Maureen Dowd: Obama Fails to Slay the Vampire
Something eerie is going on in this race
Could it be the vampire theory of politics?
Hillary grows more and more glowy
as Obama grows more and more wan
Is she draining him of his precious bodily fluids?
Leeching his magic? Siphoning off his aura?
The Upwardly-Mobile Obama
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Since Obama did exceptionally well at Harvard Law, graduating magna cum laude and serving as editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review, you would have expected his accomplishments to engender some hostility among his classmates. But they didn't.
Harvard Law School is a pretty intimate place, and there's no way anyone could fool not only so many people but apparently all the people over a three year period.
As this campaign has worn on and Obama has progressively become a less attractive figure, I still take comfort from his former classmates' high regard for him.
But there's another side to such uniform popularity. Remaining in virtually everyone's good graces requires a fair amount of work. It requires a form of day-to-day politicking that most people eschew. People who achieve such popularity have to work at it.
In this way, he's the consummate politician who feeds on the fondness of others in a way that would be foreign to normal people.
As this long campaign continues to reveal Obama as a traditional politician, his candidacy suffers from the comparison between the mythical Obama who purportedly practices a new form of politics and the real Obama, a politician who pursues office with the same zeal and in much the same manner as his predecessors and contemporaries.
Obama: Bought by the Ruling Class
It is nauseating to see Obama’s disturbing statements of fawning respect for the predominantly white capitalist economic elite – the top 1 percent that owns more than a third of U.S. wealth and a probably higher percentage of its politicians, policymakers, and opinion-makers.
Given his dependence on super-rich “election investors” to run a viable presidential campaign under the plutocratic rules of the United States’ self-negating “market democracy”, it’s not surprising that he would wish to avoid offending the nation’s leading corporate power-brokers.
Maybe it’s because Barack Obama and his handlers are sensitive to the need to reassure ruling forces that the “first black United States president” will not challenge existing hierarchies.
Maybe it’s because he’s bought and paid for by big money. Or maybe it’s because he believes in his “deeply conservative” heart that good Americans show deep respect for their socioeconomic masters.
Whatever the explanation, I’ve never seen an avowedly “progressive” political candidate more eager than Obama to display his deep willingness to obsequiously kiss the ring of dominant political and economic authority.
For someone who is waffling his way across the country, calling working- and middle-class American to “get fired up” and “stand up” for democracy (and for him), Obama sure likes to spend a lot of time groveling before supposed white and upper-class superiors.
Maureen Dowd: The Man's Mojo Aint Working No More
Maybe I’ve been reading too many stories about the fad of teenage vampire chick lit, worlds filled with parasitic aliens and demi-human creatures, but there’s something eerie going on in this race.
Hillary grows more and more glowy as Obama grows more and more wan.
Is she draining him of his precious bodily fluids? Leeching his magic? Siphoning off his aura?
It used to be that he was incandescent and she 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.
A man at a sports bar in Latrobe, Pa., advised Obama, “Get some sleep, Barack, you look like you’re tired, man.”
When the candidate noted he’s been running for president for 15 months, the guy offered another tip: “You need a drink.”
Obama disdains convention and touts his new politics, but on Friday, he had a news conference in an uninspired setting — a gas station emptied out by his Secret Service detail.
He doesn’t emulate Bobby Kennedy, who defied political tropes and underscored his concern about the poor by taking reporters on treks to rural Appalachia or odysseys to roiling inner cities for speeches on street corners.
With Indiana polls showing the Democratic combatants in a dead heat, and 21 percent of Democrats undecided, this is a perilous time for Obama to lose his fizz.
He tried to recapture the magic — and erase the bowling debacle — by shooting hoops with kids in Kokomo on Friday night.
As a basketball player, he should know he’s in overtime in his race with Hillary — and overtime is not the period to indulge in whining.
Instead of jokingly complaining that babies have learned to walk and talk since he first got in the race, he should remind voters that, if Hillary prevails, some people will slouch toward middle age having never known a White House without a Bush or a Clinton.
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.”
Obama is burdened by Jeremiah Wright’s inflammatory remarks on race and his comment to Bill Moyers that Obama “does what politicians do.” And 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.
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. “People know me.”
Not yet, but we will, one of these years.
