Maureen and the Obamanauts

Cyclops and Cunning
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 30, 2008

Maureen Dowd is still hooked on mythology and references a Daily Show bit about Obama slaying dragons.

At home, Jon Stewart was poking fun at the grandiosity of the “Obama Quest” and “the Obamanauts.” He showed film clips of “our hero” in chain mail fighting off dragons and a Cyclops in his crusade to come home and rule over Dreamerica.

She is also trying to get Obama to play her literary allusion game by tricking him into comparing himself to brave Ulysses:

By happenstance, on O-Force One I raised the matter of quests and Cyclops with the candidate. Having read that he had left the trail in early June to go back to Chicago and see his daughter Malia perform in “The Odyssey” for theater class, I wondered if that rang any bells on this trip? The hero on a foreign journey, battling through obstacles to get back home, where more trouble would wait?

“The whole sort of siren thing, the Cyclops, that’s interesting,” he said.

Note how cleverly Barack evades making any confirmation or denial of the validity of the analogy. Since he won’t open up to her, she uses the Icarus myth that he told a different reporter.

Unlike an idol, Bobby Kennedy, Obama does not see himself in terms of Greek myth, although he did tell The Times’s Jeff Zeleny on the trip that he knew the risks of “flying too close to the sun.”

And to truly mix the milieus, she throws in a newly appropriated and repurposed term Obamanaut (the phrase has been informally floating through the ether for several months now) as a portmanteau of Obama and Argonaut as in Jason And The Argonauts, today's Movies With Maureen®.

The Obamanauts were so pleased with navigating their complex thicket of global photo-ops — without even one embarrassing picture of Obama hugging an Arab — that they weren’t as wary with the press.

Maureen then lurches into a pointless anecdote whose only purpose is to reveal Obama’s choice of alcoholic beverage is not the beer he swigs on the campaign trial. This is important because Dowd has chronicled the vices of the other candidates.

The senator left his briefing books behind for a rare instance of mingling with his journalism posse at a Berlin restaurant as he sipped a rare “very dry” martini with olives.

It seems Obama is not familiar with the ways of international diplomacy and failed to get his hosts gifts even though they brought him White House warming presents.

I said he could be forgiven for not knowing the customs of a trip that had never taken place before — a mere presumptive nominee of one party being feted like a president. Or, given W.’s repellant effect on Old Europe and Obama’s pheromone effect, better than a president.

And the mention of Barack smelling nice is going to have to do as today’s Veiled Gay Slur®. It’s a stretch, but people expect and look for these small asides so that they can take umbrage at the continued existence of Maureen Dowd.

And speaking of pointless anecdotes, another involves Obama learning the German analogue of one of Maureen’s favorite phrases.

His meeting with Angela Merkel taught him a whole new expression.

“When we were talking about Iran,” he told me, “it turns out that carrots and sticks in German is sweetbread and whips, which I thought was a little more evocative.”

The mention of whips really drew a twinkle in Maureen’s eye, since she had once written a column about Hillary and Barack using nothing but bondage metaphors. She also name checks Borat's other alter-ego showing that she is in tune with all the top satirists.

I said it sounded like a skit with Ali G, sitting on a settee, talking to Madam Chancellor, the “Iron Frau,” about whips.

“That’s the equivalent German expression,” he continued, with an amused smile. “That was a little cultural lesson. Sweetbread and whips. I thought, man, we’re in Berlin ...”

But Obama stops himself before saying anything revealing, which makes him a smart man. And Maureen admires that with yet another tortured take on the Icarus myth.

Odysseus’s heroic trait is his cunning intelligence. Given his inability to get lift off, even flying close to the sun, Obama will need all he can muster.

And if he keeps taking language lessons from foreign heads of state, he may become a cunning linguist as well.

Burned By Her Source

The New York Times today printed a correction to her Cocky/Chiefy column which said:

In her column last Wednesday, Maureen Dowd wrote that a Democratic lawmaker privately asked Gen. David Petraeus why there weren’t more Democrats in the military, and he replied, “There are more than you think.” Col. Steven Boylan of the general’s public affairs office in Baghdad, which was not contacted for comment, says the quotation “is in error as he never made nor would make such a statement.”

Since she is quoting Petraeus by name and he (indirectly) denies the quote, the other person involved must have been the un-named "Democratic lawmaker". According to CBS News, the other legislators on the trip were Jack Reed, D-R.I., and Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. Since Hagel is a Republican, that leaves Jack Reed as Dowd's source.

I understand why General Petraeus has to refute an off-the-record comment that is embarrassing to military, but Reed needs to go on the record on whether he was ever told this or not. I doubt he will and will instead leave Dowd twisting in the wind. And the DowdHaters will have more ammunition to use in their jihad against her. We here at Dowd Central will have an open competition for the blogger that comes up with the most vociferous denunciation of Dowd's latest faux pas. Have at it folks.

Who Needs A Cigarette?

Stalking, Sniffing, Swooning
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 27, 2008

Maureen and Barack are getting pretty chummy on the campaign trail. After a particularly chummy press conference with French president Sarkozy she asked about the post-coital bliss:

“You must want a cigarette after that,” I teased the candidate after the amorous joint press conference, as he flew from Paris to London for the finale of his grand tour.

The scene was so steamy that Maureen began filming it in her head:

It could have been a French movie.

Passing acquaintances collide in a moment of transcendent passion. They look at each other shyly and touch tenderly during their Paris cinq à sept, exchange some existential thoughts under exquisite chandeliers, and — tant pis — go their separate ways.

Maureen never passes up a chance to show off some French. In this case, “cinq à sept” literally means “five to seven” and refers to the time for informal socializing in France. And “tant pis” has the connotation of wistful regret. And this leads us to a special Franco-American Movies With Maureen®.

Sarko, back to Carla Bruni. Obama, forward to Gordon Brown. A Man and a Man. All it needed was a lush score and Claude Lelouch.

Claude Lelouch is the famous French director of Un homme et une femme (A Man and a Woman) which explains the politirotic allusion between the two leaders. The second feature on the bill is suggest by Barack himself as he recounts how he got stalked in the hotel gym.

In Berlin, the tabloid Bild sent an attractive blonde reporter to stalk Obama at the Ritz-Carlton gym as he exercised with his body man, Reggie Love. She then wrote a tell-all, enthusing, “I’m getting hot, and not from the workout,” and concluding, “What a man.”

Obama marveled: “I’m just realizing what I’ve got to become accustomed to. The fact that I was played like that at the gym. Do you remember ‘The Color of Money’ with Paul Newman? And Forest Whitaker is sort of sitting there, acting like he doesn’t know how to play pool. And then he hustles the hustler. She hustled us. We walk into the gym. She’s already on the treadmill. She looks like just an ordinary German girl. She smiles and sort of waves, shyly, but doesn’t go out of her way to say anything. As I’m walking out, she says: ‘Oh, can I have a picture? I’m a big fan.’ Reggie takes the picture.”

The original article by the blonde reporter and her picture can be found on the Bild website. The money quote is:

I put my arm around his hip – wow, he didn’t even sweat! WHAT A MAN!

But it was a different woman that Obama, or at least his staff, missed out on meeting. And we know that Maureen has a crush on the French First Chanteuse as well.

[Obama] did not get to meet his fan, Carla Bruni. “She wasn’t there,” he said. “Which I think disappointed all my staff. That was the only thing they were really interested in.”

For one column there sure is a lot of sweating and heavy breathing in this Obama-Sarkozy-Bruni-Dowd lovefest. Perhaps if and when Barack is a head of state he can arrange a more formal ménage à tête à tête. Because that sure would make an interesting French movie.

Obama Road Trip

Barack Obama's overseas tour is gaining as much notice for the outsized press entourage as it is for the trip itself. Howard Kurtz is the Washington Post navel-gazing media reporter and his dispatch today either consciously or unconsiously echoes the central metaphor of Maureen Dowd's Labors of Hercules column:

After saying little in public during a weekend in Iraq and Afghanistan, Barack Obama met with traveling reporters near Jordan's Temple of Hercules, a gladiator standing his ground against the media hordes.

A little later in the column Maureen Dowd herself makes and indirect appearance as Obama specifically mentioned her by name for some reporter repartee:

Singling out New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd yesterday, Obama said: "What are you guys going to do in Berlin? Huh? Dowd? You got any big plans?"

My guess is just stare dreamily at The One on his world tour.

Dowd For Veep

Somebody please explain how Maureen would help the McCain ticket? I guess the gist of the cartoon is that the media is so in the tank for Obama (which is entirely different from Dukakis in the tank) that the only way to get them to quit fawning over Barack is to offer them highly placed positions in the McCain Cabinet.

Besides, Dowd would make an awful vice-president. It's the president's job to make up silly names for his associates.

The Second Coming

"My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."

-Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Is ‘The One’ Cocky or Commander in Chiefy?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 23, 2008

It seems that Maureen Dowd did manage to stow away aboard Barack Obama’s press plane or…

O-Force One, as The Chicago Sun Times mockingly calls the candidate’s freshly branded 757, with the captain’s chair embroidered with “Obama-’08/President.”

The psycho-sexual freight of anything called O-Force is not something I really want to touch so it’s good we have Lynn Sweet to blame for this phrase. Not that Maureen isn’t hard at work on the English language. We get our Crossword Puzzle Clue Of The Week® with “lacunae” which is a fancy –schmacy word for “gaps”:

The media behemoth slouching after the senator is scouring his every word, expression, bead of sweat, basketball shot and accessory — are those hiking boots too Bremer? Are the sunglasses too rapper? Will he leave enough time for his glittery groupie, Carla Bruni? — for hints of imperfection that would foretell lacunae in presidential judgment.

Since the column dateline is Jerusalem (aka the NYT Derry, NH field office) the use of slouching invokes either Joan Didion’s use of the phrase “slouching towards Bethlehem” which in and of itself is an allusion to Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” below:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The apocalyptic imagery of Yeats is mocked, along with Obama with further ironic asides about his exalted image:

The One, as McCain aides sardonically call Obama, glided through Afghanistan, Iraq and Jordan, girding his messianic loins for the inevitable kvetching he would face in Israel as skeptical Jews “try to get a better sense of what’s in Obama’s kishkes.”

Dowd helpfully explains the Yiddish-ism:

So said Nathan Diament of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, in The Daily News, defining “kishkes” as Yiddish for gut.

But it is ‘loins’ that evokes another uncomfortable adjective:

At moments, Obama was acting as though he were already “on a coin,” as Jon Stewart would say. But cocky or not, he needs to swoop up to conquer so Americans can picture him in the role.

But it's not just Americans taken with Obama. He crosses cultural and religious lines.

The One left them swooning in Jordan. A member of the king’s inner circle who attended the chicken-and-rice dinner with King Abdullah and Queen Rania said that Obama had gone a long way toward assuaging their fears that he would be so eager to run away from his paternal family’s Muslim roots and to woo skeptical American Jews that he would not be “the honest broker” they long for after W.’s crazed missionary work in the Middle East.

And with missionary zeal, we can await the Second Coming of The One.

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.