Maureen Dowd, Pulitzer Prize winner and longtime columnist for the New York Times, appears to have had it with the president. It’s difficult to tell if Mo is emotionally upset, disappointed or both. I’m opting for disappointed. She suffers from the disease that many columnists suffer from: “If only they would take my advice everything would be fine” disease. She may have caught it from Tom Freidman. There is no known cure!
Dowd’s last two columns have, brutally, taken the president to task. In Alone Again, Naturally – which borrows its title from Gilbert O’Sullivan’s 1972 hit tune — she makes the case that Obama’s penchant for being alone “started as an affectation [but] has turned into an affliction.” She refers to her NYT colleague’s description of the Obama attitude as a “bored-bird-in-a-gilded-cage.”
Says Mo:
First the president couldn’t work with Republicans because they were too obdurate. Then he tried to chase down reporters with subpoenas. Now he finds members of his own party an unnecessary distraction.
The president who was elected because he was a hot commodity is now a wet blanket.
Ouch!
But hold on: Her disappointment continues to simmer.
She now sees Obama’s “main galvanizing impulse was to get himself elected.” How disappointed she must be to see the liberal agenda falling into such disregard, when if only the president would listen to her, the fix would be in. She quotes Ezra Klein making the point that even in the White House presidential speeches are “as likely to make things worse as to make things better.”
Mo’s not done:
If you’re a fastidious pol who deigns to heal and deal only in a holistic, romantic, unified utopia, the Oval Office is the wrong job for you.
The country needs its president to illuminate and lead, not sink into some petulant expression of his aloofness.
Four days later, she is still on the warpath as she pens The Golf Address. She offers the Obama version of the Gettysburg Address. It opens:
FORE! Score? And seven trillion rounds ago, our forecaddies brought forth on this continent a new playground, conceived by Robert Trent Jones and dedicated to the Proposition that all men are created equal when it comes to spending as much time on the links as possible – even when it seems totally inappropriate, like moments after making a solemn statement condemning the grisly murder of a 40 year old American journalist beheaded by ISIL.
It gets worse from there:
Now we are engaged in a great civil divide in Ferguson, which does not even have a golf course, and that’s why I had a “logistical” issue with going there. We are testing whether that community or any community so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure when the nation’s leader wants nothing more than to sink a birdie putt.
The brave foursomes, living and dead, who struggled here in the sand, in the trees, in the water, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or subtract a few strokes to improve our score. Bill Clinton was Mr. Mulligan, and he is twice as popular as I am.
This nation, under par, shall have a new birth of freedom to play the game that I have become unnaturally obsessed with, and that golf of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.
So help me Golf.
Mo, many of us feel your pain, your disappointment, it’s just that ours started five years ago. We know you’re new to these emotions; just imagine how exhausted some of us are!
