Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, March 9, 2008
I was covered in barbecue sauce, somewhere over Texas, when Barack Obama loped down the aisle of the plane to chat with reporters.
I felt guilty, because I had been covering his speeches urging parents to make their kids give up chips and Popeyes. I hadn’t yet come to grips with the notion of giving up Popeyes when Obama — slender, chewing Nicorette and perfectly groomed in his crisp white shirt — came upon me. I was splattered with so much red sauce it could have been a scene from “Saw IV.” Not only on my face and hands but all over the candidate’s picture in the U.S. News & World Report I was reading.
“It’s on my ear,” he complained, looking down at the magazine.
Feeling cocky after 11 straight wins, he called me “MoDowd” and tweaked me for my many columns suggesting he would need to toughen up to beat the Clinton machine. “She’s trying to give me hair on my chest,” he said mockingly, plucking at his shirt.
After losing Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and his mojo, and getting whipsawed around by Hillary and his own chuckleheaded coterie of advisers, he will now have to come to grips with something he has always skittered away from: You can’t be elected president unless you prove you’re tough.
Read More Here
Maureen Dowd: The Monster Mash
Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, March 9, 2008
I was covered in barbecue sauce, somewhere over Texas, when Barack Obama loped down the aisle of the plane to chat with reporters.
I felt guilty, because I had been covering his speeches urging parents to make their kids give up chips and Popeyes. I hadn’t yet come to grips with the notion of giving up Popeyes when Obama — slender, chewing Nicorette and perfectly groomed in his crisp white shirt — came upon me. I was splattered with so much red sauce it could have been a scene from “Saw IV.” Not only on my face and hands but all over the candidate’s picture in the U.S. News & World Report I was reading.
“It’s on my ear,” he complained, looking down at the magazine.
Feeling cocky after 11 straight wins, he called me “MoDowd” and tweaked me for my many columns suggesting he would need to toughen up to beat the Clinton machine. “She’s trying to give me hair on my chest,” he said mockingly, plucking at his shirt.
After losing Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and his mojo, and getting whipsawed around by Hillary and his own chuckleheaded coterie of advisers, he will now have to come to grips with something he has always skittered away from: You can’t be elected president unless you prove you’re tough.
Read More Here