What To Do In Denver When You Are Bitter

High Anxiety in the Mile High City
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: August 26, 2008

Sensing that she doesn’t have much longer to bash the Clintons, Maureen Dowd unleashes all the stops. Projecting more than she usually does, she finds bitterness and hatred everywhere.

There were a lot of bitter Clinton associates, fund-raisers and supporters wandering the halls, spewing vindictiveness, complaining of slights, scheming about Hillary’s roll call and plotting trouble, with some in the Clinton coterie dissing Obama by planning early departures, before the nominee even speaks.

And Maureen continues to Cassandra the Subtle Sabotage Strategy my noting that Hillary is trying to keep her base energized.

At a press conference with New York reporters on Monday, Hillary looked as if she were straining at the bit to announce her 2012 exploratory committee.

“Remember, 18 million people voted for me, 18 million people, give or take, voted for Barack,” she said, while making a faux pro-Obama point. She keeps acting as if her delegates are out of her control, when she’s been privately egging on people to keep her dream alive as long as possible, no matter what the cost to Obama.

And Hillary gives her fellow senator, Joe Biden, a compliment even more ambiguous than “clean and articulate”.

Hillary also said she was happy about the choice of Joe Biden because he added “intensity” to the ticket. Ouch.

And when Dowd gets her dander up, the Movies With Maureen® allusions fly. In addition to the Hitchcockian title (and the “high” in “High Anxiety” must refer to the altitude and not any recreational pharmaceuticals), Maureen latches onto the chick-flickie call out by Hillary.

She thanked her “sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits,” and slyly noted that Obama would enact her health care plan rather than his.

But the really big movie moment compares the Clintons to the Corleones.

Obama’s pacification of Bill made his supporters depressed and anxious that he was going to be a weaker candidate than they had hoped and fearful that, as in Obama’s favorite movie, “The Godfather,” every time Democrats try to get away, the Clintons pull them back in.

But the best line from the column is gone. Missing from the current online version is this demonic aside that appeared in the dead trees edition (omitted text in [brackets]):

But this Democratic convention has a vibe so weird and jittery, so at odds with the early thrilling, fairy dust feel of the Obama revolution, that I had to consult with Mike Murphy, the peppery Republican strategist and former McCain guru.

“What is that feeling in the air?” I asked him.

“Submerged hate,” he promptly replied.

[Ah, yes, now I recognize that sulfurous aroma.]

Also gone was a line comparing Bill Clinton to a murderous mythical beast:

[Bill Clinton is brooding in his hotel suite at Brown Palace Hotel, like the outcast Grendel lurking on the outskirts of the town where young Beowulf lived.]

That parenthetical aside had inspired this less than inspired photoshoppery on my part. Now it has been retconned out of existence.

Having witnessed some editorially reining in of Maureen’s more incendiary invective, perhaps one day we will learn how she really feels.