Are You Ready For the Obama Doll?

Dude! You may need to send this one back to the drawing board.

Good Lord, has this guy even seen a photo of Obama?

A German toymaker has paid the ultimate tribute to presidential hopeful Barack Obama by immortalizing him in the form of a collector's doll. But the maker of the mini-Obama admits that it was tricky to get the skin tone correct.

Expert German dollmaker Marcel Offermann has garnered much media attention in the past with his dolls of famous people such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Pope Benedict XVI, the Dalai Lama and Lady Diana. Now he is paying tribute to the latest political figure to make history: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

The Barack Obama doll is available in a limited edition of 999 and costs €139 ($216). The 36-centimeter (14-inch doll) sports a black suit, complete with a Stars-and-Stripes lapel pin, a white shirt and Obama's trademark sky-blue tie. Offermann, who runs a doll hospital in the western German city of Neuss near Düsseldorf, explained that he chose the sky-blue tie because Obama wears it at 80 percent of his campaign appearances. "We originally wanted the doll to have rolled-up shirt sleeves but that wasn't practical," he told SPIEGEL ONLINE Tuesday.

However it was difficult to replicate the attention to detail given to the clothing when it came to the doll's head. Offermann explained that he was forced to adapt an off-the-shelf black doll's head for his tribute to Obama, which is his first attempt at making a black doll.

Offermann did, however, lighten the standard skin color of the doll's head. "We tried to make it even lighter so that it would look more like Obama, but then it didn't look so good," he said. "So we said, let's stick with this skin tone."

He admits that the physical resemblance to Obama could have been closer. "The doll works more on a symbolic level," he said. "It's a symbiosis of the clothing and the fact it's a black doll." Although "90 percent" of the feedback so far has been positive, he admits that "10 percent of people said the doll doesn't look like Obama."

A side-by-side comparison shows the obvious resemblance.


Update: Speaking of Obama, why all the secrecy over his birth certificate?