Dowd Taunts Michelle Obama

Maureen Dowd is like the junior high school girl with a crush on a boy who doesn't know she's alive.

Dowd desperately wants Barack Obama's attention. She desperately wants something.

How to get it?

Attack his wife.

In her column today, "She’s Not Buttering Him Up," Dowd expresses her discomfort with Michelle and Barack Obama's shtick on the campaign trail.

She writes:

Usually, I love the dynamics of a cheeky woman puncturing the ego of a cocky guy.

I liked it in ’40s movies, and I liked it with Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel, and Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis in “Moonlighting.”

So why don’t I like it with Michelle and Barack?

Tell us more, Maureen!

What are your insights on why you don't care???

I wince a bit when Michelle Obama chides her husband as a mere mortal — a comic routine that rests on the presumption that we see him as a god.

The tweaking takes place at fundraisers, where Michelle wants to lift the veil on their home life a bit and give the folks their money’s worth.

At the big Hollywood fund-raiser for Senator Obama in February, Michelle came on strong.

“I am always a little amazed at the response that people get when they hear from Barack,” she told the crowd at the Beverly Hilton, as her husband stood by looking like a puppy being scolded, reported Hud Morgan of Men’s Vogue. “A great man, a wonderful man. But still a man. ...

“I have some difficulty reconciling the two images I have of Barack Obama. There’s Barack Obama the phenomenon. He’s an amazing orator, Harvard Law Review, or whatever it was, law professor, best-selling author, Grammy winner. Pretty amazing, right?

“And then there’s the Barack Obama that lives with me in my house, and that guy’s a little less impressive. For some reason this guy still can’t manage to put the butter up when he makes toast, secure the bread so that it doesn’t get stale, and his 5-year-old is still better at making the bed than he is.”

She said that the TV version of Barack Obama sounded really interesting and that she’d like to meet him sometime.

Dowd goes on to cite a litany of other instances of Michelle Obama tweaking her husband -- the god-like, messiah candidate.

What's weird about the column is that Dowd never gets around to really explaining why she's uncomfortable with Michelle Obama's comments.

Dowd does bash her for failing to rein in Obama's dealings with the sleazy Tony Rezko.

...Michelle conveys the appealing idea that she will tell her husband when he’s puffed up or out of line. She aims high — she ordered her husband to stop puffing on cigarettes as he started campaigning. But then, why didn’t she see the red flags on the Rezko deal?

In order to get a bigger yard for their new house on Chicago’s South Side in 2005, the Obamas got into what the senator now confesses was a “boneheaded” real estate arrangement with a sleazy political dealmaker named Tony Rezko, who has been indicted on influence-peddling charges.

On Monday, The Chicago Sun-Times reported more shady Rezko news: “Obama, who has worked as a lawyer and a legislator to improve living conditions for the poor, took campaign donations from Rezko even as Rezko’s low-income housing empire was collapsing, leaving many African-American families in buildings riddled with problems,” from a lack of heat to no lack of drug dealers and squatters.

Mr. Obama riposted that “it wasn’t brought to my attention.” But isn’t that where a dazzling, tough, smart and connected wife could help a guy out?

So what is the point of Dowd's rambling column?

Is it to expose wife Michelle as slimy?

Is it to draw attention to candidate Barack's dirty side?

Like so many of her columns, this one is a weird, personal, PSYCHOanalytic piece with just a bit of news tossed in to lend it an air of credibilty and purpose beyond her own navel-gazing.

Since Dowd can't seem to understand why she doesn't like Michelle Obama's comments about the "real" Barack, I'll offer some amateur analysis of my own.

Dowd doesn't like the fact that Michelle Obama has a successful career, and a husband and children.

Michelle Obama has it all and Dowd can't stand it.

Yes, that works.