The Price of Pride

Mr. Darcy Comes Courting
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: August 3, 2008

Maureen Dowd opens todays column with a paraphrased parody of the premiere paragraph from Pride and Prejudice:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Barack Obama must continue to grovel to Hillary Clinton’s dead-enders, some of whom mutter darkly that they will not only not vote for him, they will never vote for a man again.

Not only is Jane Austen's classic the Movies With Maureen® pick this week, it is the central metaphor of the column. But first we have to fit in Maureen's favorite "B" words (which when discussing Clintonistas is not the b-word you would expect).

Obama met for an hour Tuesday with three dozen top Hillaryites at a hotel here, seeking their endorsement and beguiling their begrudging.

We last saw "beguiling" back when Michelle was fist bumping and before that when he was wearing a raspberry beret. "Begrudging" got a mention just recently (along with fellow b-word bedazzling), but it first showed up back in February when Obama first became threat to Hillary's coronation. And speaking of b-words, Hillary supporters were carrying McCain's water when a foul-mouthed rapper expressed his support for Barack a little too colorfully.

Before the Obama campaign even had a chance to denounce Ludacris, one of the rappers on the senator’s iPod, Hillary Inc. started to mobilize. Susie Tompkins Buell, a former Clinton bundler, told The New York Observer that Obama had to distance himself, given Ludacris’s new song rooting for Obama to “paint the White House black” and calling Hillary the b-word.

And with the bees behind us, we get a rare Triple Alliteration Alert®:

Despite Obama’s wooing, some women aren’t warming. As Carol Marin wrote in The Chicago Sun-Times, The Lanky One is like an Alice Waters organic chicken — “sleek, elegant, beautifully prepared. Too cool” — when what many working-class women are craving is mac and cheese.

Which also leads us into the food-obsessed portion of the column. Not only is Obama now not just The One (a McCainism that the GOP is trying to pin on Dowd), but he is The Lanky One, which makes Hillary the Chubby Pantsuited One.

In The Wall Street Journal, Amy Chozick wrote that Hillary supporters — who loved their heroine’s admission that she was on Weight Watchers — were put off by Obama’s svelte, zero-body-fat figure.

“He needs to put some meat on his bones,” said Diana Koenig, a 42-year-old Texas housewife. Another Clinton voter sniffed on a Yahoo message board: “I won’t vote for any beanpole guy.”

So to summarize, Hillary's PUMA hold-outs are bitter AND overweight. But we came for some silly movie analogies, and here they come:

The odd thing is that Obama bears a distinct resemblance to the most cherished hero in chick-lit history. The senator is a modern incarnation of the clever, haughty, reserved and fastidious Mr. Darcy.

Clever, haughty, reserved, and fastidious sounds like the law firm that will sue Dowd for defamation of character if Obama loses. But she makes her case by copiously quoting the ur-text of chick-lit.

Like the leading man of Jane Austen and Bridget Jones, Obama can, as Austen wrote, draw “the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien. ...he was looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud, to be above his company, and above being pleased.”

The master of Pemberley “had yet to learn to be laught at,” and this sometimes caused “a deeper shade of hauteur” to “overspread his features.”

And she covers haughty with the infamous primary debate put-down.

The New Hampshire debate incident in which Obama condescendingly said, “You’re likable enough, Hillary,” was reminiscent of that early scene in “Pride and Prejudice” when Darcy coldly refuses to dance with Elizabeth Bennet, noting, “She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me.”

And it's not enough to note that Obama is a manor-borne elitist, the American public seems to be having a hard time warming up to him.

If Obama is Mr. Darcy, with “his pride, his abominable pride,” then America is Elizabeth Bennet, spirited, playful, democratic, financially strained, and caught up in certain prejudices.

And Dowd's definition of "prejudice" is far more precise than it was in the Regency era.

In this political version of “Pride and Prejudice,” the prejudice is racial, with only 31 percent of white voters telling The New York Times in a survey that they had a favorable opinion of Obama, compared with 83 percent of blacks.

For the column conclusion, Maureen goes all rhetorical question including this rare interlaced Alliteration Alert®:

So the novelistic tension of the 2008 race is this: Can Obama overcome his pride and Hyde Park hauteur and win America over?

What any fan of the romance genre can tell you is that the heroine never realizes that she truly loves the guy she has been diffident to for two hundred pages until the very last chapter. Only then do they commit to each other. Let's see what page of this drama Election Day falls on.

Whine and Cheese

No Ice Cream, Senator?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 13, 2008

Maureen Dowd unleashes one of her most tortured metaphors in a long time as she goes horticultural on Obama:

Barack Obama may make it to the Rose Garden, but he’ll still be an orchid. For all his attempts to act like a sturdy American perennial, he’s a genuine hothouse flower, and everything he is and does is cultivated.

The Democrats are known as the Mommy Party, but Obama is bucking for Father Of The Year.

He has been trying of late to show off his dad cred — both as a potentially strong dad for the country and as a good dad to his daughters.

In the wake of blowback from his family interview, Obama is indulging in the three re's.

Refining the Iraq stance was fine. Reconsidering the eavesdropping position was sketchy. But he definitely went one “re” too far when he appeared on all three morning shows and revisited his decision to allow his daughters to be interviewed on “Access Hollywood.”

That footage was originally an "exclusive" on Wonkette, but can be seen below:



Dowd gets in a very subtle dig at the vapidness of the interview by saying this:

Maria Menounos, whose questions were as bubbly as her Pantene shampoo commercials, asked Michelle, “What is the most recent romantic thing you’ve done for him?”

She seems to be saying that real reporters don't shill for product. But then real politicians don't pimp their daughters. Maureen puts it more delicately and also gets in an Alliteration Alert®:

He may not have realized it while they were miking Malia and lighting the kids, but it clearly hit him midway through the interview.

And the embarrassing part according to Dowd is further revelations about his rather fussy eating habits. Maureen has been harping on his very non-Joe Voter diet for months, but now out of the mouths of babes, we know that Obama may be as all-American as apple pie, but don't ask him if he wants it ala mode.

He looked frustrated when Sasha revealed that “my dad doesn’t like sweets” and that he preferred “minty gum” to bubble gum. She then began singsonging “Everybody should like ice cream” before pointing a finger at the person who doesn’t: “Except Daddy!”

Which gives Dowd one more alliteration (finding the third is left to the reader as an exercise).

Whether Obama was irritated that he had slipped up and exposed his daughters or was annoyed that his kids were exposing more delicious details about his finicky, abstemious tastes, we’ll never know.

But to Maureen, the problem wasn't the slip-up, but the hand wringing. And she manages to sneak in five more re's.

While it’s a good idea not to repeat the experience, it was overkill for Obama to rebuke himself and recant his decision on the morning shows — right in the midst of other repositioning that spurred a harsh reaction among many supporters.

{snip}

The self-pitying Bill and the self-flagellating Barack both need to take a cue from the Obama girls.

Asked by Ms. Menounos, “What could you guys do that Mommy and Daddy would get really mad at?” Malia and Sasha replied in unison: “Whining.”

But the real question for those that want to label Obama an out-of-touch elitist is what type of brie does he want with that whine?

Too Thin To Win

The Last Debate
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 21, 2008

The day off has refreshed and energized Maureen Dowd and she has reverted to one of her favorite formats: the faux debate where she gets to put words in the mouth of both candidates. The most recent of these tour de forces was the epic drug-lingo round-up.

Today she imagines a mock debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as a verbal shoot-out at the OK Corral. She starts right off with a topical reference to Sweetie-gate, Barack’s off-handed and sexist dismal of a female reporter:

“What do you want? Please, Sweetie, would you just tell me what you want?”

“Don’t Sweetie me, Twiggy. You know what I want.”

The second line is faux-Hillary’s rebuttal which is the first of several references to Barack’s skinniness and/or his eating habits and lack thereof:

Forget it, Bones.

While you’ve been fake-eating and losing weight, I’ve had to stuff myself with all that greasy working-class junk food and chase it with Boilermakers.

Back at ya, Skeletor.

Dowd columns for a couple of months now have had an odd subtext that Obama’s slender frame and dainty eating style have made him too skinny to be a serious candidate. Not too black, liberal, or inexperienced (although the faux-Clinton sock puppet touches on all of these as well), but too thin. Amateur psychoanalysts may discuss this amongst yourselves.

When Dowd pulls out the rhetorical stops, the Alliteration Alerts® just pile up everywhere. This paragraph has three sets just by itself:

I’m 60 delegates away from nomination nirvana. You should stop stalking me. I come down to Florida for a victory lap and you follow me down here and call for a recount. Look what that did for Al Gore. If you show a shred of common sense and take a powder now, the party will put you on a pedestal.

Say “party pedestal powder” three times fast. I dare you. But her greatest assonance achievement is this particular phrase:

“Bill and I don’t need your Netroots arugula moolah. We don’t need your stinking $20 donors. We’ve got Burkle, the Saudis, the Kuwaitis and Kazakh uranium loot on tap.”

Just by itself, "netroots arugula moolah" would be a classic since in three words it touches on both Obama's internet ultra-liberal support base and his upper-class effete lack of he common touch. But the very next line changes targets and serves not only as poetry, but as a precise and concise summary of Clinton fund-raising scandals to come.

There are just so many tossed-off gems here, they are tough to catalog. We get the drug reference throwback:

“Wow, you’re so-o-o generous. Can I also write the plank on switchgrass?”

“I switched from grass a long time ago.”

Switched to what? Does this have something to do with the preternatural thinness?

Then there’s the memory of the Breck Girl who gets a new RudeName®:

And if you think your Secretary of Hairdressing, John Edwards, is going to help, you’re more delusional than I am.

And the racial allusions are thick and heavy as well. We get a great new phrase aimed at redneck voters who say to exit pollers that race IS a factor as well as Hillary's not always subliminal appeals to them:

So cool it with the White Fright.

And we have a great Dowdversion® that invokes the “Barack is a crypto-Muslim” rumors:

You can bet your white turban that I’m not raising the white flag.

The entire column is a laundry list of obscure scandals and campaign kerfuffles that make a Dennis Miller monologue look straight forward. Here is a Kentucky Primary/Derby reference that flows right into a dead race horse metaphor for the Clinton campaign:

I’ve never been a loser. I refuse to lose. I won the West Virginia and Kentucky derbies, and I’m not going to end up like Eight Belles.

But that is followed with a line for FauxBama that could be as sincere a statement as Maureen will ever say to Hillary directly or indirectly:

“Hillary, you’ve been a great candidate, better than your train-wreck campaign. You’re Churchillian in your indomitable tenacity. You’ve inspired women all over the country. In fact, you’ve inspired some of them to hate me. But now it’s time for you to try to muster a gracious exit.”

It’s the sign of a master satirist that she can hide the greatest truths in plain sight.

The Perfect Column

Wilting Over Waffles
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 23, 2008

Every now and then an archetypal example of something comes along. Today’s Maureen Dowd column is like the every column she's ever written all wrapped into one. Lets’ go through the catalog:

Alliteration Alert®: It starts in Wilting Waffles of the title and then goes on to “Caucasian Card” and “embarrassing explosion”.

Movies With Maureen®: It’s just not a Dowd column without at least one trip to the video store. This time Hillary Clinton is a enormous red-headed harpy enraged with jealousy. Project much, Maureen?

The Democrats are growing ever more desperate about the Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.

Emasculating Obama®: This time she puts the words into Hillary’s mouth:

Her message is unapologetically emasculating: If he does not have the gumption to put me in my place, when superdelegates are deserting me, money is drying up, he’s outspending me 2-to-1 on TV ads, my husband’s going crackers and party leaders are sick of me, how can he be trusted to totally obliterate Iran and stop Osama?

But she also delves into her long running obsessive theme of Obama as a food-picking anorexic:

He split the pancakes with Michelle, left some of the waffle and sausage behind, and gave away the French fries that came with the cheese steak.

Silly Phrases From Freshman French®: Why something like “whiny wail” wouldn’t have done here is only John Kerry’s guess:

That was made plain with his cri de coeur at the Glider Diner in Scranton when a reporter asked him about Jimmy Carter and Hamas.

Middlebrow Literary Allusions®: We have two to chose from here. it's good to know that a childless woman of a certain age is familiar with childhood classics:

Before they devour themselves once more, perhaps the Democrats will take a cue from Dr. Seuss’s “Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!” (The writer once mischievously redid it for his friend Art Buchwald as “Richard M. Nixon Will You Please Go Now!”)

And then, with a Brobdingnagian finger-wagging on the screen, he denied it to an NBC News reporter.

Blatant Bill Bashing®: That second quote above is part of a larger random swipe at the Big Dog because not a column goes by without an updated on Bill Clinton's latest step into dog poo:

They also cringe as Bill continues his honey-crusted-nut-bar meltdown.

If there’s one person who knows about crass diversions, it’s Bill. But even for him, it was an embarrassing explosion, capped with some blue language to an aide that was caught on air.

And for those of you that want to know what Bill said that brought out the prude, according to ABC News, he dropped the S-bomb:

Then, after the interview had concluded but the microphone had not yet been turned off, he said, "I don't think I should take any s[hit] from anybody on that, do you?"

The Left-Handed Hillary Compliment®: If nothing else, and truly nothing else, Dowd admires Senator Clinton’s tenacity.

The very fact that he can’t shake her off has become her best argument against him.

Awkward Sports Metaphor®: I can’t tell if Dowd thinks the candidates are playing volleyball or tennis or basketball or darts here.

Despite all his incandescent gifts, Obama has missed several opportunities to smash the ball over the net and end the game. Again and again, he has seemed stuck at deuce. He complains about the politics of scoring points, but to win, you’ve got to score points.

He knew he tanked in the Philadelphia debate, but he was so irritated by the moderators — and by having to stand next to Hillary again — that he couldn’t summon a single merry dart.

All we are missing to make this the perfect Dowd column is a tortured Dowdversion® and a new inventive Rude Name®. Instead we will have to make due with a line that DowdHaters will latch onto out of context and twist back to Maureen:

“You can go on skates. You can go on skis. ... You can go in an old blue shoe.
Just go, go, GO!”

Which is also Dowd's way of unsubtly telling Hillary not to go away mad, just go away.