Madame Strangelove

A Wake-Up Call for Hillary
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 2, 2008

The last time we saw Dr. Strangelove on Movies With Maureen®, Dick Cheney was Slim Pickens riding the bomb like a cowboy all the way down to Iran. Now Maureen Dowd has recast the movie with Hillary Clinton in the role of the titular madman.

Channeling her inner Cheney, Hillary Clinton dropped a fear bomb, as Michelle Obama might call it, implying in a new ad that if her opponent is elected, your angelic, innocent, sleeping children could die in a terrorist attack.

Only she has the wise head to go nuclear, should that Strangelovian phone call from a power-mad Putin come into the White House at 3 a.m.

But according to Dowd, Clinton looks less like the leader of the free world than the former anchor of Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update (who hilariously told Hillary to play the bitch card):

Her ad shows how composed she would be at the dread moment when she picks up the phone. Her nuke look is feminine, in a tailored camel-colored jacket and gold necklace, yet serious, in Tina Fey black reading glasses.

But the tone of the commercial is not so much Tina Fey as Faye Dunaway:

It’s rather Mommie Dearest for the first serious female contender to try to give the kiddies nightmares.

But at least Barack has morphed from Obambi into Obambi-No-More. It's not clear whether this long-standing staple (but not original to her) of her roster of rude names is being retired or just shelved until the general election:

Obambi-No-More briskly dismissed Hillary’s attempt to cast him as a global ingénue.

Dowd feels that the Clinton campaign is doomed because fear mongering just won’t work. She says the American electorate is too smart for that:

The president took the country to war on his gut, exploited our fears and played the patriotism card to advance his political agenda.

This time, Americans may prefer cerebral arguments to visceral ones. What a refreshing change reality would be.

Hmmm. New York Times policy prevents columnists from explicitly endorsing candidates, but what could Dowd mean by wanting “a refreshing change”? Could that refer to some particular candidate that also wants change. The bigger change is that if Hillary loses big on Tuesday, Maureen won’t have the Clintons to kick around any more. What will she have to talk about then? Other than movies and fashion choices. Some things will never change.