"I want to nominate a man who's cool on the outside, but who burns for America on the inside."

That's a line that jumped out at me when I was live-blogging Bill Clinton's speech last night, and in the comments here, Yashu probes the disrespect the older President insinuated toward the younger:

... Clinton is one of the masters of backstabbing with the utmost civility.

That Clinton line tonight: "I want to nominate a man who's cool on the outside, but who burns for America on the inside."

Is it just me, or is that not a huge (yet concealed just enough) dis of Obama?

"Cool on the outside" makes me think of the superficiality of Obama's "cool" facade, persona, performance, and the superficiality of "coolness" as a criterion for POTUS.

Clinton frames Obama's "coolness" as an external quality -- only skin deep.

To speak of a quality "on the outside" makes one question what's "on the inside"-- the opposition of "outside" and "inside" suggests the possibility of discordance (between external appearance/ inner essence) and thus deception, illusion... even emptiness. What's on the inside of Obama?

Someone "who burns for America on the inside"! But this is exactly what Obama is infamously suspected to not feel: he may have an American birth certificate, but everything about Obama leads one to question how American he is "on the inside." Everything about his life story and his rhetoric (cf. his international speeches) suggests that Obama is a cosmopolitan internationalist, who holds much of what "America" and "Americans" stand for in contempt.

So in this double compliment I see a double insult! Prima facie, Clinton's sentence doubly recommends Obama for the nomination/ presidency, but in fact it doubly reminds us of reasons why Obama is unfit for the nomination/ presidency.

And (this is the kicker) those very reasons recommend Romney: someone who is so very not cool (thus, doesn't rely on this superficial quality "on the outside" as part of his appeal or his case for election); and someone who (much more believably than Obama) might be said to "burn for America on the inside."

Burning on the inside sounds like sex to me, and that sound is amplified when it's coming out of Bill Clinton's mouth. Clinton's story is permeated with hidden — but not hidden enough! — sexual matters. So if Bill Clinton says that Barack Obama is outwardly cool but he burns on the inside for America, I'm getting the message that Obama is behaving like a gentleman but he really wants to screw us. (And obviously, Obama-haters will say he's been screwing us for 4 years.)