by Molly Ivors
Well, the Hello Kitty shiv, whose existence has only been hinted at up to now, is out, and clearly cannot be returned to the high-heeled boot until it has shed blood.
Yes, the Iowa caucuses are tomorrow, and Our Favorite Princess has weighed in with her final column, in which she suggests--no, states flat out--that Hillary is a Queen waiting to take the throne, and maybe, just maybe, Prince Obama will be willing to serve. Oh, and there's that other guy, not that he really, you know, matters.
As always, I am not making this up, though I desperately wish I were.
According to MoDo, the Iowa caucuses are peopled entirely by elderly female nurses. Like Tom Friedman's cab drivers, they are the sibyls of the new
age, speaking truths to which we mere mortals can only hope to aspire. Not that I have anything against elderly female nurses, but I'm skeptical that all human wisdom is contained in their conventions. (If so, we all need to use more bedpans and antibacterial soap.)
But like Friedman's ethnic cabbies, the point is not what they really think, but the working-class cover they provide for the spewings of the NYT OpEd writers. And today, MoDo spews like a teenage girl on a wine-cooler bender.
Has Hillary truly changed, and grown from her mistakes? Has she learned to be less stubborn and imperious and secretive and vindictive and entitled? Or has she merely learned to mask her off-putting and self-sabotaging qualities better? If elected, would the old Hillary pop up, dragging us back to the dysfunctional Clinton kingdom?
Get it? See, under cover of these nice elderly ladies and their observations that “I can’t understand why people dislike her so much,” and "“I don’t want Bill in the White House again,” she gets to slide in all the adjectives she's been savoring like jellybeans. The presidency, in MoDo's view, is not a public office, but rather a consolation prize for an unhappy marriage. Not news, I guess, but surprisingly obvious, even for her.
And Obama fares no better. He has this wife, you see, with an apparently limited patience for the bullshit of campaigning.
Michelle told Vanity Fair that Americans would have only one chance to anoint her husband, vowing “it’s now or never” and explaining “there’s an inconvenience factor there” and a “really, really hard” pressure and stress on the family that can only be justified if her husband can win the presidency and “change the world.”
She told a group gathered at a nursing home in Grinnell on Monday that “Barack is one of the smartest people you will ever encounter who will deign to enter this messy thing called politics.”
Gee, how is it possible that anyone could not like the kind of attention that comes with political campaigning? Wouldn't anyone be honored to be smeared by the Queen of All Inanity? Personally, despite my issues with her husband, I like Michelle Obama and find her refreshingly sharp-tongued and funny. But MoDo clearly hates her. The nerve of her to suggest that being mentioned in a MoDo column is something she might not want to relive endlessly!
It genuinely seems to worry MoDo that the three Dem front-runners are intelligent people married to intelligent people, so much so that she even breaks her rule and notes that there's a third front-runner in play. Shit, she even mentions the "E" word!
The Democratic race — three lawyers married to lawyers who talk too much — is very tight and very volatile.
I have a dark confession to make: I too am married to someone who shares my profession. We also share many similar opinions and attitudes, though not completely, and often express them, sometimes even in blog form. The Obamas met at work, the Clintons and Edwards in law school. When you are in a graduate program, or working in a time-intensive field, you often date, and sometimes fall in love with, the people directly surrounding you. And it's not all calculation and ambition: sometimes, it's just nice to have someone who understands around the house. I realize that this doesn't happen on Sex and the City, but it often happens in real life, Maureen. Trust me.
But the big news here is the actual mention of The Invisible Man: "Nancy Hibbs, a 57-year-old nurse, came to listen to John Edwards give
his son-of-a-mill-worker rant against corporate greed, complete with a
sneer aimed at Obama that anyone who thinks you can 'just nice' the
carnivorous Republican fat cats into submission is in 'Never-Never
Land.'" Note, however, that the resonance of Edwards' populist message (The nurse notes: “You can tell in his voice he’s not playing the game, you can hear his moral commitment,” she said. “We need a big turnaround.”) is reduced here to a "rant" and a "sneer," undercutting not only her acknowledgment that Edwards exists, but the perspective of her sources, both of whom are leaning toward Edwards. So he seems to have the elderly nurse vote sewn up.
And maybe even the vapid columnist vote, too. Despite his "rant," she does not identify Edwards as one of the candidates with a crown in his closet who feels the election is his due: it's Hillary and Obama who are the presumptuous ones. Does that amount to an endorsement? Heaven forfend!
