Assuming We Can, We Ask Ourselves, “Are We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For?” And We Sit Back And Think “Yes, Yes We Can, At Least I Think We Can”

If you parsed this any more it would mean nothing, but I think Robert Gibbs means something along the lines of “Bill Thompson is a real man for all men”*:

On Friday afternoon, when much of the political world was transfixed by President Obama’s surprise Nobel Peace Prize, the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, was asked a seemingly throwaway question about the New York City mayor’s race, the last inquiry of a busy news briefing.

“Can you say who, exactly, the president supports in the mayoral race up in the city?” asked a reporter from The Daily News.

Mr. Gibbs at first seemed to mock the question. “New York-centric over there,” he said. “There’s more than one city.”

After a few moments of playful banter, he offered this: “The president is the leader of the Democratic Party, and as that would support the Democratic nominee.”

Who would that be? Mr. Gibbs did not say. But he did manage to invoke another name — Mr. Bloomberg’s.

“The president,” Mr. Gibbs said, “obviously has had a chance to, throughout campaigning and in his time both as a candidate and as a president, to meet, know and work with Mayor Bloomberg, and obviously has a tremendous amount of respect for what he’s done as well.”

When asked later to confirm that the president had, in fact, endorsed Mr. Thompson, a White House spokesman said that he had.

As word of the quasi endorsement reached Mr. Thompson, his campaign scrambled to issue a statement.

It read, “Yes we can in New York City: President Barack Obama supports Bill Thompson for mayor.”

Mr. Thompson rushed to his campaign office in Midtown Manhattan to hold a press conference. He stood at a lectern in a cramped room, beaming. “Let me just say how proud and honored I am to have been endorsed by the president of the United States today,” he said. “Obviously, he thinks I’m going to be the next mayor of the city of New York.”

*As in.