You knew Maureen Dowd would turn against Obama at some point. He's just too smart, and she doesn't like that in her Democrats.
So, tonight we get her expected column bashing him as an egghead, professorial type. Key graphs:
The elitism that Americans dislike is not about family money or connections — J.F.K. and W. never would have been elected without them.
(ed. note: that's worked out has it with W.?)
In the screwball movie genre that started during the last Depression, there was a great tradition of the millionaire who was cool enough to relate to the common man — like Cary Grant’s C.K. Dexter Haven in “The Philadelphia Story.”
What turns off voters is the detached egghead quality that they tend to equate with a wimpiness, wordiness and a lack of action — the same quality that got the professorial and superior Adlai Stevenson mocked by critics as Adelaide. The new attack line for Obama rivals is that he’s gone from J.F.K. to Dukakis. (Just as Dukakis chatted about Belgian endive, Obama chatted about Whole Foods arugula in Iowa.)
There we have it.
Sadly, her disdain for folks with smarts hasn't changed much despite eight disastrous years of W., whom she admired for his common-man touch despite his stupidity. Let's now travel back in time to re-read one of Dowd's famous anti-Gore columns from 2000:
The vice president spoke 1,565 words, really, really slowly, with glacial pauses between each word. He propounded and expounded for more than 15 minutes, touching on such diverse topics as the human genome, the ice-free future of the Arctic Ocean, the ''Star Wars'' journey, the climate of New York City, federal entitlements, the climate of Atlanta, embassy security, the climate of Illinois, Individual Development Accounts, the climate of Oklahoma and the state of the U.S. economy in 1835.
She spends so much of her life engaged in pop-psychological analyses for her columns, you have to wonder if she's ever had asked herself why she hates smart people so much.
