Love. It’s the most powerful thing in the world, besides the Large Hadron Collider. For many of us, there exists only a select group of people who we love, such as our family members, our significant others, and our close friends. It is these people with whom we’ve formed deep emotional bonds, often through years of trust and companionship. President Obama, however, has set a much lower bar for who receives his love. Sure, he loves Michelle and the kids and Bo, but he also loves strangers he’s never met or spoken to, and he tells them so. If you’ve watched even a few Obama speeches or rallies, you’ve probably seen it yourself: someone in the crowd shouts “I love you!”, and Obama will invariably respond “I love you back!” Is it possible that Obama doesn’t actually love these people, and is only performing for the cameras? Perhaps, especially when you consider the subtle variations within Obama’s seemingly uniform expressions of love. With nothing else important going on in the world, we’ve identified and categorized these variations for posterity.
