Rap Star Obama-Z

If you feelin like a pimp nigga,
go and brush your shoulders off
Ladies is pimps too,
go and brush your shoulders off
Niggaz is crazy baby,
don't forget that boy told you
Get, that, dirt off your shoulder

-Jay-Z "Dirt Off Your Shoulder"

Brush It Off
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 20, 2008

Like Barbara Billingsley in Airplane, Maureen Dowd can speak Jive, old school style.

Barack Obama, who says he listens to Jay-Z along with his “old school guy” favorites like Earth, Wind & Fire and the Temptations, alluded to the rapper’s 2003 hit “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” on Thursday to sweep away concerns about his pugnacity.

After conceding that the Philly debate was tough, he brushed the imaginary lint of Hillary, George and Charlie from his shoulders, in a wordless reference to Jay-Z’s lyrics in his anthem about not letting anyone crimp your ride as you cruise from the bottom to the top: “Got some, dirt on my shoulder, could you brush it off for me.”

First off, changing "pimp your ride" to "crimp" is old lady lame. And Maureen catching onto the not-so-subliminal Jay-Z reference wasn't all that earth shattering. The hidden message of the shoulder brushing was immediately apparent to most of the blogosphere where it battled an alleged bird flip as the most debated hand gesture of his speech. It didn't take long for the YouTube stars to mash up the song and the speech so that there was no mistaking the diss (audio NSFW - it's Jay-Z, duh):



Having been on the campaign plane with Barack, Maureen starts fantasizing about how cool an Obama presidency is going to look.

There’s no doubt the cat is cool. It’s easy to imagine the wild reception many parts of the world would give a President Obama as he loped down the stairs of Air Force One in his aviator glasses, the chic and chiseled Michelle on his arm.

The hot/cool metaphor is just too painful to diagram. It's tedious even by Dowd standards. Obama last loped in the column where he snuck up on her on the campaign plane while eating barbecue. And unless you've covered as many Obama rallies as Maureen you may not be aware that Obama uses a certain Stevie Wonder chestnut as his campaign stop closer:

But before it’s signed, sealed and delivered, as his campaign song goes, Obama will have to balance his cool with some heat, as J.F.K. did. He seems too imperious about the power of hot-button values issues that have proved so potent for most of his lifetime.

But according to Dowd, he has switched to something more patriotic as he focuses attention on defusing the fervor behind McCain.

Even though his supporters raised Cain about ABC, Obama is smart enough to know he will need a better game against a canny war hero. Campaigning in Pennsylvania on Friday, he seemed eager to show he was not highfalutin. He said he and Michelle weren’t born with silver spoons; he shared how “burned up” he was when his sick mother could not get health insurance; he hugged a disabled veteran who thanked him for getting into the race, and he left a rally with a lusty “God Bless America.”

Dowd slips in the phrase "better game" (maybe Mystery can become a campaign consultant) to show that she's hip to the lingo, but also proves that she speaks fluent Fogey by slipping in "highfalutin" as the closest word to "uppity" she dares attempt.

If she really wanted to prove how down with the hip-hopper she was, she'd be using "99 Problems" as Obama's reaction to the increasingly irrelevant Clinton Campaign:

99 problems but the bitch ain't one
If you're havin' girl problems I feel bad for you son
I got 99 problems but a bitch ain't one
Hit me

But instead Maureen tries to talk like she's ever seen a copy of XXL.

He’s trying, as Jay-Z says, to get flow.

With that kind of clunky phrasing, we don't have to worry about Dowd getting crunky any time soon.

DowdSpotting: Her Hair Was Perfect

Wednesday night, Maureen Dowd was working/stalking the Democratic Debate and drew as much attention as the candidates. Natasha Chart of Open Left was working the press room with her fellow press-credentialed bloggers and spotted Dowd. Wanting a quote, she approached her.

Then Valania suggested that I ask Maureen Dowd what she thought, since she was coming our way. I scanned the direction I was more or less facing, as he indicated, spotted her, then looked back at him. She wasn't that far away, our eyes briefly met, she must have gotten a load of my bleached buzzcut or something, and then she pretty much kept staring most the rest of the way over to where she'd have to file past me in our narrow confines. It made me kind of twitchy.

But she was rebuffed:

"I've got to go to the spin room," she said, raising a warding hand with haughty languor. She sauntered off with her entourage, surveilled the back section of the room for a scosh, and then headed off to be spun. Well.

I wonder what Maureen Dowd would write about someone who acted like that towards her?

Because Maureen really doesn't have anything better to do that chit-chat with bloggers while the fate of the Democratic Party is being decided. Which leads to some catty remarks to the effect that Dowd is too pretty to be knocking other candidates on their appearance.

Which brings up more questions for me: Why should Maureen Dowd, whose own meticulously coiffed and dyed locks seem to have been airbrushed directly into reality by some fashion photography genius (seriously, her hair is surreal in its perfection,) have ever been allowed to make a national political issue out of John Edwards' hair? And why, by contrast, shouldn't her job be given instead to a real lifestyle reporter like Booker, who still manages to care about nontrivial issues and had a reasonable, human reaction to last night's festival of horrors?

The whole incident was confirmed by Jonathon Valania of Citizen Mom who also got a picture.

It all went down the way Chart says, including the contrast between MoDo, who minced around the press room in an expensive-looking (if oddly bedazzled) sweater, and Candy Crowley, who spent the debate tapping away on her keyboard and prepping for her live shot by fixing her makeup in a compact mirror.

So we don't want any stories about Dowd sending stringers to get quotes when we have photographic proof that Maureen was working the press room and annoying her star-struck groupies with her indifference. So keep up the catty remarks about clothes and hair, fellow bloggers. That way Dowd will know you are serious journalists like her.

Photo credit: Jonathon Valania

Bitter Barack Breakup

You're just a mass of prejudices, aren't you? You're so much thought and so little feeling, Professor.

-The Philadelphia Story

Eggheads and Cheese Balls
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 16, 2008

The love affair is over. Sweet, sweet Obama has gone and insulted Maureen Dowd’s working class family and the love affair is over. But she’s not bitter. Just ask her.

I’m not bitter.

I’m not writing this just because I grew up in a house with a gun, a strong Catholic faith, an immigrant father, brothers with anti-illegal immigrant sentiments and a passion for bowling. (My bowling trophy was one of my most cherished possessions.)

And when Maureen is mad, she grabs a tub of ice cream and curls up with some DVDs. We have a full slate of Pennsylvania themed Movies With Maureen® today starting with Hillary as Rocky (see this post for that unsightly image) and The Deer Hunter with Obambi as the titular target.

And as Obama has courted white, blue-collar voters in “Deer Hunter” and “Rocky” country, he has often appeared to be observing the odd habits of the colorful locals, resisting as the natives try to fatten him up like a foie gras goose, sampling Pennsylvania beer in a sports bar with his tie tight, awkwardly accepting bowling shoes as a gift from Bob Casey, examining the cheese and salami at the Italian Market here as intriguing ethnic artifacts, purchasing Utz Cheese Balls at a ShopRite in East Norriton and quizzing the women working in a chocolate factory about whether they could possibly really like the sugary doodads.

Utz is a regional brand of snack foods much beloved by the denizens of the mid-Atlantic. Dowd smirked at Barack’s daintiness around high calorie food before. Especially something as alliterative as a fattened foie gras goose And nothing could be worse for the arteries that a full Philly cheesesteak “wid” onions, not swiss cheese like Kerry’s infamous faux pas.

He hasn’t pulled a John Kerry and asked for a Philly cheese steak with Swiss yet, but he has maintained a regal “What do the simple folk do to help them escape when they’re blue?” bearing, unable to even feign Main Street cred. But Hillary did when she belted down a shot of Crown Royal whiskey with gusto at Bronko’s in Crown Point, Ind.

And we know from a previous column that Dowd admires a candidate that can knock back a shot or twelve. And speaking of shots, Dowd is just as suspicious of everyone else as to Hillary’s newly revealed hunting prowess. She is more likely to be mistaken for Mitt Romney hunting varmits than for any wild west impresario.

Just as he couldn’t knock down the bowling pins, he can’t knock down Annie Oakley or “the girl in the race,” as her husband called her Tuesday — the self-styled blue-collar heroine who reluctantly revealed a $100 million fortune partially built on Bill’s shady connections.

But Obama bad mouthing her kin is not enough to win Maureen over. She takes a Woody Allen movie title and alliterates it over to match the Bosnian dissembling.

Even when Hillary’s campaign collapsed around her and her husband managed to revive the bullets over Bosnia, Obama has still not been able to marshal a knockout blow — or even come up with a knockout economic speech that could expand his base of support.

The Katherine Hepburn/Cary Grant classic gets a double work-out since it relates to both the upscale Philly suburbs and the perils of falling for the wrong guy.

In the screwball movie genre that started during the last Depression, there was a great tradition of the millionaire who was cool enough to relate to the common man — like Cary Grant’s C.K. Dexter Haven in “The Philadelphia Story.”

Obama did not grow up in cosseted circumstances. “Now when is the last time you’ve seen a president of the United States who just paid off his loan debt?” Michelle Obama asked Tuesday at Haverford College, referring to Barack’s student loans while speaking in the shadow of the mansions depicted in “The Philadelphia Story.”

And the spoiled little lamb insinuation inherent in "cosseted" fits so well with the Obambi metaphor. But, the most interesting movie allusion in the column is also the most subtle.

The last few weeks have not been kind to Hillary, but the endless endgame has not been kind to the Wonder Boy either. Obama comes across less like a candidate in Pennsylvania than an anthropologist in Borneo.

Wonder Boy was the name of Robert Redford’s bat in The Natural. And Dowd explicitly called Obama “The Natural” back in January. But Wonder Boys (with an ‘s’) is the title of a film about an out-of-touch drugged-up elitist professor that can’t relate to the real world. This movie starred former Dowd flame Michael Douglas. But she’s not bitter. After all, who can compete with Catherine Zeta-Jones?

And if Barry is developing airs over having to mingle with the cheese-ball eating, gun-toting hoi polloi of Pennsylvania, who can blame Dowd for ditching this guy who just wants to hobnob with effete New York liberal media types. Like Maureen Dowd.

Dance Dance Innuendo

Standing by His Woman
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 13, 2008

Last week Maureen Dowd suggested we pick our next president based on who can hold their liquor the best. Since that might favor the vodka-favoring Hillary, this week she has decided that we need to have a dance-off.

See the video of Hillary dancing at a seniors’ aerobics class at a Philly Y.M.C.A. Awk.

Compare that to the slick moves of Senator Smooth Jazz.



The Clinton video has been viewed less than 300 times while Obama has over 700,000 views. I think the voters have spoken. Krugman will probably argue that a bowling tournament would be a fairer test of skill.

The rest of the column is the weekly Dowd update on how the wheels are coming off the bus while at the same time she keeps throwing advisors under the bus. What is masterful about this column is the economy with which Dowd embeds subliminal references to other previous scandals and incidents.

Bill is also crazed about the ineluctable fact that he isn’t Obama.

Maureen explained this in more detail back on in the March 26 column when she said this:

And even Clinton supporters know that Bill does not want to be replaced as the first black president, especially by a black president with enough magic to possibly eclipse him in the history books.

According to Dowd, this rear guard assualt on Obama is personal. The Big Dog wants to stay the darling of Harlem, but his running of the mouth doesn't always help his cause. When Bill Clinton mentions bank robbing sarcastically, that is enough of an opening to dredge up some metaphorical mugging.

“And, oh, they acted like she was practically Mata Hari, you know? Just making up all this stuff,” he said, adding: “And you would’ve thought, you know, that she’d robbed a bank the way they all carried on about this.”

Given her 3 a.m. ads — (that has got to be her hedge fund manager on the phone) — it was not very flattering for Bill to rant on and suggest that her 60-year-old brain was fuzzy.

This lets Dowd recall Hillary's financial windfall from fraudulent futures trading.

And while accusing Hillary of pimping Chelsea is beyond the pale, there is no compunction about calling Bill a call girl, even if he is a seven diamond hooker.

But the dubious deals of her husband, a seven-diamond influence peddler, do provide an unsavory contrast with some of the candidate’s positions.

Seven diamonds was the top price level of Hillary's super-delegate Spitzer's favorite escort agency. And Bill is nothing if not high priced even if his taste in trailer trash is low rent.

While this column is ostensibly about Bill reopening the wound of Hillary's Bosnian dissembling, it is really about things being business as usual for the Clintons. Funny business, money business, and monkey business. It is these little innuendos that Dowd slips in so that every column does double duty. And that innuendo is that the Clintons are unfit for an encore dance.

Witchcraft and Statecraft

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
-Macbeth, Act V, scene v

Toil and Trouble
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 9, 2008

Maureen Dowd is feeling very Shakespearean lately and clearly obsessed with black magic. She recently called Hillary Clinton Lady Voldemort, which is clearly a portmanteau of Lady Macbeth and the villain from the Harry Potter series. Today she more explicitly compares the war in Iraq to Macbeth’s sorcery filled tale.

Maybe it was because I was sitting in the back of the Senate chamber with three war protesters — grim-faced, chanting women dressed in black hooded cloaks, white makeup and blood-red hands — that I felt as though I were watching a production of “Macbeth” rather than a hearing on Iraq.

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” the witches in the play said. “Hover through the fog and filthy air.” (Act I, scene i)

General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker were first called The Surge Twins (as opposed to the Glimmer Twins) back on September 12, 2007 (just a week before yours truly began documenting Dowd’s pop cultural fascination with Rude Names®). They are back for an encore:

The Surge Twins were back, but the daylong testimony of David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker before two committees seemed more depressing this time. As the Bard writes in “Macbeth”: “From that spring whence comfort seemed to come, discomfort swells.” (Act I, scene ii)

That’s two quotes from the first act. I don’t know if she is saving the rest of the play for a later column or if that is just as far as she got before getting tired of the sophomore English conceit. And I know Dowd doesn’t know enough comic books to make a deliberate Green Lantern reference, but I read this as “guardians of Oa” the first time I read it:

The guardians of Iraq offer more of the same — a post-Surge Pause or “consolidation and evaluation,” as the general generically puts it — and no answers about how we can stop our ward from aligning with our enemy.

And I have no idea whether a post-Surge Pause is anything like menopause, but they both seen to be rather chaotic events.

I’m not sure what Dowd has against the senator from California, but she gives her props here:

You know you’re in trouble when Barbara Boxer is the voice of reason.

“Why is it,” she asked, “after all we have given — 4,024 American lives, gone; more than half-a-billion dollars spent; all this for the Iraqi people, but it’s the Iranian president who is greeted with kisses and flowers?”

She warmed to: “He got a red-carpet treatment, and we are losing our sons and daughters every single day for the Iraqis to be free. It is irritating is my point.”
Ambassador Crocker dryly assured the senator from California that he believed that Dick Cheney had also gotten kissed on his visit to Iraq.

Cheney may have gotten kissed, but it’s the American people that are getting screwed.

Vice Squad

The Vodka Chronicles
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 6, 2008

Maureen Dowd gets down to analyzing all the remaining presidential candidates and the criteria she uses is who has the most repugnant personal vice. She knocks McCain for not drinking enough, given his hard driving naval aviator reputation.

In his book and last week’s bio-tour, McCain painted himself as a cool bad boy. He was a girl-loving, authority-defying, plane-crashing Top Gun.

McCain’s pals know him as a man who enjoys libations of vodka with little green cocktail olives. Over the years, at dinners with reporters, I noted he had the habit of ordering one double vodka and sipping it slowly. And there was that famous Hillary-McCain Estonian drink-off in 2004, when Hillary instigated a vodka shot contest and McCain agreed with alacrity (even though he later offered a sketchy denial).

She had mentioned the bipartisan Temple of Doom style shot drinking contest on her last Meet The Press appearance back in January. She is worried that the candidate is being whitewashed because it would cut into the use of Rude Names®:

If his campaign is bowdlerizing, let’s hope it stops before he’s a bland McNice.

If McCain seems like the stealth temperance candidate, Hillary, according to Dowd, seems to be seeping under the rug her desire to earn the Absolut endorsement. The second feature of today’s Movies With Maureen® double feature is Election.

Oddly, Hillary, a Tracy Flick Goodie Two Shoes growing up, is the only one who seems to be enjoying her vices… Her campaign doesn’t deny that she likes to kick back, at the end of a long day, with a vodka on her plane.

But it’s Obama that earns her scorn for pretending to down a drink but watering the plants instead.

Everyone may imagine that Obama and his press corps spend all their time quaffing Champagne and celebrating the astonishment of his very being. But the candidate is boringly abstemious — and reporters traveling with him find him aloof. On a 2005 trip to Russia, he priggishly requested that his vodka shot glass be filled with water.

But Obama is not entirely vice free. While his pot and coke days may be behind him, he keeps backsliding on his cancer stick habit. Worse than his addiction to the devil’s weed, he is one of those annoying inconsiderate smokers that throws his butts on your windshield.

Ever since Chicago reporters followed the up-and-coming Obama and saw him flicking his ashes and butts out the windows of moving vehicles, the senator has had a testy relationship with the press about his addictions to cigarettes and littering. (Obama, wrote one reporter on his blog, was “one of those reprehensible nicotine addicts who seems to believe that the world is his ashtray.”)

Dowd’s uncited source is David Mendell as quoted by Eric Zorn. If Hillary is serious about using every weapon against Obama, she needs to appeal to those of us that find highway butt flickers repulsive.

But when discussing vices, a special corner is saved for possible future First Lad Bill Clinton. His White House chubby chasing days may be behind him with hope for an encore dimming, but he seems to be having fun with his Billionaire’s Boys Club. She sees the Big Dog being kept on too short a leash:

Bill Clinton is a cautionary tale about what happens if you surrender too many cherished vices. Curtailed from Burkling, international jet-setting, cholesterol-chowing and race-baiting, Bill has gotten raspy and lost his legendary charm.

“Burkling” is a term coined by Dowd to describe Bill’s habit of hanging around rich guys of flexible matrimonial status like gossip column staple Ron Burkle. In July of 2007, Dowd had an imaginary Hillary warn the equally imaginary Bill:

“Speaking of roving, don’t even think about going on your Hollywood rat pack’s planes after I’m elected,” she snaps. “Strictly Air Force for you, mister, with extra federal marshals. You promised me two terms after your two terms, and I’m not going to get that if you’re caught Burkling or Binging.”

In real news (as opposed to a Dowd column), the Clintons finances are intimately entwined with Burke’s business ventures which are highly dependent on favorable legislation.

In the mean time, Dowd heaves an alliterative sigh of despair about the loss of real bad boys.

Let the Big Dog off his leash. There can be virtue in a little vice.

Since Dowd won her Pulitzer tut-tutting over Bill’s vices, perhaps she has an ulterior motive in hoping for a candidate with a few bad habits to pick on.

Eye Of The Tiger

Rocky: I can't do it.
Adrian: What?
Rocky: I can't beat him.
Adrian: Apollo?
Rocky: Yeah. I been out there walkin' around, thinkin'. I mean, who am I kiddin'? I ain't even in the guy's league.
-Rocky (1976)

The Hillary Waltz
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 2, 2008

Movies With Maureen® has become like shooting fish in a barrel with Hillary Clinton running around comparing herself to Sylvester Stallone. Someone should point out to her that Rocky Balboa the punch-drunk boxer lost in the first movie. With movies out of the way, Maureen Dowd resorts to middlebrow opera call-outs:

Not only does she have a lot in common with Rocky, as she said Tuesday in Philadelphia, but she has a lot in common with another famous character — the Marschallin in Strauss’s bittersweet comic opera “Der Rosenkavalier.”

The Marschallin is a princess married to a Viennese field marshal who has a liaison dangereuse with a younger man, Count Octavian. Though she’s worried about her fleeting youth and the fickleness of men, she instructs the young man on the ways of love and then gracefully sets him free, allowing him to find happiness with young Sophie as a soaring waltz plays.

The opera synopsis includes yet another French lesson that doubles as a hidden movie reference to Dangerous Liasons, either the Roger Vadim or Glenn Close version. We also get The Hillary Waltz which is a sequel to the Nepotism Tango. Maureen does like those old fashioned dance steps. Back in November, she pointed out how Condi let Rummy "waltz away with the occupation". And Dubya and Dad are in an "Oedipal tango."

With the obligatory pop culture references out of the way, she can get on with the main agenda, cataloging Hillary’s faux pas and emasculating the nominee apparent. Time to pull out the pink highlighter once again as Maureen goes for the feminine adverbs and adjectives.

His strenuous and inadvertently hilarious efforts to woo working-class folk in Pennsylvania have only made him seem more effete. Keeping his tie firmly in place, he genteelly sipped his pint of Yuengling beer.

We last heard effete on March 9th as Dowd equated Obama with other unmasculine Democratic losers:

Obama’s multiculturalism is a selling point with many Democrats. But his impassioned egghead advisers have made his campaign seem not only out of his control, but effete and vaguely foreign — the same unflattering light that doomed Michael Dukakis and John Kerry.

But before that, the "e-word" was leveled against John Edwards a year ago in her “Running With Scissors” hatchet job on the Breck Girl.

In presidential politics, it’s all but impossible to put the man into manicure. Be sensitive, but not soft. Effete is never effective.

Dowd is also well known for her obsession with Barack’s attempts to maintain his girlish figure:

At the Wilbur chocolate shop in Lititz Monday, he spent most of his time skittering away from chocolate goodies, as though he were a starlet obsessing on a svelte waistline.

He looked even more concerned when he was offered a chocolate cake with white chocolate frosting. “Oh, man.” he said. “That’s too decadent for me.”

But Dowd can’t stay away from the boxing metaphor and makes this assertion:

Winning has no margin of error, as the Democrats should have learned by now. And the winner gets to decide his or her running mate.

But the ultimate favor Hillary can do for the Illinois freshman is to fight him full-out until the finale and then gracefully release him so he can find happiness with another.

And then, just like the The Cavalier of the Rose, he can move on to the general election by waltzing or skipping or "imitating his daughters’ dance moves by twirling around." But he might want to buy some boxing gloves instead of dancing shoes when he tangles with the Fruitbat in a Dinner Jacket:

Hillary’s work is done only when she is done, because the best way for Obama to prove he’s ready to stare down Ahmadinejad is by putting away someone even tougher.

When the Iranian Anti-Semite in Chief is considered a cakewalk compared to Hillary, that makes her one tough sparring partner.