Color me Feminist, by Not Maureen Dowd
Barack Obama, who’s seemed way too respectful of the girl running for president, maybe cause she reminds him of his Midwestern moms and apple pie, finally stepped up to the plate, and sent one zinging over right field. In Dodge Stadium, he slammed a clearly and, in my opinion, obviously spontaneous and, unlike you-know-who, unscripted, ‘fly ‘n ball’ that knocked that ‘wife candidate’ on her no longer fire proof fanny.
Obama was asked about Hillary Clinton’s clearly unprovoked attack on his qualifications. Hillary had been shamefully bragging about her own questionable qualifications, adding “if there is one job we can’t afford on-the-job training for it’s the job of our next president.” Her aides confirmed she was referring to Obama, although the sillies ought to have said she’s referring to Rudy, or Ron, who make Obama seem like he’s seeking presidential reelection.
Since he’d been pressed to respond, Obama came up with a real zingerdinger, coated with manly disdain: My understanding was that she wasn’t exactly Treasury secretary or anything in her husband’s administration, you know, so I don’t know what the chickie’s claiming, exactly. I believe she was only some president’s wife, you know, get it?
Everyone snickered, including Michelle.
It may have taken him a full nine-month pregnancy, but he finally delivered the perfect slap that made his ‘knock-her-down-and-then-laugh-at-her’ point. Rudy took note, and he immediately gave up his dream to elevate Judi to succeed his coming monarchy.
Her other rivals have been meekly going along, accepting her self-portrait as a former co-president who gets to take credit for being clued in during the deal-making, at the epicenter, and not just passing the cookies. She was never elected president, so who does she think she is; she’s just another girl taking credit for her he man’s accomplishments, and where have we seen that before? She was just there, there is no proof she was even listening. And the part of the Clinton administration that worked best — the economy, stupid — was run by Robert Rubin, a man! Hillary did not even show great judgment in her scant areas of influence — dealing with the spurious and ultimately discredited investigations, which would have turned up squat whatever she was doing hey, her wacky universal health care plan, and defending her randy husband when a few of his ex-girlfriends wanted their fifteen minutes, and a cash settlement. She wasn’t just useless, she got in the men’s way, as girls as wont to do, I might add. How’s that experience, I ask you?
Oh, sure, she went on some first lady jaunts and made one pretty good but not fabulous speech or anything, at a U.N. women’s conference in Beijing. But she most certainly was not, as her top Iowa supporter claimed, “the face of the administration in foreign affairs.” And we all know that what Iowa says once, she says, twice.
If she’d even been the top adviser she claims she was, she must have had a Nixonian (paranoid, get it?) bent for secrecy and his knack for hard-core porn, I mean, politicking, but Obama rightly points out, ain’t so, the girlie was just a wife, I’m saying wife here, not husband. The real powers behind the throne were Carville and Stephanopoulos, and they would both be leading the pack, if they would both just quit working for the big-bucks media and get back to public service, and both of them are men, get it?
Obama’s one-liner reminded me of something that rubs me and some of my old white guy, both professional and wise, friends the wrong way about Hillary. Hillary disguises nepotism with feminism, if you can believe the nerve. I mean, George Bush didn’t invoke masculine when he took over his dad’s failed job destabilizing the middle east for him, did he? I mean, manliness is never mentioned when guys are running, and anyway it’s so 80’s, now that there’s a level playing field she should start all over, at the bottom, like Bush, and Gore, and oh, gosh, all of them, no?
Some nobody who got a letter published in the Walleye Street Journal said it even better than Obama: Guys, she isn’t Dianne Feinstein, who inherited assassinated San Francisco’s Mayor Mosconi’s gig, before becoming a senator, with no head start at all, or even politically unconnected Nancy Pelosi, who became Madam Speaker on the strength of her deal-making, which is so strong we’re out of Iraq, no kidding. All Hillary is, is Mrs. Clinton, a wife, get it? She became a partner at the Rose Law Firm because she’s a wife, senator of New York because she’s a wife, and (oh my god, get me out of here) she could become president because she’s a wife. I mean, no one even died to give her a seat at the table, and none of her blood relatives have any political power at all, nada, she’s JUST A WIFE, get it?
The Clinton campaign in Iowa is in a panic, they are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, it’s, ‘bloody over,’ there, and ‘slick’. Obama has been closing the gap with women and her bringing up feminism has lost her male votes, probably, actually no one’s voted yet, so I’m speaking about polls, which are as good as votes, unless they’re exit polls of course, in Democratic districts that inexplicably go Republican, when they’re, how can I put it, wrong. Speaking around Iowa this week, Obama made the trenchant point that his exotic and rather thrilling childhood, and his years as an ‘outsider’ at Harvard, allowed him to understand the entire world.
I spent four entire years living in Asia when I was a child, he said. If you don’t understand these cultures from a child’s perspective, then it’s very hard for you to make good foreign policy decisions from a child’s perspective, I mean, hard, get it? Foreign policy is all about judgment formed before the age of ten, man-boy judgment as well as exotic mid-western apple-pie man judgment.
President Bush is not as enamored as most Americans of Obama’s foreign policy judgment. He gave a plug to Hillary calling her a “formidable candidate,” and Laura gave her a big boost when she observed that she’s just ‘trading up” from first lady. Mark my words, one way or another, George Bush is going to be running Hillary, for sure.
Though Obama forgot to mention the quick “color me experienced” trip Hillary took with some Senate colleagues to Iraq and Afghanistan just before she started running, her only very own foreign policy experience I might add, that actually counts, cause it hasn’t been discredited already with his ‘she’s just a wife’ pie-in-the-face amusing yet lofty zapperoni, he might have been thinking of it when he mocked ‘stroll ‘n chew’ Congressional junkets:
You get picked up at the airport by a state convoy and a security detail. They drive you over to the ambassador’s house and you get lunch. Then you go take a tour of some factory or some school. Children do a native dance, and there is no opportunity to discuss policy with these children, none. Tells you nothing about a child’s life in an exotic foreign local before the age of ten, so, it’s useless, and a waste of tax-payer’s money.
Kittenish Hillary pounced, knowing that her chief rival’s foreign policy résumé is as slender as his legs in spandex, once more conjuring a childish Obama out of thin air with no help whatsoever from him. She brazen-hussedly borrowed a Republican talking point, even though she’d once accused John Edwards of “throwing mud” that was “right out of the Republican playbook,” when he suggested she was untrustworthy. (Can you believe her nerve?)
“With all due respect,” she told a crowd in Iowa. “I don’t think living in a foreign country between the ages of 6 and 10 is foreign policy experience.” Now we all know Rove has used that line dozens of times, and it’s merely coincidence that Obama actually said that his childhood equates to foreign policy experience right before she allegedly commented on his remark, when we all know she was just repeating Rove’s line, and without crediting him even, and don’t forget, Obama was a male child, and an exotic Harvard outsider.
Really folks, is sleeping with the president in the White House between the ages of 45 and 53 foreign policy experience, or is it just sleeping? Posing this question, by the way, isn’t a Republican talking point, because the Republicans really want Hillary to run, they are not pretending they want her to run so that she’ll lose and Rudy won’t have to debate her on terrorism, please, just ask them.
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