Angry Young Man

I have spent my entire adult life trying to bridge the gap between different kinds of people. That's in my DNA, trying to promote mutual understanding to insist that we all share common hopes and common dreams as Americans and as human beings. That's who I am. That's what I believe. That's what this campaign has been about.

Yesterday, we saw a very different vision of America. I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened over the spectacle that we saw yesterday.

And the fact that Rev. Wright would think that somehow it was appropriate to command the stage, for three or four consecutive days, in the midst of this major debate, is something that not only makes me angry but also saddens me.

-Barack Obama, April 28, 2008

Praying and Preying
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 30, 2008

Maureen Dowd has been searching for a new moniker for Obama for a while. Obambi (which she stole from John Kass) is getting a little stale. She tried Golden Child for a bit, but now with Barack making a clean break from Reverend Wright she has a new Rude Name®. Let’s see if we can figure it out:

Barack Obama has spent his life, and campaign, trying not to be the Angry Black Man.

On Tuesday, the Sort Of Angry Black Man appeared, reluctantly spurred into action by The Really Angry Black Man.

Dowd notices that despite, or because of, his anger, the latent nicotine need is still there:

Speaking to reporters in the heart of tobacco country in Winston-Salem, N.C., the poor guy looked as if he were dying for a smoke. “When I say I find these comments appalling, I mean it,” Obama said. “It contradicts everything I am about and who I am.”

Dowd says that having to distance himself from the controversial preacher is difficult because since he was raised in a white household, Wright was his touchstone to African American culture:

At Trinity, he may have ignored what he should have heard because he was trying to assimilate to black culture. Now, he may be outraged by what he belatedly heard because he’s trying to relate to the white lunch-pail set.

Having been deserted at age 2 by his father, Obama has now been deserted by the father-figure in his church, the man who inspired him to become a Christian, married him, dedicated his house, baptized his children, gave him the title of his second book and theme for his presidential run and worked on his campaign.

That book was titled The Audacity Of Hope and was taken from Wright’s signature speech “The Audacity To Hope.” At least the good reverend got the preposition right. The more grammatically correct title would have been The Audaciousness Of Hope. (Audacilious?) You would think a Harvard-trained lawyer would know better.

This was all in response to Reverend Wright’s barnstorming tour over the weekend. Dowd says this was motivated by anger of his own:

He was certainly sore at Obama, after helping him get connected in Chicago politics, for distancing himself. But he was also clearly envious that Obama has been hailed by his flock as the halo-wearing Redeemer of America’s hope.

And I use that quote just so that I can recycle my halo photoshop.

Dowd makes at least one old school reference to one of Bill Clinton’s many campaign kerfuffles as well as Hillary Clinton's claim that she is fully vetted, a prediction that is starting to carry some weight.

Tuesday was more than a Sister Souljah moment; it was a painful form of political patricide. “I did not vet my pastor before I decided to run for the presidency,” Obama said.

In a campaign that’s all about who’s vetted, maybe he should have.

Sister Souljah, a Clinton supporter way back in 1992 had said:

If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?

Her defenders said the quote was taken out of context. But like many of Reverend Wright’s more inflammatory statements, it’s hard to think of a context where it isn’t offensive.

But if Maureen was really as down with the hip-hop scene as she pretends to be, she would have renamed it a Sister Souljah Boy Tell ‘Em Moment. Crank that.

This Week With Maureen

Maureen Dowd was a member of The Roundtable on "This Week With George Stephanopoulos". The full video segment is available here.

When asked about Obama on the campaign trail, she mashed up some recent columns and said:

It was very painful watching [Obama] carbo-loading all the time. This week in Indiana he was reduced to saying that he really does like pot roast and jello and pleading with the reporters that he's not a GQ cover. I think that that basically when he had that cris de cour(sp?) about "Why can't you just let me eat my waffles?", he was saying "Why can't I just be President?" or maybe "Why can't I be ex-President?" and get rid of the pesky reporters and Hillary and everyone.

On Bill Clinton's contribution to the campaign, she says:

The Wall Street Journal had a story yesterday that in the suburbs where [Bill Clinton] worked really hard, [Hillary] got a larger margin of the vote. So even though he was the first politician in history to play the Caucasian Card {Stephanopoulos chuckles}, some Democrats think he is really hurting her, there is some proof otherwise.

And back to Hillary:

That's the power of Hillary Clinton. That even though rationally we think that she can't possible make it mathematically, irrationally we keep saying "How is she going to make it?" I think she has done real damage in turning him from incandescent to ineffectual. She has repainted him as Bambi.

About McCain trying to distance himself from 527 groups running ads featuring the speeches of Reverend Wright:

Having been beaten that way by Dubya in 2000, a very painful way for him, I don't think he's going to to do that again. He does want the best of both worlds. There was a story in the Washington Times about how he can't get control of his party again. On the other hand, I think this is good for him the more Wright is on TV.

She was looser and more forthcoming during the Green Room segment. Asked if McCain is doing a good job getting the message out about the economy.

John McCain is not doing a good job and I don't think Barack Obama is either. He should have had a great economic speech ready to go in that last week in Pennsylvania. And he should have had a great patriotic speech ready to go also. He had one he was working on and delayed it after the San Francisco "bitter" comments. He thought it would seem to opportunistic to do it so soon, but he shouldn't have. His campaign is very static and stale on the economy.

It should just be an organic part of what he is talking about. He has a real problem relating to lower class people. Somebody said after the bitter thing, a Pennsylvania voter said, he makes us feel like we just fell off the apple cart.

On if the campaign is fun:

Well, I'm having more fun than Obama.He finds it so painful. And I'm carbo-loading. I had two cheesesteaks to do a taste comparison between the two places. He gave away his french fries. But you try to make it look fun.

Asked for suggestions, she said, "Get rid of that hi-def."

The Green Room handler said, "But you look great."

She replied, "We'll see. My hand was shaking according to Matt. It was sheer terror."

Matt then confessed that it was just a ploy to hold her hand. And who could blame him?

Disclaimer: The transcription is my own and has been editted for clarity and continuity. Any errors are mine alone.

For a backstage look at the production of the show read this blog entry by Dowd Report contributor yellojkt.

High School Bites

Desperately Seeking Street Cred
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 27, 2008

Maureen Dowd is frequently accused of treating politics like high school. But she is even more in tune with the teen set than we realized. She is up on all the reading trends:

Maybe I’ve been reading too many stories about the fad of teenage vampire chick lit, worlds filled with parasitic aliens and demi-human creatures, but there’s something eerie going on in this race.

Hillary grows more and more glowy as Obama grows more and more wan.

Is she draining him of his precious bodily fluids? Leeching his magic? Siphoning off his aura?

While it would seem that teenage vampire chick lit would be a rather narrow niche, it’s a real one and full of title like Dangerous Girls, Midnight Predator, and Uninvited, all of which would make great campaign bio titles.

In Maureen Dowd’s high school, Obama is the fashion conscious Gossip Girl that smokes too much and eats too little.

He looks like he wants to run away somewhere for three months by himself and smoke.

Hillary is not getting much sleep or exercise, and doesn’t, like the ascetic Obama, abstain from junk food and coffee and get up at dawn to work out on the road.

Barack will continue to be tagged with the label of the kid who doesn’t clean his plate despite his protests:

He dutifully enthused about carbs, assuring reporters that when he had dinner as a child with his Kansas grandparents, the food “would have been very familiar to anybody here in Indiana. A lot of pot roast, potatoes and Jell-O molds.”

It doesn’t play very plausible. On the other hand, Hillary has no qualms about eating on the road:

The Nixonian Hillary has a ravenous hunger that Obama lacks. Literally — at a birthday party in Philly for her photographer, she was devouring the chips and dip with two hands — and viscerally.

“Ravenous”, “devouring” and “viscerally” would all be great words for a teenage vampire chick lit book. And the invocation of an undead Republican is not an isolated incident. Dowd also name checks another blood-sucking ghoul from the GOP:

Even some Obama fans find Hillary’s toughness and shameless shape-shifting compelling. Having lost the White House twice to brass-knuckled pols, the Dems may be drawn to a woman who thinks like Karl Rove.

But Obama is not without his mystical charms. He is also the sports star who is magic on the court, if not in the lanes.

He tried to recapture the magic — and erase the bowling debacle — by shooting hoops with kids in Kokomo on Friday night.

We have a nice underplayed Alliteration Alert® with "kids in Kokomo" and we milk the sports metaphor for one more paragraph:

As a basketball player, he should know he’s in overtime in his race with Hillary — and overtime is not the period to indulge in whining.

Which leads us to a new feature (h/t to Grace Nearing), the Crossword Puzzle Clue Of The Week®:

But then he resumed wry whingeing about his 37 bowling score, explaining that he finished only seven frames, including two that “were bowled by a 10-year-old” and another by a 3-year-old.

From American Heritage Dictionary Online:

Whinge: Chiefly British To complain or protest, especially in an annoying or persistent manner.

Once again, Dowd searches through her thesaurus to find just the perfect word and nails it. “Annoying” and “persistent” complaining hits just the right note. And Obama’s defense of his bowling skilz would be more plausible if there weren’t Dukakis-riding-a-tank quality video of the event.

The endings of recent Dowd columns have been a little soft because so much in this campaign is still unsettled. She does finally tie the search for street cred into the Madonna-tinged titular Movies With Maureen®. Here she sums up ambiguously:

“I don’t want to go out of my way to sort of prove my street cred as a down-to-earth guy,” he said, after going out of his way. “People know me.”

Not yet, but we will, one of these years.

Is Dowd predicting plenty of Barack for the next four years or is she saying it will take that long to find the true colors of this street-wise Harvard lawyer? Whatever the answer, we will have Maureen on hand to keep a handle on the state of his life forces and aura (and let's not even touch precious bodily fluids). And to keep us update on supernatural chick lit trends.

Dowd Alert: This Week With Georgie

Maureen Dowd makes fairly infrequent guest stints on the Sunday morning yakker shows. Her last appearance was on "Meet The Press" on January 27. (Dowd Central of course has a link to that in the archive.) This Week (literally) she snubs fellow Obamaphile Tim Russert to go into the lion's den of former Clintonista George Stephanopoulos. It must be some sort of penance he is paying for his uniformly panned debate moderating.

From ABC's press release:

And on our "Roundtable," the New York Times' Maureen Dowd and ABC News' Donna Brazile, Matthew Dowd and George Will debate the week's politics.

Tune-in Sunday for "This Week" from the Newseum.

The Newseum is a news oriented musuem (duh) on Pennsylvania Avenue that is the new site for the "This Week With George Snufflupagus" studio. As this video explains, it will be the first Sunday morning talk show broadcast in high definition. So if you have ever wanted to see Maureen Dowd's copper tressed visage in all its glory, tomorrow morning is your chance.

BlogWatch: Maureen's Crib

It recently came to the attention of Dowd Central that Oprah Magazine did a virtual tour of Maureen Dowd’s Georgetown townhome recently. This fact came courtesy of Cannonfire blog that makes the argument that since Dowd lives in a nice house, she can’t possibly understand the working person:

Go here to visit Maureen's home:

The 1819 building was the first Maureen Dowd saw when she went house-hunting in 1995, and she fell for it immediately. There were the classic Georgetown details, including the six fireplaces, the wood floors, a pocket-size backyard, and what seemed like an endless number of rooms—two parlors, a den, a formal dining room, and three bedrooms.

Yet she claims to speak on behalf of the Democrats. Mere workers do not count.

Our second notice of the Dowd Estate came courtesy of long-time DowdHater® Bob Somersby of the Daily Howler:

PALACE LIVING: In 2006, Oprah magazine toured Dowd’s crib. If you’re curious, go ahead—just click here. “I go over the top at times with too many leopard-print pillows,” Dowd says. For ourselves, we’ve always admired journalists who can spot—and admit—their mistakes.

The timing of Somersby’s little dig right after it gets mentioned somewhere else is a curious coincidence proving to me that the world of DowdWatchers is not only small but also rather incestuous.

The house itself has a historical connection. The Oprah site says:

That President Kennedy lived there as a senator didn't lessen its appeal to Maureen the political junkie. She bought it immediately.

JFK lived in seven different places in Georgetown before becoming President and the historic significance of the one Maureen owns is summarized on the DC Traveler’s JFK Walking Tour Guide:

3260 N Street, NW (Stop 1) is where Kennedy began his career in the Senate. While living there, he attended a Georgetown dinner party in 1952 and met the captivating Jacqueline Bouvier. It was another nine months before, at another dinner party thrown by the same couple, he again met and this time, asked Jackie out on a double date to a carnival in Georgetown the following weekend.

A far more utilitarian description of the house is available on Zillow.com which estimates its current value at $1.2 million dollars, which is on the low end for toney Georgetown. The 1,608 square foot house was built in 1819 and has five bedrooms and 2.5 baths.

The Oprah tour has several pictures of the interior with this one of the bookcase. The resolution is too low to read the book titles, but there is clearly a set of Matryoshka Nesting Dolls it the form of Soviet leaders. Alas, there are no pictures of where the magic happens, and by that I mean the home office where she writes her columns. What did you think I mean, you pervs?

The Perfect Column

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Night Only: Dowd And Kristol Together

The two most polarizing pundits on the New York Times opinion page will be making a joint appearance at Hofstra University this Thursday, April 24. Maureen Dowd and Bill Kristol will be speaking as part of The President’s Educate ’08 Event Series. For more information see the news release

I fully expect a pie to be thrown, I'm just not sure at whom.