Is it just me, or is Barack Obama making other men feel inadequate too? I was so happy when he won that I cried like a baby. (Which I'm sure he didn't). And then the next day, the green worm of jealousy wriggled into my breast, and the backlash, the Barack-lash if you will, has been gathering momentum with every passing hour, with each iconic photograph published. It was that one of him leaving the gym in Chicago in his tracksuit, White Sox cap and those absurdly cool shades that sent me over the edge into full-blown envy.

When he was a man in a suit, albeit a very well-cut suit that hung just right, sitting through endless boring meetings and flights and speeches, I could cope. Besides, I wanted him to win so much that normal emotions were suspended. Then he did win, and took it in his long-legged stride, no-drama Obama indeed, and shrugged his civvies on and went to play basketball, and he looked so great. I'd have been furious looking at that picture even if he'd been a nobody, even if he hadn't just become the most powerful man in the world. But he had. The most admired too.

And the most desired. I just went on my favourite quiz website to get away from Obama for a while, and the first thing I saw was a busty model advertising a T-shirt that said “Hot Mama 4 Obama”. But then, fair enough. He's handsome, tall, slim, calm, collected and so cool that even the Secret Service know it, and have codenamed him Renegade (Bush is Tumbler, Ted Kennedy was known as Sunburn). So cool he admitted years ago (other contemporary politicians take note) that he'd taken illegal drugs; he was young, what's the big deal? So cool he needs only five hours sleep a night. I require eight and then another half hour on the office floor after lunch.

He went to Columbia and Harvard, didn't sell out after that, didn't go for the money, instead went to the South Side of Chicago and helped poor people. So, a clear conscience, and now, whatever happens, he's financially set for life. Best of both worlds. If he does two terms, which of course he will, he'll still be only 55 with decades of coining it to follow. He can orate like Demosthenes and write like Aeschylus and unlike your correspondent, he probably doesn't need Wikipedia to tell him who those guys were.

Michelle, my belle

More prosaically, I fancy his wife. That isn't saying much in itself, because I quite fancied Cindy McCain too, in a certain light, and I definitely fancied Sarah Palin, although I suspect that there was a degree of porn-conditioning involved there, but anyway, you don't have to choose. Michelle Obama looked exceptionally hot in that black coat coming out of the Chicago restaurant at the weekend, and in that red dress at the White House, and in the red and black number on election night. She says, incidentally, that Barack has bad breath in the morning. But then, who hasn't? And I bet mine's worse for being tinged with mediocrity.

This charming man

And, of course, he's mixed race, and everyone apart from a few nutters knows that mixed race is cool. You end up better looking for one thing - evolution likes miscegenation. Socially and professionally, being mixed race may well have been a disadvantage in the past, but I'm pretty sure that it isn't now. And even if it was a disadvantage to someone of Obama's generation, the moment he overcame that disadvantage, as he has done repeatedly and emphatically, his mixed race-ness became an advantage, the perception being that he'd come up the hard way, even if, actually, he hadn't, given he had so many other things going for him, the charm, intelligence, good looks etc mentioned above.

He will survive

The only drawback to being Barack Obama is that a fair number of people are going to try to kill him. That's a minus, obviously. The history of presidential assassination attempts indicates it's not a question of if, but when, someone has a pop. Every president since Johnson has been the target of at least one concerted attempt, with Nixon, Ford, Clinton and the younger Bush surviving two each. A pessimist would say that the US is overdue a successful presidential assassination: from Lincoln to Kennedy there were four in less than a century, then not one in 45 years since Dallas. However, an optimist would respond that security has improved, as evidenced by the foiling of the last 11 efforts (although foiling is stretching it in the case of Reagan, who did get hit). Still, the point is, when the attack comes, the probability is that President Obama will almost certainly survive. He is supremely well protected after all. And besides, for all I know, somebody might be planning to kill me, and the first thing I'll know about it is when they do.

Times Recommends

• Resist urge to throw voters red meat
• Slay sacred cows and be candid
• We cannot let these 100 deaths deflect us