As Barack Obama walked onstage in St. Paul, Minn., to claim the Democratic nomination Tuesday night, he and wife Michelle hugged and then, gazing into each other’s eyes with knowing smiles, gently knocked knuckles.
He also gave her a playful little pat on the butt, but it was the bump that got everyone talking. "That is the picture!" exulted one poster on the Jack and Jill Politics blog (which offers "a Black bourgeois perspective"). "When I saw them give each other dap, I was like ‘Hell yeah!’ "
Dap, fist pound, whatever you want to call it– it’s definitely something we’re not used to seeing on the national political stage.
"It thrilled a lot of black folks," said author and commentator Ta-Nehisi Coates, who blogs at ta-nehisi.com. Why? Because it’s the kind of gesture that, while commonplace in the African American community, was generally stifled by earlier generations of blacks working their way up into the corporate or political worlds for fears "about looking too black," he said. But Obama "is past that. . . . He wears his cultural blackness all over the place." (Remember his aping of Jay- Z’s "dirt off your shoulder" move in a recent speech?) "It’s liberating to be able to run for president as a black man. . . . Barack is like Black Folks 2.0."
Meanwhile, Karen Bradley, a visiting professor of dance at the University of Maryland, was struck by the "intimacy" of the moment. Bradley, who studies the body language of politicians, said the fist bump seemed more spontaneous and authentic than the hug, which "looked like they talked about it first." While Obama generally has contained gestures and his wife has broad ones, this was a moment "where they both shifted" and mirrored each other, fists close to their bodies. "He’s looking right at her, she’s looking right at him — it’s a partnership, it’s ‘We did it.’ " (More so than the infamous Al- Tipper smooch at the 2000 Democratic convention: "She seemed more invested in it than he did.")

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