January 6, 2008
NYT Op-Ed Columnist
Voting for a Smile
By MAUREEN DOWD
CONCORD, N.H.
The Hillary forces at the Plymouth Church caucus in Des Moines weren’t averse to bribes.
They were passing out See’s chocolates to Richardson supporters.
And they weren’t averse to threats. “My wife told me I’d have to join them or I’d be sleeping on the couch tonight,” said Ed Truslow, a compact 68-year-old manufacturing representative. He was still wearing his Chris Dodd sticker when he lumbered over to his wife’s side. A Clinton organizer slapped a Hillary sticker over the offending Dodd sticker, and with a frantic cheeriness told him: “Hillary now, right? God bless!”
They weren’t averse to bending the rules. When they realized that they might not have enough people to get even one Hillary delegate, they sneaked out of their assigned room to Red-Rover their neighbors over, before they’d been officially counted themselves.
It was understandable that Hillary’s “Golden Girls” acolytes would freak out when they saw the throngs of young Obama hopemongers swarming the caucuses. As one Dodd supporter said, looking for her little Dodd corner, “I’m lost in the Obamas.”
A caucusgoer drily noted that it did not seem the most propitious harbinger for Hillary that the fateful evening began with a threat to withhold connubial bliss.
But that’s the way the tough cookie crumbled Thursday night. The Obama revolution arrived not on little cat feet in the Iowa snow but like a balmy promise, an effortlessly leaping lion hungry for something different, propelled by a visceral desire among Americans to feel American again.
The Bushes always self-consciously and swaggeringly put themselves “on the American side,” as Poppy used to say, implying that their rivals were somehow less American. But many Americans can no longer see themselves in the warped values of the Bush White House or the pathetic paralysis of Congress or the disapproving gaze of the world.
They want a different looking glass. So they rolled the dice and, as The Chicago Tribune’s Mike Tackett put it, “voted for a smile.”
I interviewed three Republicans in the Obama section of the caucus who were ready for the red state, blue state merger. They said they didn’t want Hill and Bill back in the White House, and that John McCain was too much of a yes man for W., who had betrayed Republicans with his handling of the Iraq war and his fiscal irresponsibility.
Hillary’s aides were grumbling last week that Obama had no rationale to offer but himself.
Perhaps that was true when he started. People usually run for president because somebody tells them they should and then graft on the reasons afterward. But on Thursday, Obama’s vague optimism and smooth-jazz modernity came together in a spectacular fusion with the deep yearning of Democrats who have suffered through heartbreaking losses in the last two elections with uninspiring candidates.
Often unable to surf the electricity he sparked over the last year, Obama has now put on his laurel wreath and dropped his languid pose, tapping directly into what he calls the “fire burning” across the country — the dream of a cool, smart, elegant, reasonable, literary, witty, decent “West Wing” sort of president who won’t bankrupt us or endanger us or co-opt our rights or put a black hood on the Constitution.
“I want to go before the world and say, America’s back,” he told cheering Democrats in Milford, N.H., adding: “We are one nation. We are one people. And our time for change has come.”
Even though Obama was wooing the young demographic so coveted by Hollywood, he took a page from J.F.K. and avoided the casual look last week. There were no jeans or snow boots. Just dark suits, stylish ties and dress shoes.
By the time she got to New Hampshire, Hillary was reduced to urging voters not to buy into “false hopes.”
At a hangar in Nashua, with chatty Bill and chatless Chelsea, Hillary tried to purloin more of the Obama message. Besides saying the word “change” as often as possible, she said she was particularly reaching out to young people to help them “reclaim the future.” She claimed that she disliked the red state, blue state terminology — “We are one country,” she said, echoing Obama — even as she added that she should be the nominee because she’s the best one “to withstand the Republican attack machine.”
What she doesn’t mention is that she knows how to fight off the Republican attack machine because she and her husband were so adept at revving it up.
Listening to Hillary and Obama evokes the famous scene in the classic “The Night of the Hunter,” when Robert Mitchum, whose fingers are tattooed with “LOVE” on his right hand and “HATE” on his left, has a wrestling match with his hands to see which emotion triumphs.
In the movie, love does, but it’s a close call.