Miss Congeniality

Vice in Go-Go Boots?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: August 31, 2008

Maureen Dowd loves to watch old movies, particularly chick flicks. Who knew?

The guilty pleasure I miss most when I’m out slogging on the campaign trail is the chance to sprawl on the chaise and watch a vacuously spunky and generically sassy chick flick.

McCain's pick of Sarah Palin as his running mate delights her because it reminds her of a Sandra Bullock classic.

So imagine my delight, my absolute astonishment, when the hokey chick flick came out on the trail, a Cinderella story so preposterous it’s hard to believe it’s not premiering on Lifetime. Instead of going home and watching “Miss Congeniality” with Sandra Bullock, I get to stay here and watch “Miss Congeniality” with Sarah Palin.

It makes her so giddy that she needs to change only two words in the two parts of her Dowdversion®.

It’s easy to see where this movie is going. It begins, of course, with a cute, cool unknown from Alaska who has never even been on “Meet the Press” triumphing over a cute, cool unknowable from Hawaii who has been on “Meet the Press” a lot.

In addition to the Movie With Maureen®, Palin's Lifetime story also reminds Dowd of a quixotic television show set in Alaska which lets Maureen coin a nickname for Sarah's supporters (personally, I prefer Palindrones).

Palinistas, as they are called, love Sarah’s spunky, relentlessly quirky “Northern Exposure” story from being a Miss Alaska runner-up, and winning Miss Congeniality, to being mayor and hockey mom in Wasilla, a rural Alaskan town of 6,715, to being governor for two years to being the first woman ever to run on a national Republican ticket. (Why do men only pick women as running mates when they need a Hail Mary pass? It’s a little insulting.)

Oh, and the "Hail Mary pass" sports metaphor: Already claimed by Senator Charles Schumer, Ed Rollins, Jonathan Capehart, Marc Ginsberg, William Greider of The Nation, and about every blogger known, including Dowd Report contributor yellojkt. And for future reference I'd stay away from "game-changing" as well. It's been done.

The rest of the column is just lame fantasizing about how this chick flick will end. It only ensures that Maureen isn't going to get any script polishing gigs anytime soon. Besides, with a story this great, real life, as opposed to reel life, is going to be dramatic and hilarious enough.

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.

Joe and Mo

Twenty-one years ago, Joseph Biden’s presidential ambitions were cut short in part by two news stories by Maureen Dowd suggesting that Biden's famous rhetorical skills were not necessarily his own.

On September 12, 1987, Dowd wrote an article about Biden being excessively inspired by British Labor Party Leader Neil Kinnock:

The Neil Kinnock commercial did not lead to electoral success last May in Britain, but the 10-minute spot of the Labor Party leader's passionate speeches, against a cool soundtrack of Brahms, raised his approval rating by 19 points and became an instant classic.

On this side of the Atlantic, many Presidential campaign strategists of both parties greatly admired the way it portrayed Mr. Kinnock, who subsequently lost to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, as a man of character. Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, a Democratic hopeful, was particularly taken with it.

So taken, in fact, that he lifted Mr. Kinnock's closing speech with phrases, gestures and lyrical Welsh syntax intact for his own closing speech at a debate at the Iowa State Fair on Aug. 23 - without crediting Mr. Kinnock.

Dowd then compares the two speeches:

Neil Kinnock's commercial	Joe Biden's speech
In the commercial, the Briton began, "Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?" Then pointing to his wife in the audience, he continued: "Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because all our predecessors were thick?"	Senator Biden began his remarks by saying the ideas had come to him spontaneously on the way to the debate. "I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?" he said. Then, pointing to his wife, he continued: "Why is it that my wife who is sitting out there in the audience is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because I'm the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest?"
In his speech, Mr. Kinnock, an orator of great eloquence, rhetorically asked why his ancestors, Welsh coal miners, did not get ahead as fast as he. "Did they lack talent?" he asked, in his lilting rhythm. "Those people who could sing and play and recite and write poetry? Those people who could make wonderful beautiful things with their hands? Those people who could dream dreams, see visions? Why didn't they get it? Was it because they were weak? Those people who could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football? Weak?"	Senator Biden's Irish relations, it would seem, were similar, though they seemed to stay underground longer. "Those same people who read poetry and wrote poetry and taught me how to sing verse?" continued Mr. Biden, whose father was a Chevrolet dealer in Wilmington. "Is it because they didn't work hard? My ancestors, who worked in the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours?"

A week later, another front page New York Times article by Maureen Dowd detailing Biden’s frequent unattributed borrowing of phrases from Robert F. Kennedy, showing that he could steal from politicians on both sides of the Atlantic. Dowd cleverly positions the plagiarism charges this way:

Senator Biden has given Robert F. Kennedy credit as ''the man who I guess I admire more than anyone else in American politics.'' But Mr. Biden has not always given him credit for the words he used first.

Dowd then gives an example that seems pretty clear cut:

Robert F. Kennedy, 1968

Joseph Biden, February 3, 1987

"The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play," Senator Kennedy said. "It does not include the beauty of our poetry, or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. "It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."

"We cannot measure the health of our children, the quality of their education, the joy of their play," he said, after opening his speech by declaring that he wanted to tell the audience "what is on my mind." "It doesn't measure the beauty of our poetry, the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate, the integrity of our public officials. "It counts neither our wit nor our wisdom, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country," Mr. Biden continued, to applause. "That bottom line can tell us everything about our lives except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America except that which makes us proud to be Americans."

Dowd’s primary source for the second story was an aide in the Reagan White House that was also a major RFK groupie.

At the White House, N. Jeffrey Lord, associate director in the office of political affairs, was watching as Senator Biden spoke. A devout Robert Kennedy fan as a youth who keeps a print of the Jamie Wyeth portrait of John Kennedy in his office at the Reagan White House, Mr. Lord had listened to a memorial record of Robert Kennedy's speeches so often that he knew them by heart.

Lord had an axe to grind because he was miffed at the treatment Robert Bork had received in front of Biden’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings. When the Kinnock accusations came out and were quickly brushed aside, Lord decided to push the Kennedy plagiarism in to the spot light and the conduit he chose was Maureen Dowd. In his words from an American Spectator article:

I picked up the phone and did what Robert Redford did in that old Three Days of the Condor movie. When all is lost, spill your guts to the New York Times. In my case, I went to then-reporter (and now NYT columnist) Maureen Dowd. We'd never met. She drove Reaganites crazy. But she had been covering Biden, and I liked her writing. So Mo Dowd it was.

Her voice was careful at first. Cautious and skeptical in the way of a liberal reporter getting a call from a Reagan White House type. I explained my tale. Told her of my RFK and JFK-worship as a teenager and how I memorized all those hours of RFK speeches. When I told her that I could prove beyond question that Biden had simply been lifting RFK's words whole cloth she burst out laughing, saying something to the effect that this was just too good to be true. It seems (as I recall this all these years later) that the Biden staff had been irritated by the good Ms. Dowd as well. They had even gone to the point of making her life difficult as she sought to cover the Bork hearings. Maureen would love my records and would promise to return them in the mint condition in which I still had them. Telling her specifically which speech of RFK's had been used, and when and where Biden had done this, I delivered my treasured albums unto the New York Times. And waited.

It didn't take long.

Within days Ms. Dowd had a front page story, appearing on September 16, 1987. It appeared above-the-fold just under the photo of Judge Bork defending himself in front of Biden's Senate Judiciary Committee, flanked by ex-President Gerald Ford and Senator Bob Dole.

Dowd quoted unnamed Democratic sources that were more than willing to use these revelations against Biden:

Members of rival Democratic camps, who did not want to be quoted by name, said the question of Senator Biden's appropriating passages from another's speeches was a legitimate campaign issue. ''The suggestion that the issue is who uncovered the plagiarism is a red herring,'' said one such staff member. ''The core of Joe Biden's credibility is that he is a self-proclaimed and unique visionary orator. It's like finding out General Haig never served in the Army.''

Biden withdrew from the presidential race a week later.

Since that time additional instances of plagiarism came to light including one in law school that resulting in Biden failing and having to retake a course. For the past twenty years Joe has kept his nose clean and has gone from young rising star to elder statesman.

Politics makes for strange bedfellows and even stranger feuds and enemies. With Biden now on the ticket it will be interesting to see how Dowd plays this old run-in from early in their careers.

The Ultimate Get Out Of Jail Free Card

The "Get Out of Jail Free" card is held until used and then returned to the bottom of the deck. If the player who draws it does not wish to use it, then they may sell it, at any time, to another player at a price agreeable to both.
-Official Monopoly® Game Rules

Too Much of a Bad Thing
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: August 24, 2008

According to Maureen Dowd, John McCain’s years of being tortured as a POW in Vietnam has given him the ultimate hall pass as she states in the following Dowdversion® (the only trademarked Dowd Rhetorical Device used in this very solemn column):

I was startled, but it brought home to me what a powerful get-out-of-jail-free card McCain had earned by not getting out of jail free.

Maureen then compiles a list of the things that having been held and abused for five years gets you a free pass on.

Divorcing your wife to marry an heiress.

My mom did not approve of men who cheated on their wives. She called them “long-tailed rats.”

During the 2000 race, she listened to news reports about John McCain confessing to dalliances that caused his first marriage to fall apart after he came back from his stint as a P.O.W. in Vietnam.
{snip}
“A man who lives in a box for five years can do whatever he wants,” she replied matter-of-factly.

Pimping your wife in front of thousands of bikers.

The Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, the pastor who married Jenna Bush and who is part of a new Christian-based political action committee supporting Obama, recently criticized the joke McCain made at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally encouraging Cindy to enter the topless Miss Buffalo Chip contest. The McCain spokesman Brian Rogers brought out the bottomless excuse, responding with asperity that McCain’s character had been “tested and forged in ways few can fathom.”

Being late to a debate.

When the Obama crowd was miffed to learn that McCain was in a motorcade rather than in a “cone of silence” while Obama was being questioned by Rick Warren, Nicolle Wallace of the McCain camp retorted, “The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous.”

Liking bad pop music.

As Sam Stein notes in The Huffington Post: “The senator has even brought his military record into discussion of his music tastes. Explaining that his favorite song was ‘Dancing Queen’ by Abba, he offered that his knowledge of music ‘stopped evolving when his plane intercepted a surface-to-air missile.’ ‘Dancing Queen,’ however, was produced in 1975, eight years after McCain’s plane was shot down.”

Maybe if Dubya and Cheney had known what a great all-purpose excuse being a POW was, they wouldn’t have been so eager to avoid military service.

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.

Cheerleader In Chief

Russia Is Not Jamaica
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: August 16, 2008

Maureen Dowd is often accused of not being tough enough on the current administration, but when she she focuses on them, she let’s loose with the whole arsenal. There are three sets of Alliteration Alerts® in this paragraph alone.

After eight years, the president’s gut remains gullible. He’ll go out as he came in — ignoring reality; failing to foresee, prevent or even prepare for disasters; misinterpreting intelligence reports; misreading people; and handling crises in ways that makes them exponentially worse.

It’s no secret that 43 has a rather leisurely approach to leadership, but Maureen takes him to task with the arithmetic of the vacation.

He has spent 469 days of his presidency kicking back at his ranch, and 450 days cavorting at Camp David. And there’s still time to mountain-bike through another historic disaster.

Bush's ill-timed foray to the Olympics (while tanks were rolling in Ossetia, Putin was sitting a few seats down from Dubya at the opening ceremonies) makes him look like a lecherous frat boy instead of a world leader, prompting Maureen to give him a new Rude Name®:

We knew we could count on the cheerleader in chief to be jumping around like a kid in Beijing with bikini-clad beach volleyball players while the Re-Evil Empire was sending columns of tanks into its former republic.

And for of those keeping track, that could be taken an emasculating swipe at Bush, but since he really was a cheerleader in college, you could argue it's a clean shot.

The rest of the column is a pretty hard to argue against synopsis of the missteps we have made against the putative socialist powers. Dowd does manage to scramble one metaphor to birds nest soup standards.

China has bought so much of America that we’d be dead Peking ducks if they pulled their investments out of our market, and Russia has transformed itself from a pauper nation to a land filled with millionaires — all through our addiction to oil.

When you are cataloging the mistakes of the Bush Administration, it's tough to find the humor, even if the president himself refuses to take the job seriously.