Maureen Dowd Is Not Our Friend

It's been tempting during the past six years to think that Maureen Dowd was a voice for sanity with some of her columns about the Bush Administration. But no one should succumb to the siren song of the Fading Flirt, for as the 2008 race gets going, MoDo is sharpening her claws for Democrats only. Last week she picked up Ann Coulter's "John Edwards is a faggot" meme by suggesting that Edwards is somehow not manly enough to be president because he doesn't have a nice military buzzcut like Jon Tester. Today she goes after Michelle Obama:

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.

Ooh. She's good, isn't she? This is the best use of the Fox News "Some people say..." construct since Katie Couric's hatchet job on the John and Elizabeth Edwards on 60 Minutes.

Then she blames Michelle Obama for not having the foresight to anticipate the indictment of Tony Rezko.

Does anyone smell a Bill and Hill Reduz on the Land of Mo[r]Do[r] here? That Obama is within seven points of Hillary Clinton in South Carolina obviously made it more urgent for MoDo to unsheath her claws on him than to do another snarky Hillary column in response to Clinton's statement about using her husband as a roving ambassador if elected.

If I were going to guess who Dowd is supporting for 2008, I would say it's probably Rudy Giuliani. She loves all that tough talk stuff.