Barack Obama was looking for love in New York City.
The future President, who in 1983 was a recent graduate of Columbia University, chatted up an assistant teacher at a party that Christmas, according to a revealing new book.
And Obama apparently earned Genevieve Cook’s endorsement — they went on a date just days later and she spent that night at his tiny Manhattan apartment.
Obama’s dating life — and love letters — during the years he spent in the city are detailed in “Barack Obama: The Story” by David Maraniss, excerpts of which Vanity Fair published Wednesday.
Using Obama’s writings and ex-girlfriends’ diaries, Maraniss paints a picture of the future leader of the free world as an intense, conflicted and sometimes brooding intellectual.
But it’s those smarts that drew Cook to Obama after their chance meeting at that East Village apartment party.
While sitting on an orange beanbag chair, the two bonded over the time each spent in Indonesia as youths — and when the night ended, they exchanged phone numbers.
“I think maybe he cooked me dinner,” she wrote. “Then we went and talked in his bedroom. And then I spent the night. It all felt very inevitable."
Cook remembers that Obama also used to spend Sundays in his room wearing a sarong, drinking coffee and solving crossword puzzles.
She described the room as a “a mixture of smells that so strongly speak of his presence, his liveliness, his habits — running sweat, Brut spray deodorant, smoking, eating raisins, sleeping, breathing.”
And while Cook wrote about Obama’s “sexual warmth,” she felt he sometimes kept her at arm’s length — and when she said “I love you,” he often responded “thank you” rather than “I love you, too.”
He met his future wife Michelle in 1989.
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