Eye Of The Tiger

Rocky: I can't do it.
Adrian: What?
Rocky: I can't beat him.
Adrian: Apollo?
Rocky: Yeah. I been out there walkin' around, thinkin'. I mean, who am I kiddin'? I ain't even in the guy's league.
-Rocky (1976)

The Hillary Waltz
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 2, 2008

Movies With Maureen® has become like shooting fish in a barrel with Hillary Clinton running around comparing herself to Sylvester Stallone. Someone should point out to her that Rocky Balboa the punch-drunk boxer lost in the first movie. With movies out of the way, Maureen Dowd resorts to middlebrow opera call-outs:

Not only does she have a lot in common with Rocky, as she said Tuesday in Philadelphia, but she has a lot in common with another famous character — the Marschallin in Strauss’s bittersweet comic opera “Der Rosenkavalier.”

The Marschallin is a princess married to a Viennese field marshal who has a liaison dangereuse with a younger man, Count Octavian. Though she’s worried about her fleeting youth and the fickleness of men, she instructs the young man on the ways of love and then gracefully sets him free, allowing him to find happiness with young Sophie as a soaring waltz plays.

The opera synopsis includes yet another French lesson that doubles as a hidden movie reference to Dangerous Liasons, either the Roger Vadim or Glenn Close version. We also get The Hillary Waltz which is a sequel to the Nepotism Tango. Maureen does like those old fashioned dance steps. Back in November, she pointed out how Condi let Rummy "waltz away with the occupation". And Dubya and Dad are in an "Oedipal tango."

With the obligatory pop culture references out of the way, she can get on with the main agenda, cataloging Hillary’s faux pas and emasculating the nominee apparent. Time to pull out the pink highlighter once again as Maureen goes for the feminine adverbs and adjectives.

His strenuous and inadvertently hilarious efforts to woo working-class folk in Pennsylvania have only made him seem more effete. Keeping his tie firmly in place, he genteelly sipped his pint of Yuengling beer.

We last heard effete on March 9th as Dowd equated Obama with other unmasculine Democratic losers:

Obama’s multiculturalism is a selling point with many Democrats. But his impassioned egghead advisers have made his campaign seem not only out of his control, but effete and vaguely foreign — the same unflattering light that doomed Michael Dukakis and John Kerry.

But before that, the "e-word" was leveled against John Edwards a year ago in her “Running With Scissors” hatchet job on the Breck Girl.

In presidential politics, it’s all but impossible to put the man into manicure. Be sensitive, but not soft. Effete is never effective.

Dowd is also well known for her obsession with Barack’s attempts to maintain his girlish figure:

At the Wilbur chocolate shop in Lititz Monday, he spent most of his time skittering away from chocolate goodies, as though he were a starlet obsessing on a svelte waistline.

He looked even more concerned when he was offered a chocolate cake with white chocolate frosting. “Oh, man.” he said. “That’s too decadent for me.”

But Dowd can’t stay away from the boxing metaphor and makes this assertion:

Winning has no margin of error, as the Democrats should have learned by now. And the winner gets to decide his or her running mate.

But the ultimate favor Hillary can do for the Illinois freshman is to fight him full-out until the finale and then gracefully release him so he can find happiness with another.

And then, just like the The Cavalier of the Rose, he can move on to the general election by waltzing or skipping or "imitating his daughters’ dance moves by twirling around." But he might want to buy some boxing gloves instead of dancing shoes when he tangles with the Fruitbat in a Dinner Jacket:

Hillary’s work is done only when she is done, because the best way for Obama to prove he’s ready to stare down Ahmadinejad is by putting away someone even tougher.

When the Iranian Anti-Semite in Chief is considered a cakewalk compared to Hillary, that makes her one tough sparring partner.

But Does He Lactate?

¿Quién Es Less Macho?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 24, 2008

¿Quién Es Más Macho?:
A Spanish-language game show in an old Saturday Night Live skit. Bill Murray played the host, and contestants were asked to guess which of two actors was more macho (I believe Senor Montalban consistently came out on top.) In the end, immigration agents arrested everybody.
- everything2.com

Maureeen Dowd does not want to discuss Republican candidate innuendo as long as there is still Democratic candidate infighting, so she eschews soiling where she sleeps by jumping on the Times’ sexed up lobbyist scandal and instead goes once more to the Hillary/Obama well and makes this observation:

And when historians trace how her inevitability dissolved, they will surely note this paradox: The first serious female candidate for president was rejected by voters drawn to the more feminine management style of her male rival.

This unleashes her longest torrent yet in the feminization of Barack. Lets sort the various adjectives, adverbs, and witty phrases by gender. We at the Dowd Report have added a new shade to the quote palette and are highlighting phrases that feminize Barack in pink. First we have Hillary as a cigar chomping war monger and Obama as a dainty seamstress.

Hillary was so busy trying to prove she could be one of the boys — getting on the Armed Services Committee, voting to let W. go to war in Iraq, strong-arming supporters and donors, and trying to out-macho Obama — that she only belatedly realized that many Democratic and independent voters, especially women, were eager to move from hard-power locker-room tactics to a soft-power sewing circle approach.

Which sets up this weeks Dowdversion® where she twists a metaphor beyond recognition:

Less towel-snapping and more towel color coordinating, less steroids and more sensitivity.

Only in DowdWorld is hanging out with the Heisman Trophy winner an emasculating sign of wimpiness. In her mind, Barack even throws (or refuses to throw) like a girl (video available here):

At the University of Texas on Thursday morning, Obama proved that he was not a cowboy in overdrive like W. when he demurred at throwing a spiral because his pass might not be as good as the Longhorn stars’.

Dowd also exhibits her Pride and Prejudice to get off a cheap pun:

At first in Austin, Hillary did not channel Jane Austen. She tried once more to cast Obama as a weak sister on his willingness to talk to Raúl Castro.

The Democratic Party is often called the “Mommy Party” and Dowd takes the metaphor literally:

Among her other cascading woes, it turns out that Hillary is not able to manage her political family’s money. Like a prudent housekeeper, Obama spent the cash he raised — including from his continuing relationships with small donors — far more shrewdly, on ads rather than on himself.

Hillary on the other hand is a hard living breadwinner that can’t control the purse strings and Dowd updates the drunken sailor metaphor for the 21st century:

Hillaryland spent like a hedge fund manager in a flat-screen TV store. Her campaign attempted to show omnipotence by lavishing a fortune on the take-no-prisoners strategists Howard Wolfson and Mark Penn, and on having the best of everything from the set decoration at events to Four Seasons rooms. In January alone, they spent $11,000 on pizza, $1,200 on Dunkin’ Donuts and $95,384 at a Des Moines Hy-Vee grocery store for get-out-the-vote sandwich platters.

But total domination in the snack arena does not cut the mustard.

And speaking of not cutting it, Maureen has mentioned Hillary Clinton in her last eleven columns (January 20 was touch and go with only two sentences, but it still counts). Your guess is as good as ours as to when this Hillarobsession of Dowd's will take a breather.