Subtle Sabotage Strategy Conspircacy Revealed

Two Against The One
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: August 19, 2008

We haven’t had a good fictional conservation from Maureen since the end of May when Barrack was vetting Bill. Today, Dowd’s tortured paranoid imagination takes us to a secret Senate causcusing closet where McCain and Hillary are prematurely celebrating the defeat of Obama.

They grin at each other as they lift their celebratory shots of brutally cold Stolichnaya.

Vodka being a long-standing Dowd shorthand for the chumminess between the two senators. Here at Dowd Report we dissected the Dowd obsession with drinking here, but the original appearance of the Estonain shot contest was back in October of 2006.

Dowd then notes that McCain’s current campaign echoes the themes that were field tested against Obama in the primaries:

“Oh, John, you know I love you and I’m happy to help,” Hillary says. “The themes you took from me are working great — painting Obama as an elitist and out-of-touch celebrity, when we’re rich celebrities, too. Turning his big rallies and pretty words into character flaws, charging him with playing the race card — that one always cracks me up. And accusing the media, especially NBC, of playing favorites. It’s easy to get the stupid press to navel-gaze; they’re so insecure.”

The article in The Atlantic that detailed strategies the Clinton campaign considered but rejected as being against the pale might as well have been placed on the RNC doorstep wrapped in a bow. It’s no coincidence that these came out in a way that made Hillary look high-minded for not using them while at the same time placing the attacks in the public sphere.

While hammering at Hillary is the main focus of the column, Dowd does slip in two Too Thin To Win™ swipes:

“I’m looking toward the future now, a future that looks very bright, once we send Twig Legs back to the back bench.”

“…My gals know when I say ‘We may have started on two separate paths but we’re on one journey now’ that Skinny’s journey is to the nearest exit.”

And just in fairness, a brief reference to McCain’s shoewear is meant to show that he is not genuine populist, but a rich guy with better taste in pumps than Maureen.

“…While he’s up on his high-minded pedestal, you’ll scoot past him in your Ferragamos.”

Maureen also goes back to themes that she has mined. Compare the following part of this week’s column with a column from 2007:

Looking pleased, Hillary expertly downs another shot. “His secret fear is being seen as a dumb blonde,” she says. “He wants to take a short cut to the top and pose on glossy magazine covers, but he doesn’t want to be seen as a glib pretty boy.”

Here was Obama being discussed over a year ago:

For some of us, it’s hard to fathom being upset at getting accused of looking great in a bathing suit. But his friends say it played into this Harvard grad’s fear of being seen as “a dumb blond.” He has been known to privately mock “pretty boys” (read John Edwards, the Breck Girl of 2004).

It seems FictionalClinton reads OldDowd.

It’s in these fantasy columns that Maureen really lets the wretched rhetoric fly. Perhaps inspired by the Olympic diving competition, she goes for an unheard of degree of difficulty by combining an Alliteration Alert®, a Dowdversion™ and a stale Pop Cultural Reference all into one paragraph.

McCain lifts his glass to her admiringly. “If I do say so myself, while the rookie was surfing in Hawaii, I ate his pupus for lunch. Pictures of him pushing around a golf ball while I’m pushing around Putin. Priceless.”

Let’s look at that in slow motion. Depending on how you count “pupus”, there are seven p-words in there, a rarely achieved level of alliteration. Then you have the “pushing golf balls/pushing Putin” parallelism. And finally “Priceless” evokes tired Mastercard commercial memories. Dowd is clearly going for the Gold in purple prose. But like any good diver, Dowd also adds one final twist to wow the judges:

There’s a knock on the door. Jesse Jackson sticks his head into the meeting.

The non-too-subtle message here is that both erstwhile presidential candidates, the senator from New York and Jesse Jackson, are not to be considered allies of Obama. This column is the most explicit example yet of Dowd advancing what is the Subtle Sabotage Strategy™: Hillary Clinton is running her own 2012 campaign independent of and in opposition to Obama.

Whether Dowd is proved out to a cranky Cassandra or a prescient predictor remains to be seen, but it is clear who Maureen sees as the real enemy of The One. Hint: Her husband helped Maureen win a Pulitzer.

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.

It's A Trap

You think it's over just because I am dead. It's not over. The games have just begun.

- Jigsaw Saw IV

The Monster Mash
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 9, 2008

In every high school flick ever filmed, from Sixteen Candles to Mean Girls, there is a scene in the cafeteria where the heroine is approached by the preternaturally cute big man on campus only to be humiliated in front of the entire school. Here is Maureen Dowd’s description of that script in her mind.

I was covered in barbecue sauce, somewhere over Texas, when Barack Obama loped down the aisle of the plane to chat with reporters.

I felt guilty, because I had been covering his speeches urging parents to make their kids give up chips and Popeyes. I hadn’t yet come to grips with the notion of giving up Popeyes when Obama — slender, chewing Nicorette and perfectly groomed in his crisp white shirt — came upon me. I was splattered with so much red sauce it could have been a scene from “Saw IV.” Not only on my face and hands but all over the candidate’s picture in the U.S. News & World Report I was reading.

But rather than teen comedies, this week’s Movies With Maureen® focuses on horror films. Much to Dowd’s horror, Hillary Clinton has, like an undead psycho in the last fifteen minutes of a slasher flick, sprung back to life to attack the innocent naïve teenagers once again. This is the part of the movie where the plucky hero has to draw on his hidden reserve of machismo and strike down the zombie killer. Never mind that mojo (as opposed to Cujo, the Big Dog) is an Austin Powers call out, Dowd is telling Barack, once again, to man-up.

After losing Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and his mojo, and getting whipsawed around by Hillary and his own chuckleheaded coterie of advisers, he will now have to come to grips with something he has always skittered away from: You can’t be elected president unless you prove you’re tough.

Hillary Clinton reminds Maureen Dowd (and the Wall Street Journal editorial page) of another woman leader that terrorized the country with a band of murderous thugs, Ma Barker. And Ma Barker/Clinton has some easy prey in her scope. It’s the Return of Obambi:

Ma Clinton knows where Obambi’s soft spots are; she knows he likes being petted on his pedestal, that he’s unnerved by her, and that he can never fully accept how shameless she is. What could be more shameless than suggesting to Democrats that John McCain would make a better commander in chief than Obama?

And it’s not just Dowd that views Hillary as a relentless immoral monster lurking in the shadows waiting to attack, the Obama campaign does as well. A gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth. Here is former Obama advisor Samantha Power:

Power, a foreign policy adviser to Obama, told The Scotsman [of the BBC] that Hillary was “a monster” and the BBC that Obama’s Iraq withdrawal plan was merely a “best-case scenario.” (She’s now resigned.)

Ma Clinton pounced, telling reporters in Mississippi, “He keeps telling people one thing, while his campaign tells people abroad something else.”

And like any truly scary monster, Hillary has the power to disguise herself, the better to sneak up on unsuspecting voters.

Hillary successfully recast herself in Ohio as a beer-drinking former waitress. Only after last week’s reversals did the Obama camp raise a louder ruckus about her tax returns. Obviously, Ms. Night Shift does not want to reveal the details of the fortune that Bill Clinton has made, sometimes through dubious associations.

Night Shift was Michael Keaton’s mortuary hooker comedy before he went on to be the not-quite-dead-yet Beetlejuice. Both movies seem to be apt metaphors for the still-on-life-support Clinton campaign. But the real nightmare would be Hillary suckering the Candidate of Hope (that's "hope" as in "the desire and search for a future good", not the Arkansas spawning ground of presidential candidates) into being a zombie-fied running mate:

If he thinks Hillary has cut him down to size lately, he’d better imagine what his life would be like as the Clintons’ vice president.

Maureen is like a horror movie fan yelling at the screen as the clueless hero does something stupid. The audience knows the monster isn’t dead yet and is still lying in wait. Dowd is telling Obama to beware of any power sharing overtures Hillary may offer. As the Saw IV tagline says: It’s A Trap.

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.

BlogWatch: Cattle Prattle

Photo: Ben Sklar/Getty Images

Bob Somerby, noted DowdHater® and author of the Daily Howler accuses Maureen Dowd of mangling a quote Hillary made in El Paso, Texas, last week.

Let's be frank: The Times op-ed page is an intellectual sewer. Yesterday, Dowd was at it again. After some brain-dead Hopi humor, she lodged this hiss-spitting claim against her favorite target: "Hillary says Obama is 'all hat and no cattle.'" But The Dim One was playing her readers a tad. Here's what Clinton actually said, last Tuesday night, in Texas. We'll cite Beth Fouhy's AP report, since the Times didn't even report the comment:

FOUHY (2/13/08): She slipped into a "you all" and criticized Bush, the former Texas governor. "There's a great saying in Texas," she said, "all hat and no cattle. Well after seven years of George W. Bush, we need a lot less hat and a lot more cattle."

Huh! She had criticized Bush—but Obama worked better. So the Times let their crazy girl type it.

First off, the full speech is available on the New York Times website, so there goes that weird slam, but more importantly, is Dowd so crazy as to mix up W and Obambi like that? Let's read the paragraph following that cattle remark and figure out who Clinton is really talking about:

And we're going to sweep across Texas in the next three weeks, bringing our message about what we need in America, the kind of president that will be required on day one to be commander-in-chief to turn the economy around. I'm tested. I'm ready. Let's make it happen. (APPLAUSE) You know, there's a great saying in Texas -- you've all heard it -- "all hat and no cattle." Well, after seven years of George Bush, we need a lot less hat and a lot more cattle. Texas needs a president who actually understands what it's going to take to turn the economy around, to get us universal health care, to save hardworking Americans homes from foreclosure at the abusive practices of the mortgage companies.

The key phrase here is "the next three weeks." Hillary is not running, now or ever, against George Bush; she's running against Barack Obama who she is trying to portray as inexperienced and full of hot air, i.e. all hat and no cattle.

Is Muareen Dowd off-base is implying this spin to the comment. Anne E. Kornblut of the Washington Post was there and reported the event this way:

"You know, there's a great saying in Texas -- you've all heard it, 'All hat and no cattle,'" Clinton told a massive audience here. "Well, after seven years of George Bush, we need a lot less hat, and a lot more cattle." She continued, in an apparent swipe at both Bush and Sen. Barack Obama, the candidate gaining momenum in the Democratic race: "Texas needs a president who actually undersdtands what its going to take to turn the economy around, to get us universal health care."

John Kelso of the Austin Statesman also saw a shot at Obama in those words:

At a campaign stop in El Paso, she took a shot at President Bush, and perhaps Obama, by using the expression "all hat and no cattle." Obama could respond by saying she's "no hat and all pants suit."

Newsweek reported the quote this way:

"There's a great saying in Texas. You've heard it: all hat and no cattle. After seven years of George Bush we need a lot less hat and a lot more cattle," Clinton told the crowd, in a barely veiled swipe at her opponent. "Texas needs a president who actually understands what it's going to take to turn the economy around, to get us universal health care, to save hard-working Americans' homes from foreclosure."

And the well-respected Economist clearly saw the saying as an attack on Hillary's primary opponent:

Her quip on Tuesday night—that Mr Obama is "all hat and no cattle"—will provide the subtext of everything she says.

And the key word there is "subtext." A good candidate never explicitly calls out his or her opponent by name when a well crafted innuendo will do. So, no, Hillary's hat and cattle comment was not explicitly aimed at Obama but only the most blinded partisan would not realize who the jab was clearly aimed at.

The Dark Side And The White Knight

Darkness and Light
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 6, 2008

Not in the least; everybody allows that Lady Sneerwell can do more with a word or a look than many can with the most labored detail, even when they happen to have a little truth on their side to support it.

-School For Scandal, 1777

The Dowd thesaurus had been taken out of mothballs and Heading 421 in particular is burning from the furious page flipping. We can’t get to them all, but let’s get a sampling:

Don’t become so paranoid that you let yourself be overwhelmed by a dark vision.

But her pitch is the color of pitch

Darkness seeking darkness. It’s an exhausting specter, and the reason that Tom Daschle, Ted Kennedy, Claire McCaskill and so many other Democrats are dashing for daylight and trying to break away from the pathological Clinton path.

Note the use of pitch(shill)/pitch(tar), as in "pitch black" and in "tar and feather", giving three levels of allusion. The pathological/{dark} path pair is also well played. We even get an art lesson:

Even though Hillary reasserted her strength, corraling New York, California and Kennedy country Massachusetts, she and Obama will battle on in chiaroscuro.

From Wikipedia:

Chiaroscuro (Italian for clear-dark) is a term in art for a contrast between light and dark.

And according to Dowd, never has the contrast been clearer. And we get a nice Alliteration Alert® AND a new Rude Name® with Diffident Debutante. A nice opposite to Debate Dominatrix.

Better the devil you know than the diffident debutante you don’t. Better to go with the Clintons, with all their dysfunction and chaos — the same kind that fueled the Republican hate machine — than to risk the chance that Obama would be mauled like a chew toy in the general election. Better to blow off all the inspiration and the young voters, the independents and the Republicans that Obama is attracting than to take a chance on something as ephemeral as hope. Now that’s Cheney-level paranoia.

We also get the boxing metaphor we last saw in November back in action:

For much of the campaign, when matched against Hillary in debates, the Illinois senator seemed out of his weight class. But he has moved up to heavyweight, even while losing five pounds as he has raced around the country. The big question is: Can he go from laconic to iconic to bionic?

And on “laconic/iconic/bionic” the rhyming dictionary bursts into flames. Flames from a fire-breathing dragon{lady}:

But, if he wants to be president, he will still have to slay the dragon. And his dragon is the Clinton attack machine, which emerged Tuesday night, not invincible but breathing fire.

Obama is clearly Dowd's white knight.

Meet The Clinton Bashers

Maureen Dowd on Sunday joined the panel of Bash The Clintons Meet The Press where she was asked about the Caroline Kennedy endorsement of Barack Obama in the New York Times. Presumably she was the most qualified to answer the question because a) she’s a New York Times employee, and b) she got Caroline’s autograph on a bunch of Christmas presents.

MR. RUSSERT: Another event overnight, Maureen Dowd, in your paper, Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of the 35th president, John Kennedy, wrote an op/ed piece in The Times endorsing Barack Obama. And this is what she said: "I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president--not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans." Barack Obama. Are we going to see Caroline Kennedy, Oprah Winfrey, town hall? How significant is this?

MS. MAUREEN DOWD: Well, I think this is huge. The Hillary people were obviously trying to get Caroline Kennedy's endorsement, and the fact that she gave it to Obama is very much like the moment that Bill Clinton pushed when he shook JFK's hand at Boy's Nation. Now, JFK probably didn't remember that at all, but the Clinton campaign made that the Arthurian moment, where Galahad took the sword out of the stone. And now Caroline has done that for Obama. But it's a real moment because she is saying, "You are like my father," after decades of politicians pretending to be like, like JFK, and Gary Hart chopping his hand, and, you know, Dan Quayle trying to act like he was JFK. She is giving him the imprimatur, and it's--I think it's huge.

Her next turn at bat let her cut loose with a greatest hits compilation of Billary bashing. She got in the Big Dog allusion and even mentioned an Onion article as a reference on Bill’s behavior.

MS. DOWD: Well, it was an astonishing spectacle of seeing a so-called first black president trying to destroy a would-be first black president. I mean, we've never seen anything like this, and it was very personal between Obama and Clinton. And I think that, in the end, Hillary gave up a good narrative for her, which is that she had carved out her own identity and that it wasn't going to be the Bickersons back in the White House, and you just saw the Clintons. And, and Mitt Romney was right, you, you visualized her in the Oval, him in the East Wing rambling around looking for mischief. And it was, you know, it was a very seamy--Phil Gaily, who's the editorial page editor of the St. Petersburg Times, said watching Clinton in South Carolina is like watching a mad dog slobber. It was about him. And, you know, as The Onion said, you know, The Onion headline was, "Screw It, I'm Running for President by Bill Clinton."

Since she was taking it easy on Bill, Tim lobbed her another softball so she could get in more digs:

MR. RUSSERT: Maureen, you wrote on Wednesday, "It's odd that the first woman with a shot at becoming president is so openly dependent on her husband to drag her over the finish line."

MS. DOWD: I know. We're seeing all these astonishing things in this race, and it worked in Nevada and New Hampshire for--I think Bill Clinton helped her there. But, in this case, I just think it raised the deja vu of the Clintons will drag anyone down to their own level and trash anyone to make up for what is missing in them or what they have done wrong. During impeachment, you know, they were trashing the founding fathers. Bill Clinton's lawyers actually filed a brief saying, "Well, Alexander Hamilton had a tawdry affair, and he wasn't kicked out of office." So it's a very debilitating dynamic, you know, to drag everyone down to their level, especially when you have this alternative of optimism and hope. And they were willing to put a dagger in the heart of hope. I mean, Obama should just beat them over the head every day with the idea that Bill Clinton said he represented false hope. Because the only way they can beat him is to beat down hope and inspiration and bringing young voters and expanding the party, and they want to kill all that. And that is not a good, you know, situation for them.

After giving Obama campaign advice, she goes on to burnish his reputation as a historic watershed figure:

MS. DOWD: Tim, one of the most striking images of South Carolina--Jeff Zeleny wrote about today--was the Confederate flag flying near the capital and Obama workers holding up Obama placards. And it's, you know, an amazing historic image.

Russert also sets up a straw man in the name of Rudy for Maureen to take a few swings at. She mostly rehashes her column for the day:

MR. RUSSERT: Maureen Dowd, the indictment of Bernard Kerik, his former police commissioner, who he proposed to be secretary of Homeland Security, stories about his New York City police detail being used to guard his then-girlfriend, now-wife Judith Nathan, did those issues just take a toll on Rudy Giuliani?

MS. DOWD: Oh, of course, you know. And, you know, he's got to stop talking about 9/11 and call 911 because he's in real trouble there. And I was expecting more of a--from a man who loves opera, more of an operatic finale, one way or the other, to save himself or to self-immolate. I mean, some Maria Callas death scene. But he's so mundane. And actually yesterday he switched his message to hope. So that's not going to work for Rudy Giuliani.
…
MS. DOWD: And he was able to jump on the headlines of the day and say something provocative, and he just seems to be sleepwalking.

MR. RUSSERT: Is he recognizing that he's not going to win and sort of protecting his next career?

MS. DOWD: I think so, and saving, and saving, you know, protecting Giuliani Partners.

Moving on to McCain, Chuck Todd and Dowd exchange a little inside baseball concerning the chumminess of fellow senators McCain and Hillary.

MS. DOWD: Well, I asked McCain about that in the green room, doing reporting, and he was saying not to think--I know he really does like Hillary Clinton--I've talked to him about that--and thinks she's really fun to travel with. But he said to expect fireworks. He's not going to lay off of her. He's already talking about how she's waving the white flag of surrender on Iraq.

MR. TODD: They enjoy the vodka shots, right?

MS. DOWD: Oh, yeah, they did in Estonia, yes.

The Indiana Jones style vodka shooter contest happened back in 2006 according the Times.
In her final say of the day, Maureen manages to put Obama on an even higher pedestal than her earlier sloppy wet-kisses:

MS. DOWD: Well, I think, you know, it's very interesting to me because I think that in, in Iowa, Obama learned how to connect with his electricity. Usually you have someone being the daddy figure, and he's like the blessed child, you know, he's learning as he goes. And we're watching him learn and get personally upset in real time, which we, we saw with McCain in South Carolina in 2000, now we're seeing with Obama. And the question is, did this give him his spine? You know, he's been struggling. Is he on the pedestal like Adlai Stevenson, or is he JFK and RFK, who knows how to fight back? And I think he's got a false choice. He doesn't have to be Tonya Harding to fight back; he could be like Reagan and just flick them away and use wit. But he's learning on the job, and he, you know, he--his speech, his victory speech last night was angry. You know, he is angry at the Clintons for what he sees as underhanded tactics, and they were underhanded. So it, it depends, is he going to get back on the pedestal or is he going to figure out some way that he's comfortable with not to do cage fight, fighting.

She had declared Obama “The Golden Child” back in December and now she want to see him double axel his way to the nomination.

The Golden Child

O Brother, Where Art Thou?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 2, 2007

"I'll press your flesh, you dimwitted sumbitch! You don't tell your pappy how to court the electorate. We ain't one-at-a-timin' here. We're MASS communicating"
-Coen Brothers film O Brother Where Art Thou?

As reported second-hand here, Marueen went uptown to the Apollo to check out rising soul star Barack Obama. Being in that hallowed hall of music put here in a musical mood.

His advisers and fund-raisers have pressed him to go fortissimo. Many voters with great expectations are hovering, hoping for a crescendo.

She even invokes erstwhile singer Eddie Murphy.

Despite his uneven efforts and distaste for the claws of competition, they can see he is a golden child, one who moves, speaks, smiles and thinks with amazing grace.

The rest of the article is a litany of folk that have jumped aboard the Barackesh Express. She leads off with token non-heterosexual Andrew Sullivan, but let's see if we can spot a pattern:

In Time, Shelby Steele agrees that a President Obama could show “that race is but a negligible human difference.”

But he notes that Obama’s abandonment by his African father at the age of 2 marked him. “Much of the excitement that surrounds him comes from the perception that he is only lightly tethered to race,” Steele writes. “Yet the very arc of his life — from Hawaii to the South Side of Chicago — has been shaped by an often conscious resolve to ‘belong’ irrefutably to the black identity.”

Jesse Jackson has chastised Obama for not focusing enough on black voters or fussing more about the Jena Six. But Obama wrote that he grew up knowing how to disarm whites worried about angry black men.

But Obama did get to sup at Sylvia’s soul-food restaurant — the place where Bill O’Reilly was shocked to find such genteel black folk — with the still-up-for-grabs Al Sharpton. The only endorsement Sharpton offered afterward was: “A man that likes chicken and corn bread can’t be that bad.”

Obama got an introduction from Chris Rock, who warned the audience that “you’d be real embarrassed if he won and you wasn’t down with it. You’d say, ‘Aw, man, I can’t call him now. I had that white lady. What was I thinking?’”

And he got a benediction from Cornel West, the Princeton professor who took Obama to task earlier this year for not attending a national gathering of black scholars and civil rights leaders.

He said he’s running because of what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the fierce urgency of now.” Now can the prodigy muster that fierce urgency?

Now that we know Obambi is black enough and white enough, we just have to find out if he is man enough to defeat the siren song of Hillzilla.

Obambi In The Crosshairs

In my post about Sunday’s column, I noticed that Maureen Dowd called Barack Obama “Obambi” for the umpteenth time. The first instance was back on December 13, 2006 in a column blatantly called Will Hillzilla crush Obambi? The title echoes the classic cartoon parody "Bambi Meets Godzilla" by Marv Newland which can be seen here. Hint: It doesn't end well for Bambi.

But unlike her impertinent challenger, Hillary will have to do a lot of fancy dancing to explain her opinions about the Iraq war. And we know that she’s not a good dancer.

Built on a cult of personality, her campaign will be ruthless in stomping on Obambi, as a Chicago columnist referred to the idealistic pol who was too naïve to steer clear of a sleazy fund-raiser who wanted to buy his favor with a sweetheart real estate deal.

This sweetheart deal is allegedly the same scandal that Robert Novak has been alluding to. And while Dowd credits a "Chicago columnist" (actually John Kass of the Tribune) for inventing the "Obambi" saying, the blogosphere likes to blame Maureen.

On February 21st of this year, Dowd goes all Oscar metaphor with Obama’s Big Screen Test.

Who can pay attention to the Oscar battle between “The Queen” and “Dreamgirls” when you’ve got a political battle between a Queen and a Dreamboy?

Can you guess who is who? But then she goes right back to the Disney classic.

Did Mr. Spielberg get in trouble with the Clintons for helping Senator Obama? “Yes,” Mr. Geffen replies, slyly. Can Obambi stand up to Clinton Inc.? “I hope so,” he says, “because that machine is going to be very unpleasant and unattractive and effective.”

Her boxing metaphor (which will serve her well in the next several months), used in Where's His Right Hook? also goes back to the monster versus woodland creature image.

The Democrats lost the last two excruciatingly close elections because Al Gore and John Kerry did not fight fiercely and cleverly enough.

After David Geffen made critical comments about Hillary, she seized the chance to play Godzilla stomping on Obambi.

Ever the pop culture maven, In Can He Unleash the Force? Dowd invokes comic book heroes to get Barack to man-up.

In mythic tales from “Superman” to “Star Wars” to “Spider-Man,” there comes a moment when the young superhero has to learn to harness his powers. That’s the challenge Barack Obama faces now.

But often he reverts to Obambi, tentative about commanding the stage and consistently channeling the excitement he engenders.

Clearly Maureen hasn’t been watching her movies to the end. In Bambi, our young buck grows some antlers and becomes a powerful stag that goes on to lead the herd.

Dowd Domination

Shake, Rattle and Roll
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 18, 2007

Get out from that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans
Get out from that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans
Well, roll my breakfast 'cause I'm a hungry man

I said Shake, rattle and roll
I said Shake, rattle and roll
I said Shake, rattle and roll
I said Shake, rattle and roll
Well, you never do nothin' to save your doggone soul

Wearin' those dresses, your hair done up so nice
Wearin' those dresses, your hair done up so nice
You look so warm, but your heart is cold as ice

On a meta-level, the lyrics to the Jesse Stone penned bluesy rock classic that has been recorded by Bill Haley and Elvis Presley is more appropriate than can be imagined. We got kitchens, souls, dresses, and ice-cold hearts, all staples of the Dowd patois when discussing Clinton.

And speaking of rolls, Maureen is on one, right from the opening line:

The debate dominatrix knows how to rattle Obambi.

We first met Obambi nearly a year ago in Dowd’s December 13, 2006 column back when he was battling Hillzilla. Debate dominatrix was a throw away line I first noticed as a allusive alliteration in the French fiasco. This week, Dowd takes the bondage metaphor and runs it in a blender beyond recognition.

Mistress Hillary started disciplining her fellow senator last winter, after he began exploring a presidential bid.

She has continued to flick the whip in debates.

With so much at stake, she had to do it again in Vegas, this time using her voice, gaze and body language to such punishing effect that Obama looked as if he had been brought to heel.

If you don’t need a cold shower after all that dirty BDSM talk, check your pulse. And Dowd can’t mention Obambi with calling out how pussy-whipped he is.

Michelle said she let her husband run for president only when he agreed to give up smoking, and she’s a master at the art of the loving conjugal put-down.

And now for a Dowdified mash-up:

She owned him … after a tortured exchange… from that devastating… position… that could have dragged her to defeat.

All this hot talk has Maureen so worked up that she can’t wait for the main event because:

Rudy will not be so easy to spank.

I’ll want to get the pay-per-view for that X-rated confrontation especially if we can get Dowd as the ring announcer.