Playa Hating Obama



Sexy-smart Maureen Dowd, who has been as sharp as a Vermeer during this campaign season ("Mr. Darcy Comes A Courting" is ingenious), penetrates what can only be properly construed as the dim atmospherics of Playa Hating opaquing the Obama campaign. Dowd, who has never met a Shakespearean reference that she didn't As-You-Like-It, shares the Bard's obsession with the passing of political power from generation to generation. In that sense, Dowd has finally found a campaign of generational change -- from McCain's No-Name-Generation to Obama's Post-Boomer Generation -- worthy of her considerable powers of observation and wit. From the NyTimes:

"Just as Bill Clinton looks at Obama and sees his own oblivion, so does Jesse Jackson. As Shelby Steele wrote in The Wall Street Journal, Jackson and his generation of civil rights leaders 'made keeping whites on the hook the most sacred article of the post-’60s black identity,' equality pursued by manipulating white guilt.

"Now John McCain is pea-green with envy. That’s the only explanation for why a man who prides himself on honor, a man who vowed not to take the low road in the campaign, having been mugged by W. and Rove in South Carolina in 2000, is engaging in a festival of juvenilia.

"The Arizona senator who built his reputation on being a brave proponent of big solutions is running a schoolyard campaign about tire gauges and Paris Hilton, childishly accusing his opponent of being too serious, too popular and not patriotic enough."

"Even his own mother, the magical 96-year-old Roberta McCain, let slip that she thought the Paris Hilton-Britney Spears ad was 'kinda stupid.'"

The magical Roberta McCain, the voice of reason.