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Feminists Nurse A Grudge

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By MAUREEN DOWD

The Tampa Tribune

Published: August 5, 2008

WASHINGTON - It is a truth universally acknowledged that Barack Obama must continue to grovel to Hillary Clinton's dead-enders, some of whom mutter darkly that they will not only not vote for him, they will never vote for a man again.

Obama met for an hour last week with three dozen top Hillaryites at a hotel here, seeking their endorsement and beguiling their begrudging. He opened the session by saying that he knew there had been frustration about what they saw as sexism during the primary.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Hillary die-hards want to enshrine a whine in the Democratic platform about how the primaries "exposed pervasive gender bias in the media" and call on party leaders to take "immediate and public steps" to denounce any perceived bias in the future. That is one nutty idea.

Perhaps it is because feminists are still so busy cataloging past slights to Hillary that they have failed to mount a vivid defense of Michelle Obama, who has taken over from Hillary as the one conservatives like to paint as a harridan.

Before the Obama campaign even had a chance to denounce Ludacris, one of the rappers on the senator's iPod, Hillary Inc. started to mobilize. Susie Tompkins Buell, a former Clinton bundler, told The New York Observer that Obama had to distance himself, given Ludacris' new song calling Hillary the b-word.

Despite Obama's wooing, some women aren't warming. As Carol Marin wrote in The Chicago Sun-Times, The Lanky One is like an Alice Waters organic chicken - "sleek, elegant, beautifully prepared. Too cool" - when what many working-class women are craving is mac and cheese.

In The Wall Street Journal, Amy Chozick wrote that Hillary supporters - who loved their heroine's admission that she was on Weight Watchers - were put off by Obama's svelte, zero-body-fat figure.

The odd thing is that Obama bears a distinct resemblance to the most cherished hero in chick-lit history. The senator is a modern incarnation of the clever, haughty, reserved and fastidious Mr. Darcy.

Like the leading man of Jane Austen and Bridget Jones, Obama can, as Austen wrote, draw "the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien. ... He was looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud, to be above his company, and above being pleased."

Can America overcome its prejudice to elect the first black president? And can it move past its biases to figure out if Obama's supposed conceit is really just the protective shield and defense mechanism of someone who grew up half white and half black, a perpetual outsider whose father deserted him and whose mother, while loving, sometimes did so as well?

Maureen Dowd is a columnist for The New York Times

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