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.
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.While she doesn’t single out a quote, she is probably referring to this passage of the speech:
(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.)
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….
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.And the lady from the Gray Lady is painting a picture of the next president through some pretty thick beer goggles.
Gray is a welcome relief from black and white.
There will be no Dowd Report today. Since there was no mention of Hillary Clinton in today's column, I'm too busy ice skating through Hades.
Carry on my wayward son,
For there'll be peace when you are done
Lay your weary head to rest
Now don't you cry no more
Masquerading as a man with a reason
My charade is the event of the season
And if I claim to be a wise man, it surely
means that I don't know
The arithmetic of procuring a prostitute who is both experienced and inspirational is even more complicated than the arithmetic of procuring a president who is both experienced and inspirational.And that doesn’t even count as a Dowdversion®, because the structure is completely parallel. This shell game is much punnier:
…do you really need to shell out $4,300, plus minibar expenses, to a shell company for an hour with a shady lady? Aren’t there cheaper hooker hook-ups on Craigslist? It makes you wonder how sharp Eliot Spitzer’s pencil was on the state’s fiscal disclipline.As a bonus, we get the pretty lame shell-shady ho-ho double alliteration complete with internal rhyme and the just a little too subtle phallic pencil innuendo. But it goes juicier:
And how does it add up that Steamroller No. 1 suddenly morphs into Client No. 9, a nom d’amour with the ring of an overpriced Gucci cologne for men, giving untold thousands for untold years to a prostitution ring that has hourly rates based on rating its girls on a diamond scale of 1 to 7, with 7 being $3,100, and above 7 in a special club for $5,500 and up?This is good because Steamroller No. 1 is a callback to this profane quote from Spitzer’s first days in office (as retold on Boston.com):
"I am a fucking steamroller and I'll roll over you or anybody else," the Democratic governor told Republican Assemblyman James Tedisco in a private conversation last week, the New York Post reported on Wednesday."Fucking" was the absolutely right adjective there. Freudian slip much Eliot? This story is so hot we get, not one, but three unnamed imaginary “friends” of Maureen to chime in. The first knows her way around an escort service. Ah, those were the days, weren’t they, Mo?
(A friend of mine who knows the ways of the wayward, explained that the flesh-peddlers no doubt had a shell game as well as a shell company: “They say, ‘You can have Jane. She’s $1,000 an hour. Or, you can have Tiffany for $5,000 an hour.’ The client doesn’t know that Jane and Tiffany are the same girl...)The second is a straw(wo)man letting Dowd drag this out to the gutter and back onto the Clinton campaign.
“I would think the story about our esteemed governor is all the proof we need that we should have a woman as president,” a woman I know said in an e-mail message.And finally, we get back on the Hillary Hating Highway after our detour to Spitzers truckstop trollop.
Another woman e-mailed the reverse to a friend: “I hope this makes people think back to Monica Lewinsky. Can sex scandals be well timed?”Gee, what sex scandal does this remind Dowd of? Hmmm…
Hillary could not have been pleased to be in all the TV stand-by-your-man features, or to hear David Letterman’s Spitzer Top Ten list which included, “I thought Bill Clinton legalized this years ago.”Since sex is covered, Maureen can fan the flames of racial disrespect while getting in a jab at spectacular Democratic crash and burns of the past:
Geraldine Ferraro, who helped Walter Mondale lose 49 states in 1984, was clearly stung at what she considered Obama’s easy rise to celebrity and electoral success. Last Friday, Ms. Ferraro, who is on Hillary’s national finance committee, told The Daily Breeze, a small newspaper in Torrance, Calif.: “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman of any color, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”Sorry, I got to take the side of the Obamaniacs in this one. Gerry was one the bringing up race. And it was an attack. Guilty as charged.
[Ferraro] told The Times on Tuesday night that she was “livid,” adding: “Anytime you say anything to anybody about the Obama campaign, it immediately becomes a racist attack.”
If blood will have blood, as Shakespeare said in “Macbeth,” power will have sex.But the feature attraction is a costume drama about a powerful woman that has trouble keeping the men in her life in line. Rather than go to any of the recent Cate Blanchett portrayals, Dowd reaches way back to the Errol Flynn classic The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. “Private lives”, “Essex”, get it?
Some people took the saga of Eliot Ness in the boudoir, the old yarn of holier-than-thou caught in flagrante delicto, as a sign that a woman should be president.
But in the past, women got tangled up with sex and power. When Bette Davis played Elizabeth I, she was always sending her lovers off to the Tower of London when they made eyes at her pretty ladies-in-waiting. Catherine the Great was hardly known for her restraint. And there were Agrippa and Cleopatra, of course.And to that pantheon, Dowd adds a future ruler tough enough to stand with the men:
Hillary would never have to pretend to be a man to get aides to respect her, proving that she has moved past gender in a way Ferraro never did.Not only that, you have no fear of sex scandal on Hillary’s watch because:
In modern times, you rarely see any men having to ashenly stand by their women.We know that Hillary has already stood by her man and now Tammy Wynette gets to be the opening act.
You think it's over just because I am dead. It's not over. The games have just begun.
I was covered in barbecue sauce, somewhere over Texas, when Barack Obama loped down the aisle of the plane to chat with reporters.But rather than teen comedies, this week’s Movies With Maureen® focuses on horror films. Much to Dowd’s horror, Hillary Clinton has, like an undead psycho in the last fifteen minutes of a slasher flick, sprung back to life to attack the innocent naïve teenagers once again. This is the part of the movie where the plucky hero has to draw on his hidden reserve of machismo and strike down the zombie killer. Never mind that mojo (as opposed to Cujo, the Big Dog) is an Austin Powers call out, Dowd is telling Barack, once again, to man-up.
I felt guilty, because I had been covering his speeches urging parents to make their kids give up chips and Popeyes. I hadn’t yet come to grips with the notion of giving up Popeyes when Obama — slender, chewing Nicorette and perfectly groomed in his crisp white shirt — came upon me. I was splattered with so much red sauce it could have been a scene from “Saw IV.” Not only on my face and hands but all over the candidate’s picture in the U.S. News & World Report I was reading.
After losing Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and his mojo, and getting whipsawed around by Hillary and his own chuckleheaded coterie of advisers, he will now have to come to grips with something he has always skittered away from: You can’t be elected president unless you prove you’re tough.Hillary Clinton reminds Maureen Dowd (and the Wall Street Journal editorial page) of another woman leader that terrorized the country with a band of murderous thugs, Ma Barker. And Ma Barker/Clinton has some easy prey in her scope. It’s the Return of Obambi:
Ma Clinton knows where Obambi’s soft spots are; she knows he likes being petted on his pedestal, that he’s unnerved by her, and that he can never fully accept how shameless she is. What could be more shameless than suggesting to Democrats that John McCain would make a better commander in chief than Obama?And it’s not just Dowd that views Hillary as a relentless immoral monster lurking in the shadows waiting to attack, the Obama campaign does as well. A gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth. Here is former Obama advisor Samantha Power:
Power, a foreign policy adviser to Obama, told The Scotsman [of the BBC] that Hillary was “a monster” and the BBC that Obama’s Iraq withdrawal plan was merely a “best-case scenario.” (She’s now resigned.)And like any truly scary monster, Hillary has the power to disguise herself, the better to sneak up on unsuspecting voters.
Ma Clinton pounced, telling reporters in Mississippi, “He keeps telling people one thing, while his campaign tells people abroad something else.”
Hillary successfully recast herself in Ohio as a beer-drinking former waitress. Only after last week’s reversals did the Obama camp raise a louder ruckus about her tax returns. Obviously, Ms. Night Shift does not want to reveal the details of the fortune that Bill Clinton has made, sometimes through dubious associations.Night Shift was Michael Keaton’s mortuary hooker comedy before he went on to be the not-quite-dead-yet Beetlejuice. Both movies seem to be apt metaphors for the still-on-life-support Clinton campaign. But the real nightmare would be Hillary suckering the Candidate of Hope (that's "hope" as in "the desire and search for a future good", not the Arkansas spawning ground of presidential candidates) into being a zombie-fied running mate:
If he thinks Hillary has cut him down to size lately, he’d better imagine what his life would be like as the Clintons’ vice president.Maureen is like a horror movie fan yelling at the screen as the clueless hero does something stupid. The audience knows the monster isn’t dead yet and is still lying in wait. Dowd is telling Obama to beware of any power sharing overtures Hillary may offer. As the Saw IV tagline says: It’s A Trap.
You cannot ignore history. History has shown that in general it has been the men who have done the rapin’ and the robbin’ and the killin’ and the war mongering for the last 2000 years. It has been the men who have done the pillaging and the beheading and the subjugating of whole races into slavery. It has been the men who have done the law makin and the money makin’ and most of the mischief makin’. So, if the world isn’t quite what you had in mind, you have only yourselves to thank.
Some women in their 30s, 40s and early-50s who favor Barack Obama have a phrase to describe what they don’t like about Hillary Clinton: Shoulder-pad feminism.The age bracket mentioned is an obvious hint at the geriatric nature of Clinton’s core. According to CNN.com, in the just closed Texas primary, Barack got 58% of the under 25 while Hillary swept two-thirds of 65 and older as well getting 55% of women to Barry taking only 50% of men.
But Hillary — carried on the padded shoulders of the older women in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island who loved her “I Will Survive” rallying cry that “I am a little older and I have earned every wrinkle on my face” — has been saved to fight another day.Dowd has had Hillary singing that Gloria Gaynor disco anthem since she titled a 1998 column "Icon And I Will Survive". It’s the women with wrinkles that Dowd finds troubling in their sisterly solidarity:
Three Hillary volunteers, older women from Boston, approached a New York Times reporter in an Austin, Tex., parking lot on Tuesday to vent that Hillary hasn’t gotten a fair shake from the press. They said that they used to like Obama but now can’t stand him because they think he has been cocky and disrespectful to Hillary.Dare we say uppity? It’s the race/gender either/or that Dowd has to tiptoe most gently around. She asks rhetorically:
People will have to choose which of America’s sins are greater, and which stain will have to be removed first. Is misogyny worse than racism, or is racism worse than misogyny?And to keep with the excessive padding theme of the column she asks the same thing again:
Will America’s racial past be expunged or America’s sexist past be expunged?Dowd then cites some fourth-hand hearsay to get a truly tasteless (and vaguely related to the whole pad theme) pro-Clinton menstrual cycle solidarity quote:
As Ali Gallagher, a white Hillary volunteer in Austin told The Washington Post’s Krissah Williams: “A friend of mine, a black man, said to me, ‘My ancestors came to this country in chains; I’m voting for Barack.’ I told him, ‘Well, my sisters came here in chains and on their periods; I’m voting for Hillary.’ ”Let’s go to the tape there: Dowd quotes what a white woman told a Washington Post reporter what she told her black friend. My neck is suffering second-hand whiplash from that.
Watching Bill Clinton greet but not address — the Big Dog has been muzzled — an excited group of students at Texas State University in San Marcos on Tuesday, 19-year-old Allison Krolczyk said she was leaning toward Obama and felt no gender guilt about voting for him. “Not at all,” she said. “I think they’re both pretty amazing.”And we all know that Monica favored kneepads instead of shoulder pads for her jobs.
The crowd held up their camera phones to capture the former president, in his bright orange tie and orange-brown ostrich cowboy boots.
“We love you, Bill!” yelled one boy. “You did a good job, except for Monica.”
A Wake-Up Call for Hillary
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 2, 2008
The last time we saw Dr. Strangelove on Movies With Maureen®, Dick Cheney was Slim Pickens riding the bomb like a cowboy all the way down to Iran. Now Maureen Dowd has recast the movie with Hillary Clinton in the role of the titular madman.
Channeling her inner Cheney, Hillary Clinton dropped a fear bomb, as Michelle Obama might call it, implying in a new ad that if her opponent is elected, your angelic, innocent, sleeping children could die in a terrorist attack.
Only she has the wise head to go nuclear, should that Strangelovian phone call from a power-mad Putin come into the White House at 3 a.m.
Her ad shows how composed she would be at the dread moment when she picks up the phone. Her nuke look is feminine, in a tailored camel-colored jacket and gold necklace, yet serious, in Tina Fey black reading glasses.
It’s rather Mommie Dearest for the first serious female contender to try to give the kiddies nightmares.But at least Barack has morphed from Obambi into Obambi-No-More. It's not clear whether this long-standing staple (but not original to her) of her roster of rude names is being retired or just shelved until the general election:
Obambi-No-More briskly dismissed Hillary’s attempt to cast him as a global ingénue.Dowd feels that the Clinton campaign is doomed because fear mongering just won’t work. She says the American electorate is too smart for that:
The president took the country to war on his gut, exploited our fears and played the patriotism card to advance his political agenda.Hmmm. New York Times policy prevents columnists from explicitly endorsing candidates, but what could Dowd mean by wanting “a refreshing change”? Could that refer to some particular candidate that also wants change. The bigger change is that if Hillary loses big on Tuesday, Maureen won’t have the Clintons to kick around any more. What will she have to talk about then? Other than movies and fashion choices. Some things will never change.
This time, Americans may prefer cerebral arguments to visceral ones. What a refreshing change reality would be.
