Opinion Pajama Boy, An Insufferable Man-Child Pajama Boy, An Insufferable Man-Child

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.

Pajama Boy’s place in Internet infamy was secured as soon as the insufferable man-child was tweeted out by Organizing for America.

He is the face of a web ad that is the latest effort by the Obama team to leverage the holidays for conversation about Obamacare. “Wear pajamas,” the ad reads. “Drink hot chocolate. Talk about getting health insurance. #GetTalking.”


And, sure enough, Pajama Boy is wearing pajamas—a zip-up onesie in classic Lamar Alexander plaid—and drinking hot chocolate. He is in his twenties, sporting hipster glasses he could have bought at Warby Parker and an expression of self-satisfied ironic amusement.

Pajama Boy is about as threatening as Michael Cera and so nerdy he could guest-host on an unwatched MSNBC show. He is probably reading The Bell Jar and looking forward to a hearty Christmas meal of stuffed tofurkey. If he has anything to say about it, Obamacare enrollments will spike in the next few weeks in Williamsburg and Ann Arbor.

Perhaps the goal of OFA was to create a readily mockable image to draw attention to its message, in which case Pajama Boy was a brilliantly successful troll. The right immediately Photoshopped him into the Mandela funeral selfie and emblazoned his photo with derisive lines like, “Hey girl, I live with my parents,” and, “How did you know I went to Oberlin?”

But it’s hard not to see Pajama Boy as an expression of the Obama vision, just like his forbear Julia, the Internet cartoon from the 2012 campaign. Pajama Boy is Julia’s little brother. She progressed through life without any significant family or community connections. He is the picture of perpetual adolescence. Neither is a symbol of self-reliant, responsible adulthood.

And so both are ideal consumers of government. Julia needed the help of Obama-supported programs at every juncture of her life, and Pajama Boy is going to get his health insurance through Obamacare ( another image shows him looking very pleased in a Christmas sweater, together with the words “And a happy New Year with health insurance”).

The breakdown of marriage and its drift into the 30s mean there are more Julias and Pajama Boys than ever. The growth of government feeds off this trend, and at the margins, augments it. The vision of the Obama Democrats, distilled to its essence, is of a direct relationship between the state and the individual without the mediating institutions of family, church and community that are an inherent check on government power.

Tocqueville wrote long ago of the infantilizing tendency of such all-encompassing government. “It would be like the authority of a parent,” he wrote in a famous passage, “if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood.” If you wanted to depict what Tocqueville was getting at in one meme, Pajama Boy wouldn’t be such a bad way to do it.

Never has the difference between what Chris Matthews memorably dubbed the Mommy party and the Daddy party been so stark. Pajama Boy’s mom probably still tucks him in at night, and when she isn’t there for him, Obamacare will be. A less nurturing reaction is, as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie put it in a counter tweet, “Get out of your pajamas.” There’s a reason President Obama is underwater by a 2-1 margin among men in the latest Quinnipiac poll.

For all the ridicule directed at Julia during last year’s campaign, she got at something important: Single women did look to government as a cushion against their economic insecurities. Pajama Boy isn’t so apt. He might be glad to pay more for his health insurance to include maternity benefits he doesn’t need as a blow against gender stereotyping, but most young people will presumably consider Obamacare more rationally and realize it’s a scheme to get them to subsidize insurance costs for older people.

Good luck Pajama Boy, if you hope to talk them out of that.