Obama approached Chavez as leaders waited in line to enter a reception. The two spoke about changing their countries’ relationship, Chavez’s office said in a statement, which a senior Obama administration official did not dispute.

During his opening remarks, Obama did not say he would seek to end the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba. But he indicated an openness to shift U.S. policies, pointing to his decision this week to ease travel and financial restrictions on Cuban Americans.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking earlier, addressed Castro’s remarks more directly.

“We welcome this overture,” she said at a news conference. “We’re taking a serious look at how we intend to respond.”

The comments point at least to the likelihood of new talks. But the two countries remain stalemated on major issues: Cuba wants the U.S. to lift the embargo and remove remaining travel restrictions, but the Obama administration wants Havana to free political prisoners, improve human rights and adopt economic reforms before the U.S. takes more significant steps.

Nonetheless, experts said that even in the absence of progress on such major issues, U.S. and Cuban officials could take first steps in other areas, such as migration or counter-narcotics efforts.

Cuba was not invited to the Summit of the Americas because Castro is not democratically elected.

But the country’s inclusion in the economic and diplomatic affairs of the hemisphere emerged as a top subject of the three-day summit. Many leaders called for a repeal of the U.S. embargo and greater inclusion of Cuba.

“I don’t feel comfortable attending this summit,” said Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, a onetime leftist rebel leader. “I feel ashamed of the fact that I’m participating in the summit with the absence of Cuba.”

The secretary-general of the Organization of American States, Jose Miguel Insulza, said he would push for Cuba’s inclusion in the organization.

The Cuban government has repeatedly hinted that it is ready for a thaw in relations with the United States, only to clamp down, possibly fearful that improved relations would threaten its hold on power.

Cuba experts and lawmakers cautioned that the latest warming signs could be short-lived as well.

“I think they get spooked whenever we get closer, and they want to push it back,” said Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a longtime advocate of expanded U.S. contact with Cuba. “I’ve never been convinced they want us to fully lift the travel ban.”

Nonetheless, experts were astonished by Castro’s comments.

His willingness to discuss human rights issues and political prisoners represented a major break, experts said.

“That’s the news,” said Daniel P. Erikson, a longtime Cuba watcher at the Inter-American Dialogue, a think tank. “That’s been such a deal breaker.”

Michael Landweber, a former State Department official now at the Partnership for a Secure America, said the Cuba opening posed a “great opportunity to test Obama’s strategy of sitting down to talk” with longtime foes.

Obama had planned to use the summit to assert his commitment to reengage with Latin America and emphasize his intent to listen to other leaders.

Recognizing a sore point among Latin Americans, Obama said the United States no longer wanted to interfere in the affairs of other countries. But at the same time, he asked that other countries not reflexively demonize the U.S.

“I think it’s important to recognize, given historic suspicions, that the United States policy should not be interference in other countries. But that also means we can’t blame the United States for every problem that arises in the hemisphere,” he said. “That’s part of the bargain. That’s part of the change that has to take place.”

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