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.

Obamawulf versus Clinton Grendel

The following passage from Maureen Dowd's High Anxiety In Denver column was deleted sometime during the night. The original can still be found here.

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.

Inspired by this now purged description I propose this movie poster:

And if Bill is Grendel, then Obama is Beowulf, the warrior hero that slays the monster:

Coming to a voting booth near you.

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.

Labor Pains

Ich Bin Ein Jet-Setter
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 20, 2008

Every now and then Maureen Dowd has to remind us that she too has a high school diploma by making some allusion to a circa 1965 staple of scholastic knowledge. This week she must have stumbled upon an old copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.

Or she just may have fallen asleep during a Movies With Maureen® Steve Reeves Marathon (and I’m thinking Reeves since I doubt she knows who Kevin Sorbo is), because she is dreaming of Obama as a well-oiled heavily-muscled hero. After all, he does work out a lot:

…back home in Chicago, he worked out three times on Wednesday. An Associated Press report jokingly compared his fitness regime to that of Mr. Universe and marveled at “a distinct lack of visible sweat on the Illinois senator.”

And all this is reminding Maureen of that hunky hero of yore.

Because Obama started from scratch a year and a half ago in his amazing presidential odyssey, he has to swiftly and convincingly perform the political equivalent of the Labors of Hercules.

Cleaning the Augean stables in a single day seems like a cinch compared with navigating the complexities of Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Palestine and Jordan in a few short days.

And while Dowd is well known for her alliteration and movie references, her most distinctive rhetorical device is the Dowdversion®, two parallel clauses with either a twist or a pun connecting the two. We have several classic examples today.

Even if Obama is treated as a superstar by W.-weary Europeans, some Obama-wary Americans may wonder what he’s doing there…

See the alliterative weary/wary change-up. But not all rise to this level of pithy. Some are a little lazier and more obvious:

Since he’s already fighting the perception that he’s an exotic outsider, he can’t be seen as too insidery with the Euro-crats.

The outsider/insidery link is just a little forced. But when she is on top of her game, a Dowdversion® can work on several levels:

Instead of obtaining the girdle of the Amazon warrior queen Hippolyte, Obama has to overcome the hurdle of the Amazon warrior queen Hillary.

This one is a two-fer because we get the rhyming girdle/hurdle pair with the even more alliterative Hippolyte/Hillary comparison which completes the current events tie-in. And it masculinizes Senator Clinton as an Amazon warrior in a completely defensible literary allusional way. Take that Clark Hoyt.

The next Dowdversion® is more explicitly tied to Herculean labors motif:

Instead of slaying the nine-headed Hydra, he must bedazzle three European countries without causing Middle America to begrudge his popularity with a bunch of foreigners.

This one is a particulary significant call-back because begrudge and bedazzle are two of Dowd’s favorite words. In April she admired Hillary for…

…the gusto with which she bedazzled her résumé and then bedazzled some more when she got caught bedazzling.

In February she wrote a column about Obama titled “Begrudging His Bedazzling” (DowdReported here) where she declared:

Bedazzling beats begrudging.

But the use of 'bedazzling' predates the current campaign. Back in 2000, she wrote a column about how boring and soporific Al Gore that was titled “Belaboring, Not Bedazzling”. And 'belaboring' brings us right back (in more than one way) to Hercules.

She only explicitly mentions five of the twelve labors. In addition to cleaning the Augean Stables, slaying the Hydra, and de-girdling Hippolyte ones mentioned above, she also compares speech making to stealing the Apples of the Hesperides. But the labor she uses to invoke Bill Clinton is the most puzzling:

Obama must capture his own equivalent of the Erymanthian Boar, deciding how much to grovel to get Bill Clinton in his corner, and he has to calculate whether the Big Dog will be help or hindrance, or both, as he was with his wife, and how to use him, if at all.

While many might think comparing Bill to a boar (or even a bore) is an apt analogy, in the Dowdverse, Clinton is the Big Dog, which would make the three-headed hell-hound Cerebus the better choice. But explicating that metaphor would cause problems with a family newspaper and would make Maureen struggle to think of what exactly Bill Clinton’s third head would be.

And on that note, we have to sign off by noting that the Kennedy allusion in the title really has nothing to do with the swords and sandals motif of the rest of the column except that since Barack is going to Berlin as part of his travels, it ties Obama in some way to the JFK mystique. By the Washington dateline, we know Dowd isn't risking foreign intestinal distress by being on the press plane. That means Maureen has to stay home and fantasize about Barack coming to our rescue, whip in hand.

The Sexy Librarian

Dreams of Laura
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 9, 2008

It’s summer beach reading time and Maureen Dowd has an advanced review copy of a book the rest of us don’t get to buy until September. The book is the thinly veiled story of the current First Lady.

The cover of this fantasy version of Laura Bush’s life, “American Wife,” is alluring, a woman’s shapely figure in a white gown, with white opera gloves and a diamond ring.
The author is not Anonymous, or Eponymous or Pseudonymous, yet there is the air of a “Primary Colors” stunt about this political roman à clef, which is timed to come out during the Republican convention.

Joe Klein of Time magazine was the "Anonymous" that wrote Primary Colors, the novel not-very-loosely based on the 1992 Clinton campaign. Rather than wince and grimace at the fictionalized sex scenes of the similar Bush-based book, Dowd finds the story vibrant and exciting.

Still, it’s not a salacious tell-all, and words like “smear” and “gossip” are misplaced. It’s a well-researched book that imagines what lies behind that placid facade of the first lady, a women’s book-club novel by a young woman named Curtis Sittenfeld who has written two best sellers, including “Prep.”

Dowd precisely pins down a feeling many people get from Laura Bush’s persona:

You don’t get any fingerprints from Laura Bush. When you look into her eyes during an interview, you feel as if she is there somewhere, deep inside herself, miles and miles down.

But then Maureen awkwardly scrambles for a metaphor that never quite docks:

But there’s only one vessel that can ferry you past Laura’s moat, and that’s fiction. Ms. Sittenfeld has creatively applied her crayons to all the ambiguous blanks in the coloring book.

In defending lightly fictionalized versions of real people, Dowd invokes Flaubert, proving once again that she took high school English:

For “Madame Bovary,” Flaubert partly drew on the real-life story of Delphine Delamare, a village doctor’s unhappy wife who had lots of lovers and a premature and humiliating death.

In addition to Flaubert, she also gets to name check her American Lit reading list:

How could a novelist not be drawn to such a tragedy? It’s easy to imagine all that guilt, shame, conscience, fear, sex and nightmares in the hands of Eudora Welty or Larry McMurtry.

And of course, we get a Movies With Maureen® double feature with both Marion The Librarian and Donna Reed.

And the story of the quiet, pretty librarian who could suffer the fate of being an old maid if not rescued by the dashing hero is a favorite American narrative — from “The Music Man” to “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

But Laura Bush’s real life has a history of tragedy beyond having to be married to Dubya.

During her husband’s presidential runs, many reporters shied away from asking Laura Bush about the freakishly horrible accident she had when she was 17. Hurrying to a party, she ran a stop sign in Midland, Tex., one night on Farm Road 868 and ran into a car that turned out to be driven by the golden boy of her high school, a cute star athlete she was believed to have had a crush on. He died instantly of a broken neck.

Which lets Maureen quote a Laura Bush biographer about the incident:

As Ann Gerhart wrote in “The Perfect Wife”: “Killing another person was a tragic, shattering error for a girl to make at 17. It was one of those hinges in a life, a moment when destiny shuddered, then lurched in a new direction. In its aftermath, Laura became more cautious and less spontaneous, more inclined to be compassionate.”

But going back to the fictionalized version, part of the fun of this type of book is finding the real-life counterparts. Maureen practically cackles over the portrayal of matriarch Barbara Bush:

The Barbara Bush doppelgänger, dubbed “Maj,” for Her Majesty, is as tart as ever. “When she turned her attention to me,” Alice says of Maj, “I always felt, and not in a positive way, as if we were the only ones in the room and total vigilance were required.”

And in prose, we are able to look inside the heads of people we can only watch from the outside in real life.

In the novel, Alice, tormented by the choices her husband has made about the war that she’s stood by, blurts out to a grieving father that she thinks the war should end. In life, we can only wonder how Laura feels.

And since we may never know, we will have to settle for looking into Laura's eyes through the East Wing window.

Manchurian Reruns

The Wrong Stuff
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 2, 2008

With the campaign season past the primary boost phase, we might expect some new metaphors for the new/old left/right campaign we have, but instead we get Movies With Maureen® reruns. First up is The Manchurian Candidate:

In the warped imagination of some on the left and right, this is a race between two Manchurian candidates, the Vietnam Manchurian candidate and the Muslim Manchurian candidate.

We last saw a reference to this Frank Sinatra/Angela Lansbury classic back in February:

Hillary and her top aides could not say categorically that her campaign had not been the source on the Drudge Report, as Matt Drudge claimed, for a picture of Obama in African native garb that the mean-spirited hope will conjure up a Muslim Manchurian candidate vibe.

The twist for this column is that both McCain and Obama are refighting the Vietnam War, only this time it's all interservice friendly fire. Obama has lined up a regiment of veterans to fight by proxy the war hero image of McCain.

Wes Clark joined the growing ranks of troublesome Obama associates when he meowed that just “riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down” is not a qualification to be president. He made McCain sound like a drone aircraft.

And the mere mention of aviation, gets Maureen misty for the good ole days of Pappy Boyington Bush.

This is not even about Obama. It’s the old business of grunts resenting flyboys. Bob Dole made a crack long ago about patrician Poppy Bush flying over the infantry.

But we also get a bonus Movies feature, but again, it's a rerun.

But as Obama offers himself as an avatar of modernity, the horizon fills with Swift boats against the current, and he is, Gatsby-like, “borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

The Great Gatsby is probably just behind Gone With The Wind as Maureen's favorite overworked metaphor. Hillary Clinton was Daisy Buchanan and now Barack Obama is in the Robert Redford role. Let's see if that metaphor plays out as well.

I'm just disappointed that with the Tom Wolfe movie allusion in the title of the column that Maureen didn't dredge up Obama's old reverend and go for a Wright Stuff pun as well. But it's a long campaign. We still have time.

No Happy Ending

She’s Still Here!
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 4, 2008

Part of the drama of the primary season has been watching Maureen Dowd scramble every Tuesday night to stick some news peg into her Wednesday column. Her sportswriter training taught her a valuable tip about writing on deadline: Have all the post-game analysis written before the players take the field. That way all you have to do is stick the scores in the right place and file the article before last call.

The “winner” of the final primary has been a foregone conclusion for a while and pundits have been waiting for the Kabuki theater to play out. The only suspense has been what will Hillary say. And if you were expecting a gracious concession, you’d be disappointed. Here is Dowd’s sigh of exasperation with one final none-too-subtly disguised Obambi:

He thought a little thing like winning would stop her?

Oh, Bambi.

Whoever said that after denial comes acceptance hadn’t met the Clintons.

If Hillary could not have an acceptance speech, she wasn’t going to have acceptance.

And the acceptance line is first of several Dowdversions®. The much better one is:

But even as Obama was trying to savor, Hillary was refusing to sever.

As befits a valedictory farewell, several common Dowd themes are recalled, dusted off, and buffed up. If Bill Clinton is The Big Dog, then Hillary is a yappie Jack Russell Terrier that refuses to admit to being outmatched:

Barry has been trying to shake off Hillary and pivot for quite a long time now, but she has managed to keep her teeth in his ankle and raise serious doubts about his potency.

And potency is just one of a few emasculating asides. Seriously, can anyone else get away with calling Barrack a sistah?

Hillary’s camp radiated the message that Obama was a sucker who had played by the rules on Florida and Michigan, and then reached an appeasing compromise, and that such a weak sister could never handle Putin or I’m-A-Dinner-Jacket.

And Maureen will use that Iranian rhyming slang until her last dying day.

Another common theme is Obama as Magical Negro, although perhaps with a devilish twist:
As he was reaching the magic number of delegates, she was devilishly stealing the spotlight.
We get yet another random Movies With Maureen® reference to Gone With The Wind :

She did not bat her eyelashes at him and proclaim him Rhett Butler instead of Ashley Wilkes.

In order to inject some actual analysis, she posits two theories about Hillary’s against all hope last ditch strategy:

Theory No. 1 is that it’s the Cassandra “I told you so” gambit: She believes intensely that he’s too black, too weak and too elitist — with all his salmon and organic tea and steamed broccoli — to beat her pal John McCain. But she has to pretend she’ll do “whatever it takes,” even accept the vice presidency, a job she’s already had and doesn’t want again, so that nobody will blame her when he loses on Nov. 4. Then she can power on to 2012.

Theory No. 2 is that it’s a “Bad stuff happens” maneuver, exemplified in her gaffe about the R.F.K. assassination, that she figures that at least if she moves a few blocks from Embassy Row to the Naval Observatory, she’ll be a heartbeat away from the job she’s always wanted.

Rather than dwell on the RFK analogy, I prefer to call this the We Are Marshall Strategy. Accidents happen and it is best to be prepared. Either theory relies on Obama listening to the demands that Hillary has earned a place on the ticket. And Maureen has a response:

“It would be,” said one influential Democrat, “like finding out there’s no tooth fairy.”

And Hillary knows all about fairy tales. She just can’t quite catch that happy-ever-after ending. In the meantime she is just sitting in the theater watching the credits roll wondering what happened to her script.

Gut Check

All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it's like being ambushed by a grotesque.

-Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead

Cult of Deception
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 1, 2008

Maureen Dowd reflects on the revelations of Scott McClellan’s book What Happened (which should really include a question mark in the title) and comes up with this conclusion:

They say that every president gets the psychoanalyst he deserves. And every Hamlet gets his Rosencrantz.

Either they had a James Coburn marathon on Movies With Maureen® last night or Dowd has been reading Bush On The Couch by Justin Frank. Either way she concludes that McClellan is Rosencrantz to Bush’s Hamlet, a former friend tasked with betraying the hero. Only in the Shakespearean version, the tables get turned and Rosencrantz gets the shaft.

In the nearly equally famous Tom Stoppard play, Rozencrantz (and mirror image Guildenstern) stumble around cluelessly never quite realizing the significance of the events around them. Either way, calling McClellan Rosencrantz is not quite a compliment.

Behind alliteration, one of Maureen Dowd’s favorite rhetorical devises is the Dowdversion®, a sentence with a parallel structure but with a twist or a pun in it. At the top of the column she tries three with little success.

So now comes Scott McClellan, once the most loyal of the Texas Bushies, to reveal “What Happened,” as the title of his book promises, to turn W. from a genial, humble, bipartisan good ol’ boy to a delusional, disconnected, arrogant, ideological flop.

The first one isn’t bad with lots and lots of adjectival opposites but no real panache. She moves on (while calling McClellan a bit of a dunce) to this one:

Although his analytical skills are extremely limited, the former White House press secretary — Secret Service code name Matrix — takes a stab at illuminating Junior’s bumpy and improbable boomerang journey from family black sheep and famous screw-up back to family black sheep and famous screw-up.

This one is better because the twist is that there is no twist. Dubya always has been and always will be a moronic loser besmirching the proud patrician Bush line. He aspires to be Jeb but only ends up making Neil look like the honest one.

How did W. start out wanting to restore honor and dignity to the White House and end up scraping all the honor and dignity off the White House?

This is the worst of the bunch with the only difference between the two being changing "restore" to "scraping". These three rhetorical retorts are not her best work and you can almost see the scratch-out lines as she keeps trying to come up with one worthy of her reputation.

Instead she goes with her gut and appropriates a recent best seller that insists that first instincts are best and that second guessing is counterproductive.

It turns out that our president is a one-man refutation of Malcolm Gladwell’s best seller “Blink,” about the value of trusting your gut.

Every gut instinct he had was wildly off the mark and hideously damaging to all concerned.

It seems that if you trust your gut without ever feeding your gut any facts or news or contrary opinions, if you keep your gut on a steady diet of grandiosity, ignorance, sycophants, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, those snap decisions can be ruinous.

She ties the metaphorical meaning of gut with the word diet to mention PBJ sandwiches, Dubya’s favorite food. By doing so, she infantilizes Bush and makes him seem like a petulant school kid, which many other kiss-and-tell tomes have done as well.

The faint praise that Dowd throws McClellan’s way is that he finally did the right thing for the most petty of reasons.

We already know What Happened, but it feels good to hear Scott say it. His conscience was spurred by hurt feelings.

In Washington, it is rarely the geopolitical or human consequences that cause people to turn on leaders behaving immorally. The town is far more narcissistic and practical than that.

Dowd then compares him to Colin Powell and George Tenant, two other insiders turned pariah for the crime of leaving the administration inner circle. She claims that they didn’t jump off the Bush bandwagon out of any ideological or philosophical awakening, but because they caught on that they were being manipulated and used. McClellan’s camel straw was that Bush knew that Scooter Libby had dissembled about Victoria Plame and didn’t care.

And that was even before “the breaking point,” when he learned the worst about his idol — that the president who had denounced leaks about his warrantless surveillance program, who had promised to fire anyone leaking classified information about Plame, was himself the one who authorized Dick Cheney to let Scooter leak part of the top-secret National Intelligence Estimate.

“Yeah, I did,” Mr. Bush told his sap of a press secretary on Air Force One. His tone, the stunned McClellan said, was “as if discussing something no more important than a baseball score.”

Clearly, Dowd doesn't think highly of McClellan's skills. And the last Dowdversion® of the day is the most damning:

[Bush] was always wrong, but always very clear.

And that is clearly how Scottie the Press Secretary got duped for so long. He never quite knew what was so wrong about what he did. And he clearly never realized in his gut that he was being used and discarded like a bit player who thinks that the world has grown honest.

Eve Of Destruction

Funny business, a woman's career, the things you drop on the way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you'll need them again when you get back to being a woman.

-All About Eve

All About Eve
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 25, 2008

Maureen Dowd's synopsis of the latest campaign gaffe (using the Michael Kinsley definition of a gaffe as being a politician accidentally telling the truth) goes as follows:

In an interview with The Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, Hillary disagreed that she’s hurting party unity: “My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”

She was talking about the timeline for June, not wishing physical harm upon her rival. But many Democrats were upset. Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina called her words “beyond the pale.”

Maureen's reasonably rational explanation is that like any dedicated athlete, Hillary knows that a contest isn't over until fat lady sings. A true competitor never quits while there is still hope, even if the only hope is the opponent self-destructing.

Maybe a tired, stressed Hillary was giving an unfiltered version of a blunt conversation that she’s had with her husband and advisers about staying in the race, using R.F.K. as an anything-can-happen example, in the same way she fantasizes about Sean Hannity breaking a story that would demolish Obama.

I'm not quite sure what Mount Rushmore and Deadwood have to do with it, but the mention of this week's Movie With Maureen® (and column title), All About Eve implies that perhaps Hillary wouldn't mind giving this hypothetical Obama immolation a little push.

Maybe it was the proximity of Mount Rushmore and Deadwood, but something caused Hillary’s inner Eve Harrington to leap out in South Dakota.

And while many of Dowd's rhetorical flourishes lately have been a little over-the-top and too clever by half, she hits just the right note with this paragraph:

But coming right after the anniversary of the King assassination, right before the anniversary of the Bobby Kennedy assassination, right in the midst of the wrenching news about Teddy Kennedy’s brain tumor, and right in the middle of Billary’s hostile takeover attempt on the vice president’s mansion, the image was jarring.

The confluence with the Kennedys brings back a Dowd's magical metaphor:

Barack Obama has fused two of the most powerful narratives in American history — those of Martin Luther King Jr. and Camelot — and that makes him both magical and vulnerable.

But Hillary is waiting in the wings, the understudy that feels she should have the starring role. In those cases, Dowd suggests that it is best not letting those types of ambitious actors backstage in the first place.

Obama now has the perfect excuse not to pick Hillary as his running mate. She has been too unseemly in her desire to be on the scene if he trips, or gets hit with a devastating story. She may want to take a cue from the Miss America contest: make a graceful, magnanimous exit and wait in the wings.

By now it's nearly reflexive, but there is just a little tinge of the Royalty Metaphor® coupled with an emasculating aside in the final paragraph where Maureen compares Barack with defrocked beauty queen Vanessa Williams.

That’s where the runners-up can be found, prettily lurking, in case it turns out the girl with the crown has some naked pictures in her past.

And while an actual nude picture of Obama may do even more for his support among women than his famous Venus-from-the-sea bathing suit shot, you have to wonder what are the skeletons in the skinny guy's closest that still give Hillary hope.

Hillary The Killer Rabbit

That's the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent
you ever set eyes on!

-Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Is She a Trojan Rabbit?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 11, 2008

As the entire world, including lagging indicator the Time magazine, declares Barack Obama the de facto Democratic candidate, Maureen Dowd moves on to the next phase: picking a running mate. One possibility would be Hillary Clinton. The thought of that makes Maureen rabid.

So how does Obama repay Hillary for running a campaign designed both to unman him and brand him as an unelectable black? Is the most ingenious way to turn the screw by not choosing her as his running mate, or by choosing her?

Dowd wonders if Hillary wants to be thrown in that briarpatch.

But in a return engagement with Obama at the top, could she really wake up every day in the back seat and wish him well, or would she just be plotting? (Fourteen vice presidents have ascended, after all.) Wouldn’t she be, in Monty Python parlance, the Trojan Rabbit behind the gates?

The flaw in the Trojan Rabbit plan was that the Knights of the Roundtable forgot to hide in the rabbit.

BEDEVERE: Well, now, uh, Launcelot, Galahad, and I, uh, wait until nightfall, and then leap out of the rabbit, taking the French, uh, by surprise. Not only by surprise, but totally unarmed!

Monty Python also features the killer rabbit that is a cute little bunny with a ferocious temper.

Hillary has a strange, unnerving effect on Obama, and whenever he is around her, he’s unable to do his best. Probably, it’s because she’s furious, always shaking his hand off her arm, ignoring him, giving him the evil eye and emasculating him, and the Golden One is not used to such rough treatment.

Barack is still the Golden One, which is a promotion from Golden Child. Earlier in the column, Dowd had made a veiled Basic Instinct call-out:

After 15 months of fighting her off, as she veered wildly from bully to victim, as she brandished any ice pick at hand, whether racial, sexual, mathematical or marital (in the form of her Vesuvian husband), Obama must decide the most efficacious means of doing to Hillary what she has been trying to do to him: putting her in her place.

Proving once again that there is no political situation that can’t be compared to an old movie, today’s feature Movies With Maureen® is Pat and Mike.

It’s a similar syndrome to the one Katharine Hepburn’s star athlete and her supercilious fiancé have in “Pat and Mike.”

The fiancé is always belittling Hepburn, so whenever he’s in the stands, her tennis and golf go kerflooey. Finally, her manager, played by Spencer Tracy, asks the fiancé to stay away from big matches, explaining, “You are the wrong jockey for this chick.”

“You know, except when you’re around, we got a very valuable piece of property here,” he says, later adding, “When you’re around, she’s no good, she’s dead, see?”

Dowd is saying that Hillary would knock Obama off his game.

The best way Obama can punish Hillary is to reward himself. He’s no good around her, see?

The best advice for Obama would be to meet any overtures from the Clinton campaign with the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. Then, count to three. No more. No less.

The Scorpion's Nature

"But some things are not forgivable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable! It is the one unforgivable thing, in my opinion, and the one thing of which I have never, never been guilty."

"I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don't tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth."

-Blanche DuBois, A Streetcar Named Desire

Butterflies Aren’t Free
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 7, 2008

I’d been worried about Maureen Dowd. The stress of the campaign seems to have interrupted her Movies With Maureen® marathon, but returning to form, we have Vivien Leigh night. Maureen compares Hillary to Vivien Leigh with her tenacity to do anything to get a role.

In his memoir, the legendary Elia Kazan wrote about directing Vivien Leigh in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” While he did not think that Leigh was a great natural actress, he was impressed that she would crawl through glass to get the role right.

Hillary Clinton may not be a great natural politician, but traveling across the country on her own Bus Named Desire, she has crawled through glass to get the role right.

But Blanche DuBois from A Steetcar Named Desire just doesn’t seem Clintonesque enough to Dowd, so she goes back to the Vivien Leigh costume drama she has used on more than one occasion, Gone With The Wind:

Hillary is less Blanche than Scarlett. “Heaven help the Yankees if they capture you,” Rhett told the willful belle at the start of her rugged odyssey.

And heaven help the Democrats as they try to shake off Hillary. On top of her inane vows to obliterate Iran, OPEC and the summer gas tax, she plans “a nuclear option” during her Shermanesque march to Denver.

And just to prove that she can, Maureen comes up with yet another baffling metaphor. While the column title evokes the Goldie Hawn romantic comedy, Butterflies Are Free, the real source for the column title is this inane comparison:

The Democratic race has been a scorpion and a butterfly in a bottle. Hillary tore Barry’s wings off, and so psyched him out with her silly goading — “Enough about the speeches and the big rallies!” she cried — that he gave up his magical trump cards.

The more famous tale of a scorpion is about the frog and a scorpion crossing a river (as told here by Luis Aguilar Leon):

A scorpion asks a frog for help crossing a river. Intimidated by the scorpion's prominent stinger, the frog demurs.

``Don't be scared,'' the scorpion says. ``If something happens to you, I'll drown.''

Moved by this logic, the frog puts the scorpion on his back and wades into the river.

Half way across, the scorpion stings the frog.

The dying frog croaks, ``How could you -- you know that you'll drown?''

``It's my nature,'' gasps the sinking scorpion.

In this better example, Clinton is the scorpion that will sting Obama and force them both to drown just because that is what she does.

The more familiar Dowd themes get touched on just to keep them current. We have a reference to Obama refusing food:

Even though people at diners kept trying to fatten up Obama — he drew the line at gravy — he looked increasingly diaphanous, like anti-matter to Hillary’s matter.

Which also included the Crossword Clue Or The Week® for 'diaphanous' which is evocative of butterflies and gauzy flightiness. While not completely efeminizing Barack, it will do.

Maureen Dowd is no darling of Media Matters, the left wing Truth Squad and enforcer of political correctness. They have been on her for daring to call Clinton a vampire (here’s my take on that column and a typically rabid Media Matters over-reaction). She seems to be daring them to come after her for quoting an Indiana voter that thinks Barack is Muslim.

In a restaurant in Greenwood on Tuesday, Obama approached an older white guy who waved him off, muttering afterwards to a reporter: “I can’t stand him. He’s a Muslim. He’s not even pro-American as far as I’m concerned.”

Dowd does nothing to dispel the obvious misimpression this voter has. And really that sort of mistake is beyond correction. It is a Big Lie spread among rabid right-wingers that has taken hold in the zeitgeist. I’m just waiting for the accusations that Dowd is a foot soldier and dupe for the McCain campaign for observing that the meme is out there. Hand-wringing liberal outrage in four, three, two, wait for it…

Knocking Dowd for pointing out the weaknesses of Democratic candidates is a fool's game. It's her nature to do so, no matter who ends up drowning. Just like the scorpion.

Bitter Barack Breakup

You're just a mass of prejudices, aren't you? You're so much thought and so little feeling, Professor.

-The Philadelphia Story

Eggheads and Cheese Balls
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 16, 2008

The love affair is over. Sweet, sweet Obama has gone and insulted Maureen Dowd’s working class family and the love affair is over. But she’s not bitter. Just ask her.

I’m not bitter.

I’m not writing this just because I grew up in a house with a gun, a strong Catholic faith, an immigrant father, brothers with anti-illegal immigrant sentiments and a passion for bowling. (My bowling trophy was one of my most cherished possessions.)

And when Maureen is mad, she grabs a tub of ice cream and curls up with some DVDs. We have a full slate of Pennsylvania themed Movies With Maureen® today starting with Hillary as Rocky (see this post for that unsightly image) and The Deer Hunter with Obambi as the titular target.

And as Obama has courted white, blue-collar voters in “Deer Hunter” and “Rocky” country, he has often appeared to be observing the odd habits of the colorful locals, resisting as the natives try to fatten him up like a foie gras goose, sampling Pennsylvania beer in a sports bar with his tie tight, awkwardly accepting bowling shoes as a gift from Bob Casey, examining the cheese and salami at the Italian Market here as intriguing ethnic artifacts, purchasing Utz Cheese Balls at a ShopRite in East Norriton and quizzing the women working in a chocolate factory about whether they could possibly really like the sugary doodads.

Utz is a regional brand of snack foods much beloved by the denizens of the mid-Atlantic. Dowd smirked at Barack’s daintiness around high calorie food before. Especially something as alliterative as a fattened foie gras goose And nothing could be worse for the arteries that a full Philly cheesesteak “wid” onions, not swiss cheese like Kerry’s infamous faux pas.

He hasn’t pulled a John Kerry and asked for a Philly cheese steak with Swiss yet, but he has maintained a regal “What do the simple folk do to help them escape when they’re blue?” bearing, unable to even feign Main Street cred. But Hillary did when she belted down a shot of Crown Royal whiskey with gusto at Bronko’s in Crown Point, Ind.

And we know from a previous column that Dowd admires a candidate that can knock back a shot or twelve. And speaking of shots, Dowd is just as suspicious of everyone else as to Hillary’s newly revealed hunting prowess. She is more likely to be mistaken for Mitt Romney hunting varmits than for any wild west impresario.

Just as he couldn’t knock down the bowling pins, he can’t knock down Annie Oakley or “the girl in the race,” as her husband called her Tuesday — the self-styled blue-collar heroine who reluctantly revealed a $100 million fortune partially built on Bill’s shady connections.

But Obama bad mouthing her kin is not enough to win Maureen over. She takes a Woody Allen movie title and alliterates it over to match the Bosnian dissembling.

Even when Hillary’s campaign collapsed around her and her husband managed to revive the bullets over Bosnia, Obama has still not been able to marshal a knockout blow — or even come up with a knockout economic speech that could expand his base of support.

The Katherine Hepburn/Cary Grant classic gets a double work-out since it relates to both the upscale Philly suburbs and the perils of falling for the wrong guy.

In the screwball movie genre that started during the last Depression, there was a great tradition of the millionaire who was cool enough to relate to the common man — like Cary Grant’s C.K. Dexter Haven in “The Philadelphia Story.”

Obama did not grow up in cosseted circumstances. “Now when is the last time you’ve seen a president of the United States who just paid off his loan debt?” Michelle Obama asked Tuesday at Haverford College, referring to Barack’s student loans while speaking in the shadow of the mansions depicted in “The Philadelphia Story.”

And the spoiled little lamb insinuation inherent in "cosseted" fits so well with the Obambi metaphor. But, the most interesting movie allusion in the column is also the most subtle.

The last few weeks have not been kind to Hillary, but the endless endgame has not been kind to the Wonder Boy either. Obama comes across less like a candidate in Pennsylvania than an anthropologist in Borneo.

Wonder Boy was the name of Robert Redford’s bat in The Natural. And Dowd explicitly called Obama “The Natural” back in January. But Wonder Boys (with an ‘s’) is the title of a film about an out-of-touch drugged-up elitist professor that can’t relate to the real world. This movie starred former Dowd flame Michael Douglas. But she’s not bitter. After all, who can compete with Catherine Zeta-Jones?

And if Barry is developing airs over having to mingle with the cheese-ball eating, gun-toting hoi polloi of Pennsylvania, who can blame Dowd for ditching this guy who just wants to hobnob with effete New York liberal media types. Like Maureen Dowd.

Vice Squad

The Vodka Chronicles
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 6, 2008

Maureen Dowd gets down to analyzing all the remaining presidential candidates and the criteria she uses is who has the most repugnant personal vice. She knocks McCain for not drinking enough, given his hard driving naval aviator reputation.

In his book and last week’s bio-tour, McCain painted himself as a cool bad boy. He was a girl-loving, authority-defying, plane-crashing Top Gun.

McCain’s pals know him as a man who enjoys libations of vodka with little green cocktail olives. Over the years, at dinners with reporters, I noted he had the habit of ordering one double vodka and sipping it slowly. And there was that famous Hillary-McCain Estonian drink-off in 2004, when Hillary instigated a vodka shot contest and McCain agreed with alacrity (even though he later offered a sketchy denial).

She had mentioned the bipartisan Temple of Doom style shot drinking contest on her last Meet The Press appearance back in January. She is worried that the candidate is being whitewashed because it would cut into the use of Rude Names®:

If his campaign is bowdlerizing, let’s hope it stops before he’s a bland McNice.

If McCain seems like the stealth temperance candidate, Hillary, according to Dowd, seems to be seeping under the rug her desire to earn the Absolut endorsement. The second feature of today’s Movies With Maureen® double feature is Election.

Oddly, Hillary, a Tracy Flick Goodie Two Shoes growing up, is the only one who seems to be enjoying her vices… Her campaign doesn’t deny that she likes to kick back, at the end of a long day, with a vodka on her plane.

But it’s Obama that earns her scorn for pretending to down a drink but watering the plants instead.

Everyone may imagine that Obama and his press corps spend all their time quaffing Champagne and celebrating the astonishment of his very being. But the candidate is boringly abstemious — and reporters traveling with him find him aloof. On a 2005 trip to Russia, he priggishly requested that his vodka shot glass be filled with water.

But Obama is not entirely vice free. While his pot and coke days may be behind him, he keeps backsliding on his cancer stick habit. Worse than his addiction to the devil’s weed, he is one of those annoying inconsiderate smokers that throws his butts on your windshield.

Ever since Chicago reporters followed the up-and-coming Obama and saw him flicking his ashes and butts out the windows of moving vehicles, the senator has had a testy relationship with the press about his addictions to cigarettes and littering. (Obama, wrote one reporter on his blog, was “one of those reprehensible nicotine addicts who seems to believe that the world is his ashtray.”)

Dowd’s uncited source is David Mendell as quoted by Eric Zorn. If Hillary is serious about using every weapon against Obama, she needs to appeal to those of us that find highway butt flickers repulsive.

But when discussing vices, a special corner is saved for possible future First Lad Bill Clinton. His White House chubby chasing days may be behind him with hope for an encore dimming, but he seems to be having fun with his Billionaire’s Boys Club. She sees the Big Dog being kept on too short a leash:

Bill Clinton is a cautionary tale about what happens if you surrender too many cherished vices. Curtailed from Burkling, international jet-setting, cholesterol-chowing and race-baiting, Bill has gotten raspy and lost his legendary charm.

“Burkling” is a term coined by Dowd to describe Bill’s habit of hanging around rich guys of flexible matrimonial status like gossip column staple Ron Burkle. In July of 2007, Dowd had an imaginary Hillary warn the equally imaginary Bill:

“Speaking of roving, don’t even think about going on your Hollywood rat pack’s planes after I’m elected,” she snaps. “Strictly Air Force for you, mister, with extra federal marshals. You promised me two terms after your two terms, and I’m not going to get that if you’re caught Burkling or Binging.”

In real news (as opposed to a Dowd column), the Clintons finances are intimately entwined with Burke’s business ventures which are highly dependent on favorable legislation.

In the mean time, Dowd heaves an alliterative sigh of despair about the loss of real bad boys.

Let the Big Dog off his leash. There can be virtue in a little vice.

Since Dowd won her Pulitzer tut-tutting over Bill’s vices, perhaps she has an ulterior motive in hoping for a candidate with a few bad habits to pick on.