Magic Man

When I was much younger, The Wizard of Oz was my favorite movie. I just loved imagining myself being there with Dorothy and being part of that great adventure she had.

-Facebook: Hillary Clinton

Surrender Already, Dorothy
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 30, 2008

Every now and then Maureen Dowd likes to throw in a little Third Year French just to keep us on our toes. Todays lesson en Francois is:

Pas si vite, mon vieux.

Which roughly translates as “Not so fast, old man.” It was said in response to this:

Bernard Kouchner, the foreign minister of France and a strong supporter of the United States, recently observed that President Bush has done such a number on our image in the world that no one will be able to restore the luster.

“I think the magic is over,” he said.

Maureen thinks there is someone with some fairy dust that can save us:

It’s all about the magic, really.

And whether we can take a flier on this skinny guy with the strange name and braided ancestry to help us get it back.

There is a type of stock character in the movies that Spike Lee calls the "super-duper magical negro.” This is the wise, noble African American that tells the hero where he has gone wrong and what he needs to do to get right with the universe. Think Sydney Poitier in The Defiant Ones. Think Will Smith in The Legend of Bagger Vance. Think Morgan Freeman in about anything. In the 2008 Democratic primary it is Barack Obama.

Of course, there is good magic and there are the Dark Arts, the type that Hillary practices:

Many voters decided last week to stick with Obama despite his less-than-convincing explanations about the Rev. Wright — even as many soured on Hillary, casting her as Lady Voldemort.

And the comparison to the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz just comes too easy when Hillary serves up softballs like this:

Hillary sunnily riposted that she likes long movies. Her favorite as a girl was “The Wizard of Oz,” so surely she spots the “Surrender Dorothy” sign in the sky and the bad portent of the ladies of “The View” burbling to Obama about how sexy he is.

And given Maureen’s poor memory about “Surrender Dorothy” signs, maybe she needs to stay away from Oz references.

But Maureen thinks Obama is the Knight in Shining Armor that will save us from the Clintons reseating themselves on the throne:

Obama, like the preternaturally gifted young heroes in mythical tales, is still learning to channel his force. He can ensorcell when he has to, and he has viral appeal. Who else could alchemize a nuanced 40-minute speech on race into must-see YouTube viewing for 20-year-olds?

And maybe we can get Denzel Washington to play him in the movie version. That would be magical.

Photo Credit: Todays illustration comes courtesy of Iowa Presidential Watch PAC, which posted it December 14, 2007. Clearly it takes more to get rid of Senator Clinton than merely throwing a bucket of water on her.

The Big Truth

He’s got to hide the truth.
She'll stop at nothing to find it.
But tonight, Everything's off the record.

-The Big Easy tagline

You can’t handle the truth!

-A Few Good Men

But Big Jule cannot win if he plays with honest dice!

-Guys and Dolls

Hillary or Nobody?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 26, 2008

Sometimes Maureen Dowd just throws subtlety to the wind and lets us know how she really feels. Let’s go down the list:

She likes watching old movies:

It’s one of my favorite movie formulas, driving the dynamics in such classics as “A Few Good Men,” “The Big Easy” and “Guys and Dolls”: Charming, glib guy spars and quarrels with no-nonsense, driven girl, until they team up in the last reel. He spices up her life, and she stiffens his spine.

This is a very telling episode of Movies With Maureen®. What do these movies have in common? Bad boys that with a secret to hide. Tough talking lugs like Jack Nicholson, Dennis Quaid, and Marlon Brando. It’s a bonus if they treat women wrong.

Hillary Clinton won’t settle for second banana. Again.

It’s hard to imagine that after spending her whole life playing second-fiddle to a superstar pol, Hillary wants to do it again. She’s been vice president.

Maureen has already explore the theory that Barack would be and unfit veep for Hillary. Now she says that there is no way Hillary would settle for a position she de facto already had.

The Clintons only think of themselves.

After all, the Clintons think of themselves as The Democratic Party. When Bill and Dick Morris triangulated during the first term, it was what was best for Bill, not the party. In 1996, when Bill turned the White House into Motel 1600 for fund-raisers, it was more about his re-election than the re-elections of his fellow Democrats in Congress; in 2000, the White House focused its energies more on Hillary’s Senate win than Al Gore’s presidential run.

The Billary Express has always been a duopoly and the focus has never been what is good for the party, but what is good for the Clintons.

If she can’t win the nomination, she will sabotage Obama to give herself a shot in 2012.

Some top Democrats are increasingly worried that the Clintons’ divide-and-conquer strategy is nihilistic: Hillary or no democrat.

(Or, as one Democrat described it to ABC’s Jake Tapper: Hillary is going for “the Tonya Harding option” — if she can’t get the gold, kneecap her rival.)

And we all know how it turned out for Tonya. Nancy Kerrigan became America’s sweetheart until she bad mouthed Mickey Mouse.

That whole wait-until-next-time strategy sounds pretty Machiavellian. It requires the hope that an electorate that rejected you this time around will flock to you four years down the road.

There you have. The Four Horsemen of Maureen Dowd for the past six months. Just mix and match as required until the election. Then she can go on to stopping the next Clinton run.

BlogWatch: Great Minds Dept.

Yours truly wasn't the only one inspired by Dowd's Sunday column to graft Hillary Clinton's face onto a Terminator exoskeleton. Richard Blakely of Gawker Media was also motivated to show off his photoshop skilz which are far better than my lame attempt. Here they are side by side (mine is obviously on the top):



Thanks Maureen for inspiring these Schwarzenegger/Clinton mash-ups.

She'll Be Back

Haunting Obama’s Dreams
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 23, 2008

Maureen Dowd is still having nightmares about Hillary Clinton’s resurgent campaign even though most pundits don’t see any chance of the Senator from New York catching the Senator from Illinois in either the delegate count or the popular vote. Still Dowd claims that people are worried.

It is a tribute to Hillary Clinton that even though, rationally, political soothsayers think she can no longer win, irrationally, they wonder how she will pull it off.

In her nightmare scenario, an undead Hillary arises like a killing machine to menace the hero:

It’s impossible to imagine The Terminator, as a former aide calls her, giving up. Unless every circuit is out, she’ll regenerate enough to claw her way out of the grave, crawl through the Rezko Memorial Lawn and up Obama’s wall, hurl her torso into the house and brutally haunt his dreams.

“It’s like one of those movies where you think you know the end, but then you watch with your fingers over your eyes,” said one leading Democrat.

This monster movie analogy was used here on the Dowd Report as well as by Dowd’s fellow Obamamaniac Andrew Sullivan. Here is his take:

The Oscars host Jon Stewart compares [the Clintons] to a Terminator: the kind that is splattered into a million tiny droplets of vaporised metal . . . only to pool together spontaneously and charge back at you unfazed.

Of course, comparing Hillary to a ruthless killing machine is not a new concept. This video is one of several on YouTube.

But Dowd saves some of her venom of the other half of the Clinton tag-team. In perhaps the cheapest shot ever leveled at Bill Clinton, Maureen has this to say about his latest campaign spinning:

On Friday in Charlotte, N.C., Bill Clinton, the man who once thanked an R.O.T.C. recruiter “for saving me from the draft” during Vietnam, sounded like Sean Hannity without the finesse.

Ouch.

Conventional wisdom has it that Hillary’s last hope is some sort of power play involving the super delegates that she has courted. This sort of logrolling is supposed to be the Clintons strong point, but Dowd throws a bucket of water on this wicked witch.

After the Hillary camp lost — and trashed — Bill Richardson and was outmaneuvered by the Obama forces on mulligans in Michigan and Florida, Hillary’s hopes dwindled down to the superdelegates.

If Jimmy Carter, Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi are the dealmakers, it won’t take Hercule Poirot to figure out who had knives out for Hillary in this “Murder on the Orient Express.”

Movies With Maureen® Spoiler Alert: In the star-studded Agatha Christie classic, the murder victim was so hated that everyone on the train had a motive for killing him and they did.

Dowd then lists the beefs each of these party bigwigs has with the ham-handed Clintons and comes to this conclusion:

If Hillary’s fate falls into the hands of Jimmy, Al and Nancy, the Clinton chickens may come home to roost.

And that would be a movie as scary as The Birds.

Crashing Into The Bushes

Soft Shoe in Hard Times
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 16, 2008

Maureen Dowd, after four months of nearly exclusive focus on the Clinton campaign, raises her head like a groundhog that has overslept and notices that the economy has gone into the dumper. Not that she claims you would know by listening to George W. Bush:

The dollar’s crumpling, the recession’s thundering, the Dow’s bungee-jumping and the world’s disapproving, yet George Bush has turned into Gene Kelly, tap dancing and singing in a one-man review called “The Most Happy Fella.”

Gene Kelly is the low-hanging fruit in this pop culture parade (the widow Kelly has already protested any insinuation that W could possibly hold a candle to Gene’s footwork), but The Most Happy Fella is the more intriguing call-out. This is an obscure Frank Loesser musical comedy most notable for its operatic musical structure.

The plot about a shlubby guy hitting on a waitress has little to do with the Bush administration, but back in January, Patt Morrison at the Huffington Post called Dick Cheney the “Most Happy Fella”. Who knew so many pundits writing about the Dubya crew were showtune fans?

Whether or not Dowd was inspired by Morrison or not is not for me to figure out, but another passage sounded very familiar. It seems that Maureen reads a lot of Dowd. Take this comment in the Sunday column:

Boy George crashed the family station wagon into the globe and now the global economy.

Boy George was a Rude Name® in Dowd's mind since before 9/11. But W has wrecked the family station wagon before. That car crash metaphor sounds just like the one she used in her December 5, 2007 column (DowdReported here):

When W.’s history is written, he will be seen as the rebellious teenager crashing the family station wagon into his father’s three most cherished spots — diplomacy, intelligence and the Gulf.

And before that on July 11, 2007 in a column called “History As An Alibi”:

Watching the warring tribes in Iraq grow more violent has caused the beginning of a reconciliation among the warring tribes in Washington, as they realize they have to get the car keys away from the careening president who has crashed into the globe.

That’s a whole lot of crashing going on. Mostly of metaphors into each other.

Wait, Wait, It's MoDo

Maureen Dowd will be the guest on this week's edition of National Public Radio's quiz show Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! (h/t to FishbowlDC).

Of course we will have full links and highlights later in the week.

Saint Obama In Shades Of Gray

Photoimage modified under Creative Commons license
from official campaign Flickr site.
All original restrictions apply.

Black, White & Gray
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 19, 2008

In the closest thing to an endorsement yet, Maureen Dowd has high praise for Barack Obama’s make or break speech on race in America. Coming so soon after Saint Patrick’s Day, Dowd can’t help but filter the speech through a green tinted glass.

She winds up by using some alliteration and a fairly pedestrian resentment Dowdversion® and then leads into the parenthetical revelation that her working class Irish clan harbors racial resentment:

He tried to shine a light on that clannish place where grudges and grievances flourish. After racing from race for a year, he plowed in and took a stab at showing blacks what white resentment felt like and whites what black resentment felt like.

(He was spot-on about my tribe of working-class Irish, the ones who have helped break his winning streak in New Hampshire and Ohio, and may do so in Pennsylvania.)

While she doesn’t single out a quote, she is probably referring to this passage of the speech:

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Basically, she is saying that some of her closest relatives are racist, but….

While she is being confessional, she owns up to this revelation:

A little disenchantment with Obama could turn out to be a good thing. Too much idealism can blind a leader to reality as surely as too much ideology can.

Gray is a welcome relief from black and white.

And the lady from the Gray Lady is painting a picture of the next president through some pretty thick beer goggles.