Barack Obama's got a smile that can light up a newspaper, leave alone television and computer screens.
It's like the smile Elvis Presley used to flash in his movies, looking so dashing and carefree.
It's like the Beatles smiling in their moptop days.
It makes you smile, too.
Now why am I using this picture of Obama boarding a plane? Why, of course, because he was here in Singapore, wasn't he?
Come and gone like this three-minute song --- George Harrison singing Here Comes The Sun. Obama has already reached Shanghai, reports the Wall Street Journal.
I was tempted to sing Good Day, Sunshine like the Beatles yesterday when I saw the local newspaper's front page.
Here in Singapore, the Straits Times front page looked really good yesterday with a big picture of Obama shaking hands with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong with a big smile, with another hand resting on Mr Lee's arm. It was so relaxed and informal, like they were two friends at a party.
Obama seems to take the stuffiness out of state occasions, which was what it was --- they were meeting at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in Singapore to discuss the global economy, free trade, climate change and all that serious stuff. Yet, there he was, looking so happy.
He can turn any occasion into a Kodak moment.
See the New York Times video of the big speech he gave in Tokyo, where he said America and Asia were bound, not separated, by the Pacific.
He walks up to the stage with a smile, waves, has a little joke and a laugh about the Americans present.
And then he talks about his childhood in Indonesia and Hawaii, recalls a visit to Japan with his mother and says:
The United States of America may have started as a series of ports and cities along the Atlantic, but for generations we also have been a nation of the Pacific. Asia and the United States are not separated by this great ocean; we are bound by it.
It's almost poetry.
And he does it so gracefully, carries himself so lightly.
I am, of course, going by what I have seen on television and the internet.
Indelible are the images of him embarking and disembarking from planes. That's why I chose this picture of him. When the aircraft doors shut on him, as they do in television news, it's like a spark going out --- the excitement jetting off.
His own life may be very different.
But that's how the media reports his goings and comings, feeding off his eloquence and charisma.
That's what I missed in Singapore.
He gave no big public speech in Singapore like he did in Japan.
The poet came, but there was no poetry.
This is a land of prose. Singapore has fine, farsighted, highly educated and articulate, upstanding leaders who have transformed the land into an oasis of prosperity.
But Barack Obama is sui generis. Only America could have made him what he is today, as he himself said repeatedly during his election campaign.
I won't discuss his politics, his stand on various issues, which are better understood by pundits.
I am writing about the man I have seen on television and the internet.
I writing about the man I see "riding on a smile and a shoeshine".
That's a quote from Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.
Willy Loman is a failure, utterly unlike Obama.
Yet that's the phrase that comes to mind when I see Obama impeccably groomed, self-assured and smiling.
May he go on riding on a smile and a shoeshine.
For he is Captain America in a bespoke suit, radiating soft power. The kind the world loves best. Elvis Presley, rock' n' roll, Facebook and Twitter.
Obama is breaking the mould in politics, taking the stuffiness out of state occasions, a world leader with his own Facebook page, regular webcasts on the White House home page.
And others are following suit.
America's still in the lead.
