Biden gave a press party at his house recently with a beach theme — complete with Uzi-size squirt guns and water slides. Journalists came with their families, schmoozed with top White House officials like David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, and watched a dripping wet vice president walk around with his little grandson. One Obama aide remarked that Biden is “the most beloved person in the White House.”

Jon Stewart and bloggers mocked the journalists, suggesting they were too chummy with power. But the picnic was on the record, and good reporters can’t be co-opted by some cold French fries. Whenever you see politicians in a relaxed or stressful situation, beyond the usual teleprompter speeches and scripted photo ops, you learn something about those charged with making life and death decisions. You may even pick up some news.

We learned there that Joe Biden has been assigned the press portfolio. This is remarkable, given that it was Obama who was hailed as the charming new JFK, the mesmerizing leader who beguiled an infatuated press, as the “Saturday Night Live” skit went, to plump his pillows.

But that skit was more of a caricature of some ideological cable guys and besotted columnists — including some conservatives — than a realistic portrayal of his relationship with the “working” press.

The press traveling with Obama on the campaign never had a lovey-dovey relationship with him. He treated us with aloof correctness, and occasional spurts of irritation. Like many Democrats, he thinks the press is supposed to be on his side.

The patrician George Bush senior was always gracious with reporters while conveying the sense that what we do for a living was rude.

The former constitutional lawyer now in the White House understands that the press has a role in the democracy. But he is an elitist, too, as well as thin-skinned and controlling. So he ends up regarding scribes as intrusive, conveying a distaste for what he sees as the fundamental unseriousness of a press driven by blog-around-the-clock deadlines.

The 21st-century press beast is a scary multimedia monster, caught up in the trite as well as the vital, and reporters rarely can be as contemplative as the cerebral Obama would like.

Sometimes on the campaign plane, I would watch Obama venture back to make small talk with the press, discussing food at an event or something light. Then I would see him literally back away a few moments later as a blast of questions and flipcams hit him.

But that’s the world we live in. It hurts Obama to be a crybaby about it, and to blame the press and the “old Washington game” for his own communication failures.

“On health care, Obama told single-payer liberals that they had to deal with the world as it is, not as they wanted it to be,” said Jonathan Alter, the author of “The Promise,” about Obama’s first year in office. “But he doesn’t take his own advice when it comes to the media. Obama refuses to deal with the media world as it is. He’s holding out for the media world that he wants. But that will never be. That disdainful attitude toward 24-hour cable culture is slowing his political reflexes. We’re seeing that in the oil spill. I don’t think it’s personal with him. It’s not that he despises reporters as human beings, like Nixon. He does scores of interviews and he doesn’t rage behind closed doors. But if he doesn’t make more concessions to Washington as it is, he’s going to hurt his presidency.”

Now that Obama has been hit with negative press, he’s even more contemptuous. “He’s never needed to woo the press,” says the NBC White House reporter Chuck Todd. “He’s never really needed us.”

Labels: Get the fuck over yourself already, hack journalism, Maureen Dowd, self-important blowhards

After David Letterman acknowledged that he’d had flings with young assistants, some commentators talked about it in the same breath as Roman Polanski, who drugged and sodomized a 13-year-old. That’s outrageous.

Sexual harassment entails pressuring or penalizing a staffer or making the office atmosphere hostile. Despite the blustering of the attorney of the alleged execrable extortionist, Joe Halderman, there’s no evidence yet that Letterman was guilty of that.

Working for a boss as anti-social and self-critical as Letterman, whose world is circumscribed by his show, would not be easy. (The man is obviously not joking when he goes off on his self-loathing shticks; otherwise, he would have dated some of those gorgeous actresses flirting with him on air over the decades.)

But we haven’t heard that the curmudgeonly comedian, who has never lost his streak of Midwest primness, forced any staffers to listen to tales of pubic hairs on Cokes or Long Dong Silver.

From what we know so far, and that may not be everything, the women who got involved with Letterman were not pressured. One former intern, Holly Hester, said she had wanted to marry him but that he broke it off because of their age disparity.

Stephanie Birkitt, his former lover and assistant, described herself as his best friend. She was not punished but rewarded with a recurring on-air starring role — despite the fact that she wasn’t funny or charming. As usual, Letterman was living out loud on the show, showing the audience his crush. His company footed the tab for Birkitt to go to law school, a loan she has now paid back; it says it did the same for some other staffers who wanted to pursue higher education.

On Monday night, when Letterman joked that he might be the first talk-show host to be impeached, Birkitt’s name was still listed in the show credits.

Labels: David Letterman, Maureen Dowd

Can't wait to hear what the explanation for this is.

Text from Josh Marshall's TPM post on Thurs.:

Text from the Dowd column:

More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Kinda weird, hunh ...

I guess that the problem was that Google somehow went into the future and grabbed the page from the Dowd column and magically transported it back in time to the Marshall post and ... and ...

Hmm.

I'm sure that there must be an explanation for how this happened out there somewhere.

[snip]

UPDATE:  Here is Dowd's response:

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, in an email to Huffington Post, admits that a paragraph in her Sunday column was lifted from Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall's blog last Thursday.

Dowd claims that she never read his blog last week but was told the line by a friend of hers. In a follow-up email, she forwarded her desire to apologize to Marshall, writing that had she known, she would have gladly credited Marshall.

Labels: hack journalism, Maureen Dowd, plagiarism

On 9/11, President Bush learned of disaster while reading “The Pet Goat” to grade-school kids. On Tuesday, President Obama escaped from disaster by reading “The Moon Over Star” to grade-school kids.

“We were just tired of being in the White House,” the two-week-old president, with Michelle at his side, explained to students at a public charter school near the White House.

Even as he told the children his favorite superheroes were Batman and Spider-Man, his own dream of being the superhero who swoops in to swiftly save America was going SPLAT!

It just ain’t that easy.

Unlike W. and Dick Cheney, who heroically resisted acknowledging their historically boneheaded mistakes, President Obama summoned a conga line of Anderson, Katie, Brian, Chris and Charlie to the Oval Office to do penance, over and over.

“I think I messed up. I screwed up,” he confessed to Couric.

He told the anchors that the man who helped make him president, Tom Daschle, had made “a serious mistake” by not paying taxes on a car and driver. (It should have been a harbinger of doom when Daschle began sporting those determined-to-be-hip round red glasses.)

Mr. Obama admitted that “ultimately it’s important for this administration to send a message that there aren’t two sets of rules. You know, one for prominent people and one for ordinary folks who have to pay their taxes.”

It took Daschle’s resignation to shake the president out of his arrogant attitude that his charmed circle doesn’t have to abide by the lofty standards he lectured the rest of us about for two years.

Labels: icepick meet forehead, idiocy, Maureen Dowd, Pardon Me While I Puke, punditry

found it bizarre that when Caroline offered to use her magic capital — and friendship with Barack Obama — to help take care of New York in this time of economic distress, she was blasted by a howl of “How dare she?”

People are suddenly awfully choosy about who gets to go to the former home of Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond and Robert Torricelli.

Although Americans still have enough British in their genes to be drawn to dynasties, W. has no doubt soured the country on scions. And the camps of the other two New York dynasties — the Clintons (still bitter about Caroline’s endorsement of Obama) and the Cuomos (who’d like that Senate seat for Andrew) — have certainly done their best to undermine Caroline.

Congress, which abdicated its oversight role as the Bush crew wrecked the globe and the economy, desperately needs fresh faces and new perspectives, an infusion of class, intelligence and guts.

People complain that the 51-year-old Harvard and Columbia Law School grad and author is not a glib, professional pol who knows how to artfully market herself, and is someone who hasn’t spent her life glad-handing, backstabbing and logrolling. I say, thank God.

The press whines that she doesn’t have a pat answer about why she wants the job. I’ve interviewed a score of men running for president; not one had a good answer for why he wanted it.

Robert Duffy, the mayor of Rochester, complained that when the would-be senator visited the Democratic headquarters there recently, she did not respond to pictures in a conference room of her father, mother, brother and herself as a little girl. Isn’t it creepy to expect her to emote on cue? Isn’t it more authentic to want to keep some of your most private feelings to yourself?

I know Caroline Kennedy. She’s smart, cultivated, serious and unpretentious. The Senate, shamefully sparse on profiles in courage during Dick Cheney’s reign of terror, would be lucky to get her.

And believe me, she talks a whole lot better than the former junior senator from New York, Al D’Amato, who once wailed that he was “up to my earballs” in some mess, and another time complained to me that those “little Jappies” bring over boats full of cars and then take the boats back empty.

Anyhow, it isn’t how you say it. It’s what you say. Hillary Clinton is a great talker, but she never stood up in the Senate to lead a crusade against any Republican horror show, from Terri Schiavo to the Bush administration’s dishonest push to war.

Sitting in the Senate gallery on Tuesday as senators were sworn in by Dick Cheney, I saw plenty of lawmakers who had benefited from family.

Labels: Caroline Kennedy, Maureen Dowd

At first blush, it would seem to be a positive for Obama that he is hard to mock. But on second thought, is it another sign that he’s trying so hard to be perfect that it’s stultifying? Or that eight years of W. and Cheney have robbed Democratic voters of their sense of humor?

Certainly, as the potential first black president, and as a contender with tender experience, Obama must feel under strain to be serious.

But he does not want the “take” on him to become that he’s so tightly wrapped, overcalculated and circumspect that he can’t even allow anyone to make jokes about him, and that his supporters are so evangelical and eager for a champion to rescue America that their response to any razzing is a sanctimonious: Don’t mess with our messiah!

If Obama keeps being stingy with his quips and smiles, and if the dominant perception of him is that you can’t make jokes about him, it might infect his campaign with an airless quality. His humorlessness could spark humor.

On Tuesday, Andy Borowitz satirized on that subject. He said that Obama, sympathetic to comics’ attempts to find jokes to make about him, had put out a list of official ones, including this:

“A traveling salesman knocks on the door of a farmhouse, and much to his surprise, Barack Obama answers the door. The salesman says, ‘I was expecting the farmer’s daughter.’ Barack Obama replies, ‘She’s not here. The farm was foreclosed on because of subprime loans that are making a mockery of the American dream.’ ”

John McCain’s Don Rickles routines — “Thanks for the question, you little jerk” — can fall flat. But he seems like a guy who can be teased harmlessly. If Obama offers only eat-your-arugula chiding and chilly earnestness, he becomes an otherworldly type, not the regular guy he needs to be.

Labels: hack journalism, idiocy, Maureen Dowd

Certainly, Senator Obama was exercising sophisticated damage-control on his problem with Jeremiad Wright. But he did not pander as Mitt Romney did with his very challenging speech about Mormonism, or market-test his own convictions, as most politicians do.

Unlike what the Clintons did to Lani Guinier, responding to her radical racial ideas by throwing her under the bus, Obama went to great pains to honor the human dimension of his relationship with his politically threatening “old uncle,” as he calls him.

Displaying his multihued, crazy-quilted DNA, he talked about cringing when he heard the white grandmother who raised him use racial stereotypes and confess her fear of passing black men on the street.

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.

(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.)

[snip]

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.

Up until now, Obama and his worshipers have set it up so that he must be so admirable and ideal and perfect and everything we’ve ever wanted that any kind of blemish — even a parking ticket — was regarded as a major failing.

With the Clintons, we expect them to be cheesy on ethics, so no one is ever surprised when they are.

But Saint Obama played the politics of character to an absurd extent. For 14 months, his argument for leading the world has been himself — his exquisitely globalized self.

Labels: hack journalism, Maureen Dowd

Like a block of keys stripped from your keyboard, what you are conspicuously absenting from your column stands out in such sharp relief because it is so conspicuously absent from the instrument you are using to create it. From your own emotional lexicon.

Because what Senator Obama appears to be is...a gentleman.

Imagine that? And how spiritually famished you must be, Modo, not to recognize one when he’s standing right there?

Not Slick Willie II. Not Jebus. Not Obambi. None of the tired, cloying, Dowdian archetypes that cobweb you like so much Blanche DuBois-brand Spanish Moss, and not whatever, clever, diminutive you cobble up next week.

Just a gentleman.

Relaxed. Comfortable in his own skin. Articulate. Flawed. Confident. At ease in the company of strong, accomplished women. Courteous, but not one to be shoved around. Casually brilliant, but not frantically “Oh! Oh! Oh! PickMe!PickMe!PickMe!”

And for the record, no, to the extent this gentleman is succeeding it is not because he is running away from “hard-power locker-room tactics to a soft-power sewing circle approach.”

Je-zus, Maureen; do you ever just give your neuroses $20 and send them off to the movies?

Labels: hack journalism, Maureen Dowd

It’s already famous as The Snub, the moment before the State of the Union when Obama turned away to talk to Claire McCaskill instead of trying to join Teddy Kennedy in shaking hands with Hillary.

Nobody cared about W., whose presidency had crumpled into a belated concern about earmarks.

The only union that fascinated was Obama and Hillary, once more creeping around each other.

It would have been the natural thing for the Illinois senator, only hours after his emotional embrace by the Kennedys and an arena full of deliriously shrieking students, to follow the lead of Uncle Teddy and greet the rebuffed Hillary.

She was impossible to miss in the sea of dark suits and Supreme Court dark robes. Like Scarlett O’Hara after a public humiliation, Hillary showed up at the gathering wearing a defiant shade of red.

But the fact that he didn’t do so shows that Obama cannot hide how much the Clintons rattle him, and that he is still taking the race very personally.

On a flight to Kansas yesterday to collect another big endorsement, this one from Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, Obama said he was “surprised” by reports of The Snub.

“I was turning away because Claire asked me a question as Senator Kennedy was reaching forward,” he said. “Senator Clinton and I have had very cordial relations off the floor and on the floor. I waved at her as I was coming into the Senate chamber before we walked over last night. I think there is just a lot more tea leaf reading going on here than I think people are suggesting.”

But that answer is disingenuous. Their relations have been frosty and fraught ever since the young Chicago prince challenged Queen Hillary’s royal proclamation that it was her turn to rule.

Last winter, after news broke that he was thinking of running, he winked at her and took her elbow on the Senate floor to say hi, in his customary languid, friendly way, and she coldly brushed him off.

It bothered him, and he called a friend to say: You would not believe what just happened with Hillary.

Again and again at debates, he looked eager to greet her or be friendly during the evening and she iced him. She might have frozen him out once more Monday night had he actually tried to reach out.

But now Obama is like that cat Mark Twain wrote about who wouldn’t jump on the stove again for fear of being burned.

It was only after the distortions of the Clintons in South Carolina that he changed his tone and took on Hillary in a tough way in the debate there. Afterward, one of his advisers said that it was as though a dam had broken and Obama finally began using all the sharp lines against Hillary that strategists had been suggesting for months.

Why had it taken so long for Obama to push back against Hillary? “He respected her as a senator,” the adviser replied. “He even defended her privately when she cried, saying that no one knows how hard these campaigns are.”

But Obama’s outrage makes him seem a little jejune. He is surely the only person in the country who was surprised when the Clintons teamed up to dissemble and smear when confronted with an impediment to their ambitions.

Knowing that it helped her when Obama seemed to be surly with her during the New Hampshire debate, telling her without looking up from his notes that she was “likable enough” — another instance of Obama not being able to hide his bruised feelings — Hillary went on ABC News last night to insinuate that he was rude Monday.

“Well, I reached my hand out in friendship and unity and my hand is still reaching out,” she said, lapsing back into the dissed-woman mode. “And I look forward to shaking his hand sometime soon.”

Something’s being stretched here, but it’s not her hand. She wasn’t reaching out to him at all.

The New York State chapter of NOW issued an absurd statement on Monday calling Teddy Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama “the ultimate betrayal”: “He’s picked the new guy over us.”

But Obama is the more emotionally delicate candidate, and the one who has the more feminine consensus management style, and the not-blinded-by-testosterone ability to object to a phony war.

As first lady, Alpha Hillary’s abrasive and secretive management of health care doomed it. She voted to enable W. on Iraq so she could run as someone tough enough to command armies.

Given her brazen quote to ABC News, Obama is right to be scared of Hillary. He just needs to learn that Uncle Teddy can’t fight all his fights, and that a little chivalry goes a long way.

Labels: 2008 election, idiocy, Maureen Dowd

Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back to the White House?

Bill Clinton was known for biting his lip, but here was Hillary doing the Muskie. Certainly it was impressive that she could choke up and stay on message.

She won her Senate seat after being embarrassed by a man. She pulled out New Hampshire and saved her presidential campaign after being embarrassed by another man. She was seen as so controlling when she ran for the Senate that she had to be seen as losing control, as she did during the Monica scandal, before she seemed soft enough to attract many New York voters.

Getting brushed back by Barack Obama in Iowa, her emotional moment here in a cafe and her chagrin at a debate question suggesting she was not likable served the same purpose, making her more appealing, especially to women, particularly to women over 45.

The Obama campaign calculated that they had the women’s vote over the weekend but watched it slip away in the track of her tears.

At the Portsmouth cafe on Monday, talking to a group of mostly women, she blinked back her misty dread of where Obama’s “false hopes” will lead us — “I just don’t want to see us fall backwards,” she said tremulously — in time to smack her rival: “But some of us are right and some of us are wrong. Some of us are ready and some of us are not.”

There was a poignancy about the moment, seeing Hillary crack with exhaustion from decades of yearning to be the principal rather than the plus-one. But there was a whiff of Nixonian self-pity about her choking up. What was moving her so deeply was her recognition that the country was failing to grasp how much it needs her. In a weirdly narcissistic way, she was crying for us. But it was grimly typical of her that what finally made her break down was the prospect of losing.

As Spencer Tracy said to Katharine Hepburn in “Adam’s Rib,” “Here we go again, the old juice. Guaranteed heart melter. A few female tears, stronger than any acid.”

The Clintons once more wriggled out of a tight spot at the last minute. Bill churlishly dismissed the Obama phenom as “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen,” but for the last few days, it was Hillary who seemed in danger of being Cinderella. She became emotional because she feared that she had reached her political midnight, when she would suddenly revert to the school girl with geeky glasses and frizzy hair, smart but not the favorite. All those years in the shadow of one Natural, only to face the prospect of being eclipsed by another Natural?

How humiliating to have a moderator of the New Hampshire debate ask her to explain why she was not as popular as the handsome young prince from Chicago. How demeaning to have Obama rather ungraciously chime in: “You’re likable enough.” And how exasperating to be pushed into an angry rebuttal when John Edwards played wingman, attacking her on Obama’s behalf.

“I actually have emotions,” she told CNN’s John Roberts on a damage-control tour. “I know that there are some people who doubt that.” She went on “Access Hollywood” to talk about, as the show put it, “the double standards that a woman running for president faces.” “If you get too emotional, that undercuts you,” Hillary said. “A man can cry; we know that. Lots of our leaders have cried. But a woman, it’s a different kind of dynamic.”

...it was Hillary who seemed in danger of being Cinderella. She became emotional because she feared that she had reached her political midnight, when she would suddenly revert to the school girl with geeky glasses and frizzy hair, smart but not the favorite.

Labels: hack journalism, Hillary Clinton, Maureen Dowd

George Bush made it easy—he handed them a character on a plate. He had one slogan—compassionate conservatism—and one promise aimed squarely at denigrating Bill Clinton: to restore honor and integrity to the White House. He was also perceived to be fun to be with. For 18 months, he pinched cheeks, bowled with oranges in the aisles of his campaign plane, and playacted flight attendant. Frank Bruni, now the restaurant critic for The New York Times but then a novice national political-beat reporter for the same newspaper, wrote affectionately of Bush's "folksy affability," "distinctive charm," "effortless banter," and the feather pillow that he traveled with.

But Gore couldn't turn on such charm on cue. "He doesn't pinch cheeks," says Tipper. "Al's not that kind of guy." With Gore still vice president, there was a certain built-in formality and distance that reporters had to endure. Having served the public for nearly 25 years in different roles—from congressman legislating the toxic-waste Superfund to vice president leading the charge to go into Bosnia—Gore could not be reduced to a sound bite. As one reporter put it, they were stuck with "the government nerd." "The reality is," says Eli Attie, who was Gore's chief speechwriter and traveled with him, "very few reporters covering the 2000 campaign had much interest in what really motivated Gore and the way he spent most of his time as vice president: the complexities of government and policy, and not just the raw calculus of the campaign trail."

[snip]

As with all campaigns, the coverage of the 2000 election would be driven by a small number of beat reporters. In this case, two women at the most influential newspapers in the country: Seelye from The New York Times and Ceci Connolly from The Washington Post.

A prominent Washington journalist describes them as "edgy, competitive, wanting to make their mark," and adds that they "reinforced each other's prejudices."

"It was like they'd been locked in a room, and they were just pumping each other up," says Gore strategist Carter Eskew.

"They just wanted to tear Gore apart," says a major network correspondent on the trail. (Both refute such characterizations of themselves. "Why would reporters [from] major news organizations confer with the competition on such a fiercely competitive story?" asks Connolly.)

Building on the narrative established by the Love Story and Internet episodes, Seelye, her critics charge, repeatedly tinged what should have been straight reporting with attitude or hints at Gore's insincerity. Describing a stump speech in Tennessee, she wrote, "He also made an appeal based on what he described as his hard work for the state—as if a debt were owed in return for years of service." Writing how he encouraged an audience to get out and vote at the primary, she said, "Vice President Al Gore may have questioned the effects of the internal combustion engine, but not when it comes to transportation to the polls. Today he exhorted a union audience in Knoxville, Iowa, to pile into vans—not cars, but gas-guzzling vans—and haul friends to the Iowa caucuses on January 24." She would not just say that he was simply fund-raising. "Vice President Al Gore was back to business as usual today—trolling for money," she wrote. In another piece, he was "ever on the prowl for money."

The disparity between her reporting and Bruni's coverage of Bush for the Times was particularly galling to the Gore camp. "It's one thing if the coverage is equal—equally tough or equally soft," says Gore press secretary Chris Lehane. "In 2000, we would get stories where if Gore walked in and said the room was gray we'd be beaten up because in fact the room was an off-white. They would get stories about how George Bush's wing tips looked as he strode across the stage." Melinda Henneberger, then a political writer at the Times, says that such attitudes went all the way up to the top of the newspaper. "Some of it was a self-loathing liberal thing," she says, "disdaining the candidate who would have fit right into the newsroom, and giving all sorts of extra time on tests to the conservative from Texas. Al Gore was a laughline at the paper, while where Bush was concerned we seemed to suffer from the soft bigotry of low expectations." (Seelye's and Bruni's then editors declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Barack Hussein Obama squinted into the New Hampshire sun to read a new speech on his teleprompter Monday and turned into William Jennings Bryan.

It isn’t a good fit. Obama is many things, but the Great Commoner ain’t one of them. Bryan gave a Cross-of-Gold speech, and Obama gave a Cross-of-Media speech.

The urbane young senator who rules over Chicago society with his wife, Michelle, the glamour boy who has graced more fashionable magazine covers than Heidi Klum, the debonair pol who has wowed crowds at white-tie and black-tie press dinners in D.C., suddenly started ranting about Washington pundits and other jades on the Potomac who don’t appreciate the thrilling loftiness of his message and purifying minimalism of his résumé.

Suddenly, the candidate who had so consciously modeled himself and his wife on J.F.K. and Jackie was a simple rube, fighting the system.

“There are a lot of people who have been in Washington longer than me, who have better connections and go to the right dinner parties and know how to talk the Washington talk,” he told an audience in Manchester.

The smooth jazz senator claiming no facility with “Washington talk” struck a false note. In the traditional Labor Day kickoff to a campaign that has already left us weary of the inauthentic, the shopworn and the hyper-prepped, Obama told voters: “Now, when the folks in Washington hear me speak, this is usually when they start rolling their eyes, ‘Oh, there he goes talking about hope again. He’s so naïve. He’s a hope-peddler. He’s a hope-monger.’ Well, I stand guilty as charged. I am hopeful about America. Apparently, the pundits consider this a chronic condition, a symptom of a lack of experience.”

Actually, the only thing we regard as a symptom of a lack of experience is a lack of experience. This pundit, for one, needs hope as much as any American these days. But the only time I roll my eyes is when my hope is dashed that Obama will boldly take on Hillary, making his campaign more than cameras and mirrors and magazine covers.

The Obama promise was a fresh approach to politics, and now he pulls out the oldest trick in the playbook — the insider-who-pretends-to-be-an-outsider bit, the tactical populist, the sophisticate desperately shedding his sophistication.

I expected more of him than the same outsider routine I’ve heard from other beltway familiars, like Pat Buchanan and Bush senior.

Poppy took off his striped, preppie watchband and talked about his alleged love of pork rinds. (He really liked martinis and popcorn.)

When he ran for president in 1992, Mr. Buchanan claimed to be an outsider, even though he was a Washington native, an aide to three presidents and a D.C. pundit who lived so close to C.I.A. headquarters that his cat kept setting off the security sensors buried in the woods.

Obama doesn’t understand that his new approach — obliquely attacking Hillary by dismissing “those who tout their experience working the system in Washington” — cedes ground to her by admitting she has more experience working the system.

He allows Hillary to present herself as having the experience to be president just because she was married to one. He should be making the opposite case, that Hillary — go ahead, use her name, she won’t bite you, or even if she does, you’ll get over it — knew from nothing about the system.

In the White House, she botched health care and bungled dealing with special prosecutors — remember that talent she had for losing critical files? And in the Senate, she played it safe and became a Democratic Senator Pothole while helping W. launch his disaster in Iraq.

Obama relentlessly recited his credentials to voters in New Hampshire, talking about being a community organizer the way corporate lawyers remind you they were in the Peace Corps.

It’s not his experience that excites people, but his brainy élan. We don’t know about his judgment: good on Iraq, bad on Rezko.

The joke on Obama is that the only experience that has served Hillary well has been the experience of raw, retail politics — the kind he turns up his nose at — which has allowed her to seem authoritative and professional and singularly unwhiny in speeches and debates.

She first tripped up Obama by making him think that every time he fought back he was falling off his pedestal. As one of the Washington pundits Obama has scorned put it, with a grin: “That’s why you have two hands, one to graciously greet your opponents and one to stick the shiv in.”

By conjuring a scenario where Hillary is the deft insider and he’s the dewy outsider, Obama only plays into her playbook again.

To borrow Oscar Levant’s old joke about Doris Day: We knew Obama before he was a virgin.

Labels: hack journalism, Maureen Dowd, utter horseshit

For me, one of the most amazing reversals brought about by W.’s reign of error is this: He may have turned my sister into a Democrat.

As a girl, Peggy shivered in the bitter cold through a coatless John Kennedy’s inaugural speech, and when she saw W. “debone” Ann Richards in a Texas debate in ’94, she thought: “This guy will be the greatest president since J.F.K. He’s so good looking, bright. He’s got everything going for him.”

She volunteered at the Republican convention in 2000, toting a “W Stands for Women” sign. I snuck her into the press pen at a breakfast with George and Laura and had to tackle her when, to the consternation of reporters, she began cheering as if at a Redskins game. She flew to West Virginia to work a phone bank for W. She sat up all night election night (in vain). She cut back on Christmas presents to give him money, and proudly displayed pictures of herself at fund-raisers, one with W., one with Dick Cheney. She canceled her Times subscription when I wrote about the rigged buildup to the Iraq war, and called “Bushworld” (my chronicle of W.’s warped reality) “that silly book.”

She once told a reporter that she couldn’t totally choose W. over me because she knew if she were dying “he won’t come and hold my hand, and I know Maureen will.” So imagine my surprise when she started talking about voting for Barack Obama or John Edwards, if they stop “pussyfooting” around Hillary.

“W.’s loyalty to Cheney has hurt his presidency,” she says sadly. “When Cheney picked himself as vice president, W. should have said, ‘Bug off.’ He could have made his own banquet instead of choosing leftovers. If only he had dialed his father or listened to Powell instead of Cheney and Rumsfeld on Iraq. Not only has W. brought himself down, he’s brought down John McCain, who I wanted to support but can’t because of the war.

“I grew up in the shadow of Walter Reed and was used to seeing servicemen without limbs. But recently after watching a special on soldiers coming home from Iraq with brain injuries, I picked up a picture of my four nephews and I know how I would feel if they had fought in Iraq and came home without limbs or in body bags.

“We are spending billions on this war, and yet veterans and their children are practically getting nothing. I’m no longer a Republican. I’m an American, and I will cast my vote for the person I believe will start the process to get out of Iraq — unless, of course, it’s Hillary.”

Labels: idiocy, Maureen Dowd

Labels: Maureen Dowd

It’s no wonder Al Gore is a little touchy about his weight, what with everyone trying to read his fat cells like tea leaves to see if he’s going to run.

He was so determined to make his new book look weighty, in the this-treatise-belongs-on-the-shelf-between-Plato-and-Cato sense, rather than the double-chin-isn’t-quite-gone-yet sense, that he did something practically unheard of for a politician: He didn’t plaster his picture on the front.

“The Assault on Reason” looks more like the Beatles’ White Album than a screed against the tinny Texan who didn’t get as many votes in 2000.

The Goracle does concede a small author’s picture on the inside back flap, a chiseled profile that screams Profile in Courage and that also screams Really Old Picture. Indeed, if you read the small print next to the wallet-sized photo of Thin Gore looking out prophetically into the distance, it says it’s from his White House years.

A subliminal clue to his intentions, perhaps? He must be flattered that many demoralized leading Republicans and Bush insiders think a Gore-Obama ticket would be unbeatable. And he must be gratified that his rival Hillary has never cemented her inevitability, even with Bill Clinton’s lip-licking Web video pushing her.

But though he’s on a book tour clearly timed to build on his Oscar flash and Nobel buzz, and take advantage of the public’s curiosity about whether he’ll jump in the race, he almost seems to want to sigh and roll his eyes when he’s asked about it.

“I’m not a candidate,” he told Diane Sawyer on “Good Morning America.” “This book is not a political book. It’s not a candidate book at all.”

Of course, his protestation was lost given the fact that he was sitting in front of a screen blaring the message “The Race to ’08,” and above a crawl that asked “Will he run for the White House?”

He is so fixed on not seeming like a presidential flirt that he risks coming across as a bit of a righteous tease or a high-minded scold, which is exactly what his book is, a high-minded scolding. He upbraided Diane about the graphics for his segment, complaining about buzzwords and saying, “That’s not what this is about.”

Diane was not so easily put off as he turned up his nose at the horse race and the vast wasteland of TV, and bored in for the big question: “Donna Brazile, your former campaign manager, has said, ‘If he drops 25 to 30 pounds, he’s running.’ Lost any weight?”

Labels: Al Gore, idiocy, Maureen Dowd

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.

Many people I talked to afterward found Michelle wondrous. But others worried that her chiding was emasculating, casting her husband — under fire for lacking experience — as an undisciplined child.

Labels: Maureen Dowd, media whores, tabloid journalism