Eye Of The Tiger

Rocky: I can't do it.
Adrian: What?
Rocky: I can't beat him.
Adrian: Apollo?
Rocky: Yeah. I been out there walkin' around, thinkin'. I mean, who am I kiddin'? I ain't even in the guy's league.
-Rocky (1976)

The Hillary Waltz
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 2, 2008

Movies With Maureen® has become like shooting fish in a barrel with Hillary Clinton running around comparing herself to Sylvester Stallone. Someone should point out to her that Rocky Balboa the punch-drunk boxer lost in the first movie. With movies out of the way, Maureen Dowd resorts to middlebrow opera call-outs:

Not only does she have a lot in common with Rocky, as she said Tuesday in Philadelphia, but she has a lot in common with another famous character — the Marschallin in Strauss’s bittersweet comic opera “Der Rosenkavalier.”

The Marschallin is a princess married to a Viennese field marshal who has a liaison dangereuse with a younger man, Count Octavian. Though she’s worried about her fleeting youth and the fickleness of men, she instructs the young man on the ways of love and then gracefully sets him free, allowing him to find happiness with young Sophie as a soaring waltz plays.

The opera synopsis includes yet another French lesson that doubles as a hidden movie reference to Dangerous Liasons, either the Roger Vadim or Glenn Close version. We also get The Hillary Waltz which is a sequel to the Nepotism Tango. Maureen does like those old fashioned dance steps. Back in November, she pointed out how Condi let Rummy "waltz away with the occupation". And Dubya and Dad are in an "Oedipal tango."

With the obligatory pop culture references out of the way, she can get on with the main agenda, cataloging Hillary’s faux pas and emasculating the nominee apparent. Time to pull out the pink highlighter once again as Maureen goes for the feminine adverbs and adjectives.

His strenuous and inadvertently hilarious efforts to woo working-class folk in Pennsylvania have only made him seem more effete. Keeping his tie firmly in place, he genteelly sipped his pint of Yuengling beer.

We last heard effete on March 9th as Dowd equated Obama with other unmasculine Democratic losers:

Obama’s multiculturalism is a selling point with many Democrats. But his impassioned egghead advisers have made his campaign seem not only out of his control, but effete and vaguely foreign — the same unflattering light that doomed Michael Dukakis and John Kerry.

But before that, the "e-word" was leveled against John Edwards a year ago in her “Running With Scissors” hatchet job on the Breck Girl.

In presidential politics, it’s all but impossible to put the man into manicure. Be sensitive, but not soft. Effete is never effective.

Dowd is also well known for her obsession with Barack’s attempts to maintain his girlish figure:

At the Wilbur chocolate shop in Lititz Monday, he spent most of his time skittering away from chocolate goodies, as though he were a starlet obsessing on a svelte waistline.

He looked even more concerned when he was offered a chocolate cake with white chocolate frosting. “Oh, man.” he said. “That’s too decadent for me.”

But Dowd can’t stay away from the boxing metaphor and makes this assertion:

Winning has no margin of error, as the Democrats should have learned by now. And the winner gets to decide his or her running mate.

But the ultimate favor Hillary can do for the Illinois freshman is to fight him full-out until the finale and then gracefully release him so he can find happiness with another.

And then, just like the The Cavalier of the Rose, he can move on to the general election by waltzing or skipping or "imitating his daughters’ dance moves by twirling around." But he might want to buy some boxing gloves instead of dancing shoes when he tangles with the Fruitbat in a Dinner Jacket:

Hillary’s work is done only when she is done, because the best way for Obama to prove he’s ready to stare down Ahmadinejad is by putting away someone even tougher.

When the Iranian Anti-Semite in Chief is considered a cakewalk compared to Hillary, that makes her one tough sparring partner.