by Molly Ivors
I've been waiting with bated breath to see what Maureen might come up with in the wake of her public smackdown and the current inexorable (but not surprising) surge toward party unity. (Many of us predicted this, you know.) MoDo's response?
Picking on older women (and you know, not too much older than you, Mo. Just sayin').
I mean, wow. Following the finest examples of crappy news coverage we've seen over the last six months (I picture J. Jonah Jameson, the cranky editor from Spiderman, screaming "Find me a racist Hillary supporter! Stat!"), MoDo takes a fine moment and focuses almost exclusively on one old lady who's having a hard time letting go.
Carmella Lewis, with her Hillary T-shirt and Hillary placard, came
all the way from Denver to make sure there would be plenty of
ambiguity, duality and ferocity in Unity.
Just as Hillary was
testing out the unfamiliar familiarity “Barack and me” Friday and
talking about “his grace and his grit,” Carmella began loudly booing
and waving her sign.
“We want Hillary!” screamed the 57-year-old retired ad saleswoman and Clinton delegate.
“It’s over, lady!” yelled some Obama supporters a few yards away.
Standing between the Sharks and the Jets, David Axelrod took pity
on an older friend of Carmella’s who was suffering from aridity in the
Unity humidity. The chief Obama strategist fetched a glass of water and
brought it to the woman, who was wearing five Hillary buttons.
This amenity did not stop the disunity. Carmella and her friends
continued to cry, “Nobama!” “We love you, Hillary!” and “We need
Hillary!” as Barack Obama sat onstage on a stool behind his former
rival, his finger studiously at his lips.
Carmella was not
impressed with all the kissing, laughing and whispering that Hill and
Bam were diligently doing for the cameras, so that the moment could
produce, as Obama press aide Robert Gibbs put it on “Larry King Live,”
“a great picture.”
When it was Obama’s turn to speak, Carmella
announced loudly, “I wish I had ear plugs.” Then, as Obama tried to
ingratiate himself with the Hillary partisans in the crowd by saying
that because of the New York senator, his daughters “can take for
granted that women can do anything that the boys can do and do it
better and do it in heels,” Carmella put her fingers in her ears.
As Obama tried to curry favor with Hillary, looking over at her
sensible, sturdy shoes and marveling, “I still don’t know how she does
it in heels,” Carmella tore up a tissue and stuffed it in her ears.
When Obama pandered with a line about how he wouldn’t “perpetuate a
system in which women are paid less for the same work as men,” she put
her hands over her tissue-stuffed ears.
“Maybe she’d like what she heard if she listened,” sighed Axelrod.
When Obama talked about moving beyond “all the petty bickering,” as
Hillary robo-nodded at his side and CNN’s Candy Crowley applied
pre-broadcast lipstick above her, Carmella glared at people applauding.
Afterward, Carmella got her idol to autograph her sign, telling the smiling Hillary, “You’re going to be the next president.”
She told The Times that she and her friends were all voting for John McCain and that Hillary was just doing what she had to do.
“But I have a gut feeling,” she said with macabre faith, “that something’s going to happen so that she becomes the nominee.”
Now, the question here is not so much whether such people exist: of course they do. We here in the left blogosphere generally see the other side of this, as in "If she's the VP, I'm not voting!" But, you know, we recognize this for what it is: bruises that haven't quite healed yet. But they will, and anyone who supported Clinton for any reason other than her gender are going to climb on the bus eventually. Obama's striking the right notes, they're both behaving well, and it's all going to be fine by August.
But MoDo focuses on Carmella. And by focusing I mean spending far more than the requisite quote or two of column time on her. Look at how much column space she gave this person! She must have been stalking her all day. (Note to Carmella: I'd buy thicker curtains, and if an improbably taut redhead in cherry-red pumps tries to deliver flowers to you, don't open the door.) Creepy.
But then, we knew this would happen. Part of what I've been waiting for is to see what the transition to general election nastiness would look like We all understand that Maureen's Cop Daddy issues mean that she's going to do everything she can to tear down the Dems between now and the election, in order to further the chances of Senator Matlock J. Depends and his trollop of a trophy wife. But I admit, I didn't expect her to be reduced to the fringes of the crowd quite this quickly.
And now, they're "Hill and Bam" and her colleagues in the media are the "Bamary press corps," with the exception of one Fox producer who circulated tapes of the former rivals saying mean things about each other. MoDo's Hannah Montana shiv is more subtle, slyly whispering that THEY'RE BIG FAKERS AND THEY STILL HATE EACH OTHER. Umm, yeah. Maureen. Whatever. Actually, I don't give a shit what they think of each other. Are they going to fix the country? Yes? Good. Now STFU.
But like Carmella and her impossible longing for the Glory Days, Maureen finally, finally gets a chance to relive her own: by focusing on He Who Must Not Be Named, who, she says, "who is in a self-pitying meltdown about not being Elvis anymore, trying
to shake down Obama for more — more apologies for perceived snubs and
more help paying off the $22 million Clinton debt." Ummm, you might have missed it, Mo, but Obama did donate this week. And just as Jimmy Carter was annoyed at Clinton for dismissing his accomplishments in office, Obama should have some respect for the Clinton administration. And I think he will, eventually, but as with Carmella, it'll take some time. And Bill will, too.
But I think the whole point of today's column was to suggest a rough equivalence between Carmella and Bill Clinton, one clearly belied by the fact that he was, you know, there. But in her desperation to create bad guys, MoDo's settled on Bill, the bad guy from her Pulitzer days.
Good luck with that.
