One-Trick Maureen: Dowd Continues to Question the Sexuality of Leading Democrats

Posted by Molly Ivors, Whiskey Fire at 6:12 AM on July 28, 2008.

You gotta feel a bit bad for Barack Obama, all things considered. He's so clearly the better candidate. I know it. You know it. Dogs know it. He spends the week touring the globe facing millions of people who literally expect him to Save the World, and his reward is to get a private sitdown with the Prom Queen of Sulzberger High, who is allowed to needle him endlessly with bullshit questions and air raids and her snide smoking asides.  (Patent pending on those, Ann Althouse! Step off, beeyotch!) It's enough to give a guy the bends.



In MoDo's world, Obama, a Dem, is sexually suspect, two terms which inspire thoughts of the Department of Redundancy Department. And so his encounter with French president Sarkozy, that wingnut twat, was not a meeting between a world leader and a presumptive world leader designed to make up for five years of Freedom Toast, but a cinq à sept, a liaison in the afternoon, languorous and stolen.

Passing acquaintances collide in a moment of transcendent passion. They look at each other shyly and touch tenderly during their Paris cinq à sept, exchange some existential thoughts under exquisite chandeliers, and -- tant pis -- go their separate ways.

Sarko, back to Carla Bruni. Obama, forward to Gordon Brown. A Man and a Man. All it needed was a lush score and Claude Lelouch.

(And yes, in case you're wondering, there are days when I wish deconstructing MoDo's psyche was not my avocation, because you gotta wonder who gets a pup tent or a wide-on from standard photo-ops of political meetings. That's just weird. Brokeback Ballroom?) Note  that Sarkozy gets to go home to the hot chick, Obama to the milquetoast New Labour guy. Clearly, Sarkozy isn't really "like that," but Obama is. And he was sad, so sad, to be leaving Paris. Bet you were too, Mo.




The funny part is, MoDo likes Obama, at least as much as she's capable of doing. And he seems to have figured out how to handle her, more or less. But he can't control the way she writes, the collection and accretion of elements she's using to build the narrative against him. And I'm not entirely sure she can, either, though identifying the urge to trivialize as a compulsion does seem to let her off the hook somewhat. Still. I may be compelled to eat a tube of raw cookie dough, but I don't.



Today's outing has two established narrative threads: the gay thing (which will never really go away for her, I don't think), and the Chosen One thing, noted in moments such as these:  "After 200,000 people thronged to see Obama at the Victory Column in Berlin, christening him 'Redeemer' and 'Savior,' it turned out Sarko was also Obamarized, as the Germans were calling the mesmerizing effect." And, "How does he like the McCain camp mocking him as 'The One'? 'Even if you start believing your own hype, which I rarely do, things'll turn on you pretty quick anyway,' he said. 'I have a fairly steady temperament that has at times been interpreted as, 'Oh, he's sort of too cool.' But it's not real.' "



Nicely done, Senator. Deft.

The only way, really, to face down MoDo and her ilk is to turn the narratives against her. Not that she's figured out that he's figured that out, of course: since she follows the above immediately with, "Obama kept his cool through a week where he was treated as a cross between the Dalai Lama and Johnny Depp."  But Obama has already done and end-run around that narrative, and another nascent one MoDo notes here: that in his incredible popularity abroad, he's going to alienate dumbass rednecks:

I asked how his "Citizen of the World" tour will go down in Steubenville, Ohio.

"There will probably be some backlash," he said. "I'm a big believer that if something's good then there's a bad to it, and vice versa. We had a good week. That always inspires the press to knock me down a peg."

(A disclaimer to the dumbass redneck population: my family roots are in Bellaire, Ohio, a scant 30 miles from Steubenville, where my beloved older brother attended some sort of Catholic evangelical college.)



But in noting that he expects this line of attack, Obama largely defangs it. (Remember the reports of John Kerry speaking French with his brother? Clearly, a faux-French fag.) Obama's on to the game, the structure of innuendo and destruction in which the press has gleefully participated while Rome burns under their feet, MoDo most of all. Except I think he seems to miss one thing: the relentless need to pump sex and sexuality into the narrative.

In Berlin, the tabloid Bild sent an attractive blonde reporter to stalk Obama at the Ritz-Carlton gym as he exercised with his body man, Reggie Love. She then wrote a tell-all, enthusing, "I'm getting hot, and not from the workout," and concluding, "What a man."

Obama marveled: "I'm just realizing what I've got to become accustomed to. The fact that I was played like that at the gym. Do you remember 'The Color of Money' with Paul Newman? And Forest Whitaker is sort of sitting there, acting like he doesn't know how to play pool. And then he hustles the hustler. She hustled us. We walk into the gym. She's already on the treadmill. She looks like just an ordinary German girl. She smiles and sort of waves, shyly, but doesn't go out of her way to say anything. As I'm walking out, she says: 'Oh, can I have a picture? I'm a big fan.' Reggie takes the picture

I ask him if he found it a bit creepy that she described his T-shirt as smelling like "fabric softener with spring scent."

He looked nonplussed: "Did she describe what my T-shirt smelled like?"

Clearly, this reporter needs to work on her inner Parker Posey if she wants to be the German MoDo. At least she got a workout out of this. What did MoDo get?



Well,maybe she got to go shopping in Paris. But she didn't score any points against Obama today, much as she tried.

Tagged as: obama, dowd

Molly Ivors blogs at Whiskey fire.