by Molly Ivors
Ariel, the Idiot Princess, is in fine form this morning.
You know that moment in Mel Brooks' High Anxiety when Brooks, concerned about noises he hears at night, visits Cloris Leachman's room? She greets him in a tightly cinched robe and promises to keep it down, then, as soon as he's gone, removes it to reveal a Nazi uniform and throws open the doors to her closet, where Harvey Korman is bound up in some sort of sex game?
Reading this morning's column was kind of like that: MoDo throwing open the doors on her own personal psychodrama and inviting us all in.
She admits, with unusual candor, that she wants a Sugar Daddy or a Big Daddy or a Grandpa Daddy to take care of her. Not that this is news to anyone paying attention: "Customarily in presidential races, Americans seek a patriarchal figure, a strong parent to protect the house from invaders and financial turbulence."
No, honey, that's just you and a couple of redneck redstate pussies. Oh, and Tom Tancredo. The rest of us would like competent governance and someone who will turn this massive ship of state around and get us moving in the right direction, away from pointless wars and torture and kidnapping, and toward energy independence, jobs, and universal health care.
But honestly, that's not even her theme this morning, just a throwaway line. Her point, such as it is, is far more horrifying: she essentially walks up to Obama, pinches him on the cheek, and calls him just the cutest little pickininny prodigy you ever did see! And so clean and articulate! And non-threatening!
I'm only exaggerating a little, unfortunately.
Those enraptured with his gifts urge him on, like anxious parents, trying to pull that sustained, dazzling performance out of him that they believe he’s capable of; they are willing to put up with the prodigy’s occasional listlessness and crabbiness, his flights of self-regard and self-righteousness. Despite his uneven efforts and distaste for the claws of competition, they can see he is a golden child, one who moves, speaks, smiles and thinks with amazing grace.
His advisers and fund-raisers have pressed him to go fortissimo. Many voters with great expectations are hovering, hoping for a crescendo.
Except for panicked Clintonistas, everyone seems eager to see if the young pol can live up to his potential. Responding to his more combative style, the press has relaunched him, giving him a second chance to shine, on this week’s cover of Time, in the pages of The New Yorker, in the up arrow of Newsweek, which now declares him “poised to be the comeback kid,” and at The Times, where young female assistants lined the halls on Wednesday to watch him glide into a second meeting with editorial board writers and editors.
.........
“Much of the excitement that surrounds him comes from the perception that he is only lightly tethered to race,” [Shelby] Steele writes. “Yet the very arc of his life — from Hawaii to the South Side of Chicago — has been shaped by an often conscious resolve to ‘belong’ irrefutably to the black identity.” (Obama wrote that he dropped a white girlfriend partly because of her race.)
Jesse Jackson has chastised Obama for not focusing enough on black voters or fussing more about the Jena Six. But Obama wrote that he grew up knowing how to disarm whites worried about angry black men.
Hoo boy. Talk about unintentionally revealing the dirty secrets of your undercarriage. The column is essentially a declension of the "Obambi" meme she launched a few weeks ago, and the enhanced racial angle is genuinely disturbing.
By basically calling Obama a prima dona brat, she places him in the "reluctant candidate" pool with Fred Thompson. He's only doing this because we want him to, because we know he can. C'mon, President Doogie Howser! You can do it! In other words, he's doing this for us, the nervous helicopter parents, not out of any sense of ambition or public service or a genuine belief that his candidacy can benefit the nation in any concrete way. If Hillary gets the nomination, our clear response should be to create a fake MySpace profile to taunt her into suicide for hurting our little guy's feelings.
Even the press is encouraging him inappropriately, in MoDo's opinion. "Let him get a hit! He never gets a hit! His parents are here!" She doesn't actually use the phrase "the soft bigotry of low expectations," but if you play the column backward, like we used to for metal albums in the 70's, it's clearly there.
She also notes that "young female assistants lined the halls of the Times" to see him, and the meaning is clear: President Bobby Sherman is in the house! Those who support him do so because he's cute, or a pop star, or smooooooth. Anything but his policies and his calls for change. It does seem to be the case that younger voters are attracted to Obama, but MoDo, that's a good thing, not a bad thing. (And this poll, which is oldish, says Hillary has significant youth support, too.)
And he's the coverboy for Time and Lisa Simpson's ubiquitous Non-Threatening Boys Magazine.
My concern here is that in her adamant refusal to consider anything of substance, she invites us to judge based on superficialities, too. And we've had seven years of that and it's a bad, bad thing.
I was at a party last night, standing around in the kitchen drinking beer and talking about politics with a friend I've known for well over two decades, and he asked me if I considered MoDo a conservative. I thought for a moment and said no, not exactly. She's terminally trivial. She demeans our national conversation by talking about important political decisions as though they were votes for the King and Queen of the Freshman Welcome dance, as though she were one of those demonic seniors in Dazed and Confused--Parker Posey, maybe--vetting who's in and who's out by how much shit they're willing to take.
As with Clinton, I have issues with Obama. Social Security is not in trouble, and, like it or not, telling people that Jeebus saved you from Teh Gay is bigoted. Skipping controversial votes is no good, either, no matter who does it. I think he's young and that there's every chance he'll hone his skills and become someone I will be proud to support. For me, he's not that guy, not now, not yet. But it's not because he's a prodigy or a pop star or that the kids seem to like him.
For a legitimate, and far more disturbing, takedown of Obama, see Paul Krugman. Meanwhile, MoDo can return to whatever stodgy white guy she's got trussed up in her closet this week and stop dragging down the discourse.
UPDATE: The delightful V for Virginia plays with photoshop....
