Too Thin To Win

The Last Debate
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 21, 2008

The day off has refreshed and energized Maureen Dowd and she has reverted to one of her favorite formats: the faux debate where she gets to put words in the mouth of both candidates. The most recent of these tour de forces was the epic drug-lingo round-up.

Today she imagines a mock debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as a verbal shoot-out at the OK Corral. She starts right off with a topical reference to Sweetie-gate, Barack’s off-handed and sexist dismal of a female reporter:

“What do you want? Please, Sweetie, would you just tell me what you want?”

“Don’t Sweetie me, Twiggy. You know what I want.”

The second line is faux-Hillary’s rebuttal which is the first of several references to Barack’s skinniness and/or his eating habits and lack thereof:

Forget it, Bones.

While you’ve been fake-eating and losing weight, I’ve had to stuff myself with all that greasy working-class junk food and chase it with Boilermakers.

Back at ya, Skeletor.

Dowd columns for a couple of months now have had an odd subtext that Obama’s slender frame and dainty eating style have made him too skinny to be a serious candidate. Not too black, liberal, or inexperienced (although the faux-Clinton sock puppet touches on all of these as well), but too thin. Amateur psychoanalysts may discuss this amongst yourselves.

When Dowd pulls out the rhetorical stops, the Alliteration Alerts® just pile up everywhere. This paragraph has three sets just by itself:

I’m 60 delegates away from nomination nirvana. You should stop stalking me. I come down to Florida for a victory lap and you follow me down here and call for a recount. Look what that did for Al Gore. If you show a shred of common sense and take a powder now, the party will put you on a pedestal.

Say “party pedestal powder” three times fast. I dare you. But her greatest assonance achievement is this particular phrase:

“Bill and I don’t need your Netroots arugula moolah. We don’t need your stinking $20 donors. We’ve got Burkle, the Saudis, the Kuwaitis and Kazakh uranium loot on tap.”

Just by itself, "netroots arugula moolah" would be a classic since in three words it touches on both Obama's internet ultra-liberal support base and his upper-class effete lack of he common touch. But the very next line changes targets and serves not only as poetry, but as a precise and concise summary of Clinton fund-raising scandals to come.

There are just so many tossed-off gems here, they are tough to catalog. We get the drug reference throwback:

“Wow, you’re so-o-o generous. Can I also write the plank on switchgrass?”

“I switched from grass a long time ago.”

Switched to what? Does this have something to do with the preternatural thinness?

Then there’s the memory of the Breck Girl who gets a new RudeName®:

And if you think your Secretary of Hairdressing, John Edwards, is going to help, you’re more delusional than I am.

And the racial allusions are thick and heavy as well. We get a great new phrase aimed at redneck voters who say to exit pollers that race IS a factor as well as Hillary's not always subliminal appeals to them:

So cool it with the White Fright.

And we have a great Dowdversion® that invokes the “Barack is a crypto-Muslim” rumors:

You can bet your white turban that I’m not raising the white flag.

The entire column is a laundry list of obscure scandals and campaign kerfuffles that make a Dennis Miller monologue look straight forward. Here is a Kentucky Primary/Derby reference that flows right into a dead race horse metaphor for the Clinton campaign:

I’ve never been a loser. I refuse to lose. I won the West Virginia and Kentucky derbies, and I’m not going to end up like Eight Belles.

But that is followed with a line for FauxBama that could be as sincere a statement as Maureen will ever say to Hillary directly or indirectly:

“Hillary, you’ve been a great candidate, better than your train-wreck campaign. You’re Churchillian in your indomitable tenacity. You’ve inspired women all over the country. In fact, you’ve inspired some of them to hate me. But now it’s time for you to try to muster a gracious exit.”

It’s the sign of a master satirist that she can hide the greatest truths in plain sight.

Eight Ball Barry

Eight ball: A quantity of cocaine or crystal that weighs an eighth of an ounce, hence an "eight ball", which is equivalent to 3.5 grams. –Urban Dictionary

Raspberry for Barry
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 14, 2008

As the Clinton campaign runs out of steam, so does Maureen Dowd’s ability to come up with alliterative Rude Names®:

Obama is acting the diffident debutante, pretending not to care that he was given a raspberry by a state he will need in the fall.

We first saw “Diffident Debutante” back on February 3rd when Hillary was still the Debate Dominatrix. And tell me she didn’t just make a raspberry/Barry Obama pun? Please. Or is it a Prince "Raspberry Beret" shout-out? I'm not sure which would be worse.

And speaking of not believing my eyes, is “eight ball” a drug crack (so to speak) or is Maureen just that clueless about coke lingo:

Fast Barry shot some pool Monday afternoon at Schultzie’s Billiards in South Charleston, including prophetically sinking an eight-ball in the pocket…

I think not. After all, she managed to fit twenty drug slang terms into this column.

The cleverest line in the column was this one about Hillary exploiting class antagonism:

Mining that antipathy, the New York senator has been working hard to get the hard-working white voters of hardscrabble Appalachia so she can show that a black man can’t yet be elected president.

And that vein of antipathy (see, antipathy sounds like anthracite, which is a type of coal, get it?) includes some not so subtle racism which Maureen is glad to chronicle:

Two in 10 white voters said race was important in how they voted, and more than 8 of 10 of these went for Hillary. This echoes an article in The Washington Post on Tuesday that chronicled the racism that some Obama volunteers found in Indiana and Pennsylvania.

The story quoted Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, who could take only one night on an Obama phone bank in the nearly all-white Susquehanna County, Pa.: “One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn’t possibly vote for Obama and concluded: ‘Hang that darky from a tree!’ ”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote about complaints of racism after a bar in Marietta, Ga., began selling an Obama 2008 T-shirt with a picture of Curious George peeling a banana.

(Click here for a Boston Herald story with a picture of said shirt if you are that curious.)

Dowd first spotted the “won’t vote for a well-educated charismatic black guy” trend in her Pennsylvania wrap-up, but as Obama becomes the nominee apparent expect the race-baiting to become more explicit. If we can elect a Catholic president, we can elect a Black president, even if he can’t carry West Virginia. And the mention of JFK is just enough to send Maureen to mutter nostalgically into her Bumillers for the rest of the column:

J.F.K. bought affection in West Virginia. “The boss of Logan County said 35,” Peters recalled. “He meant $3,500, but Kennedy thought it was $35,000, so he gave him $35,000. They put out all this money and they carried the precincts.” (Hillary has been using street money more than Obama, though it is unclear how much it has helped.)

And really, that is enough of that. Once we start eulogizing dead Democratic presidents it’s time for last call.

The Campaign Buzz

Reefer Madness in Iowa
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 16, 2007

Maureen Dowd is determined to show off how "hep" she is by dropping as many drug references as she can cram into one column. With a little help from this NYT article from last summer, let's catch up on the lingo the kids are using nowadays and count the number drug "cracks" we can find in her trademarked faux debate:

WASHBURN: Senator Clinton, I’d like you to start us off by explaining why your campaign has been getting down and dirty with someone so clean¹ and articulate?

It was marginal candidate Joe Biden that put his foot in his mouth over the "a" word. I doubt he's even aware of the sobriety implication of "clean."

CLINTON: I apologized to Senator Obama. I absolutely did not authorize or condone the remarks made by one of my co-chairs in New Hampshire about my distinguished colleague’s youthful indiscretions. If primary voters don’t care that he did “a little blow²,” then my goodness, why should I? Even if he had packed a straw³ full of the white rabbit⁴ and had a snow bunny^4a blow it in his ear, who would care, for Pete’s sake? I only wish I knew all that colorful chasing-the-dragon⁵ lingo. Senator Obama certainly has a lot of street cred, even if it isn’t Main Street. We owe it to the good people of Iowa to stick to critical issues like the economy, and how to get a fiscally responsible budget like we had in the ’90s, the ’90s, the ’90s —

WASHBURN: Snap out of it.

CLINTON: Sorry. Anyway, even if Senator Obama were still riding the snow train⁶, I would not allow any revelations about it to sully this campaign. I’m not sure who that young man in a hoodie was that Barack was talking to outside tonight, before the debate. I’d seen the young man earlier, standing around in the shadows outside. But that’s neither here nor there. Even if I had been able to see whether any money was exchanged, or who was selling to whom, I would not allow anyone in my campaign, even that scamp Mark Penn, to use the word cocaine, cocaine, cocaine⁷ —

WASHBURN: Senator!

{snip}

CLINTON: Don’t bogart⁸ the time, Barack. I’d like a hit. Carolyn, shouldn’t there be some timing device to let my young friend know when he’s going over, something that would go “BONG⁹!”

OBAMA: I know what you’re doing, Hillary. I wasn’t born yesterday. She wants Americans to think I’m so young and green that I can only run for White House intern. It would be a stain on me to sink as low as her.

"Stain" is not a drug reference, just the obligatory Monica reference. Dowd has to make at least one in every Clinton related column. The Pulitzer committee insists.

CLINTON: I don’t appreciate that crack¹⁰. If you’re going to needle¹¹ me, Senator —

OBAMA: In turn, I would like to reply that what this country really needs is change —

CLINTON: Change is mine now, Senator Belushi¹². Bill and I stole it weeks ago. Some people believe you get change by hoping for it. Some believe you get change by snorting¹³ it. I believe you get it by working hard.

WASHBURN: Can you both please describe the key features of what you consider to be the best education system in the world?

CLINTON: Well, I know that some of my supporters have been spreading gossip that Senator Obama loves the madrassa system for pre-K through terrorist training camp. But there is not a gram¹⁴ of truth in those accusations. We shouldn’t inject¹⁵ intolerance into this race.

WASHBURN: I would like to talk about the Peru free trade deal that was signed on Friday. You both missed the vote.

CLINTON: Oh, Barack should take that one. His views on Peruvian are positively flaky¹⁶.

And there really was a US-Peru Free Trade Agreement this week, so that isn't as lame a stretch as it first appears.

OBAMA: You’re the flaky one, Hillary, backing up the president when he wanted to rush¹⁷ into Iraq and wage this trillion-dollar war.

CLINTON: It’s no wonder you didn’t want to go into Iraq, Barack. There are no free bases¹⁸ there.

WASHBURN: All right, you two. We’re out of time. Have a Merry Christmas and —

CLINTON: And I am sure that Senator Obama is dreaming of his usual White Christmas¹⁹. Hitch up the reindeer!

WASHBURN: As I was saying, a Happy New Year.

CLINTON: He gets no kick from Champagne²⁰ ...

Footnotes:
1. Drug-free
2. Cocaine
3. Common paraphernalia item used in snorting cocaine
4. A thinly veiled Jefferson Airplane song about drug use
4a. A white female; this expression is commonly used to describe a white female who mingles amoung black males. Not technically a drug reference, but it completes the reflexive Dowd inversion pun with "white rabbit".
5. The need for an ever-increasing dose of a drug to get the same high.
6. Use cocaine. "Ride a train" has a much different sexual connotation.
7. Benzoylmethyl ecgonine (C₁₇H₂₁NO₄)
8. To hog something, esp. a marijuana cigarette
9. A water pipe used for smoking marijuana.
10. A form of cocaine meant for smoking.
11. Paraphernalia used to inject drugs.
12. John Belushi, a famous Chicago comedian, died of a drug overdose.
13. To inhale a drug.
14. Unit of measurement for drugs.
15. To force dugs into the body using a syringe.
16. Peruvian flake is 100% pure powder cocaine.
17. The euphoria caused by drugs.
18. Freebase is a variation of cocaine intended to be smoked.
19. To use cocaine. Also a sexual reference.
20. The Cole Porter song "I Get A Kick Out Of You" has a cocaine reference:

I get no kick from Champagne.
Mere alcohol doesn't thrill me at all,
So tell me why should it be true
That I get a kick out of you?

Some get a kick from cocaine
I'm sure that if I took even one sniff
That would bore me terrificly too
Yet I get a kick out of you

No, Maureen, we get a kick out of YOU!