Dowd: Desperately Seeking Obama

I think Maureen Dowd has a crush on Barack Obama.

I'm certain.

She's probably like Chris Matthews. I bet when she hears Obama she gets a thrill going up her leg, the way Matthews does; but she won't admit to it.

In her column, "Desperately Seeking Street Cred," Dowd scratches and claws at Hillary Clinton while she playfully teases Obama.

She writes:

It used to be that [Obama] was incandescent and [Hillary] was merely inveterate. Now she’s bristling with life force, and he looks like he wants to run away somewhere for three months by himself and smoke.

Hillary is not getting much sleep or exercise, and doesn’t, like the ascetic Obama, abstain from junk food and coffee and get up at dawn to work out on the road. She’s still a long shot and she’s 14 years older than her rival.

Yet she’s the one who is more energetic and focused and beaming, and he’s the one who seems uneven and gauzy, often fatigued and unable to disguise being fed up with the slog. Even his speeches don’t have the same pizazz.

This is a setup. Dowd speaks admiringly of Hillary before she goes in for the kill.

...Even some Obama fans find Hillary’s toughness and shameless shape-shifting compelling. Having lost the White House twice to brass-knuckled pols, the Dems may be drawn to a woman who thinks like Karl Rove.

James Clyburn, the influential black congressman from South Carolina, says that some blacks are buying into the 2012 Tonya Harding conspiracy theory: that the Clintons know they can’t beat Obama this time, so they are “hell-bound,” as Clyburn put it, to shred him so he’ll lose to McCain and Hillary will be able to try again in 2012 — when McCain is 76.

In interviews, Clyburn called the tactics of the Clintons and their henchmen “bizarre,” “disingenuous” and “scurrilous.”

...Hillary is burdened by her husband’s inflammatory remarks on race and her own willingness to burn the party to save the party.

The Nixonian Hillary has a ravenous hunger that Obama lacks. Literally — at a birthday party in Philly for her photographer, she was devouring the chips and dip with two hands — and viscerally.

I would like to know what Dowd thinks was so inflammatory about Bill's remarks on race. She's very vague.

She's certainly not vague about what she thinks of Hillary. Dowd casts her as a she-devil.

When a lib compares another lib to Karl Rove, that's about as low as one can go.

Calling Hillary "Nixonian" is also quite a shot.

But Dowd really gets vicious when she calls Hillary a pig with the chips and dip.

There are so many complaints about the superficial nature of this presidential race, yet Queen lib Dowd isn't exactly steering away from the superficial and focusing on substance in this column.

After slamming Hillary, Dowd dwells on the very matters that Obama wants to go away.

At Joe’s Junction gas station in Indianapolis, Obama did his best to shoo away the pesky elitist label. Accused by an Indianapolis reporter of looking like a GQ cover, he said he has only four pairs of shoes and buys “five of the same suit and then I patch them up and wear them repeatedly.” But his campaign refused to reveal the brand, presumably because it’s not J. C. Penney.

He dutifully enthused about carbs, assuring reporters that when he had dinner as a child with his Kansas grandparents, the food “would have been very familiar to anybody here in Indiana. A lot of pot roast, potatoes and Jell-O molds.”

But then he resumed wry whingeing about his 37 bowling score, explaining that he finished only seven frames, including two that “were bowled by a 10-year-old” and another by a 3-year-old.

“I don’t want to go out of my way to sort of prove my street cred as a down-to-earth guy,” he said, after going out of his way.

It's crazy that a presidential candidate is trying to win votes by saying he grew up on meals of "pot roast, potatoes and Jell-O molds."

What is that?

Dowd is perpetuating the superficiality and silliness, and so is Obama.

When Obama says, “People know me,” Dowd concludes:

Not yet, but we will, one of these years.

She makes it sound like we don't know Obama.

I disagree. We are learning about him. He's not a smooth talking unknown anymore. That's his real problem.