It did not come as a great surprise when the scales dropped from Peggy Noonan’s eyes, and her ardor for the president swirled away. But one would not have expected such a diminishment in Maureen Dowd’s affections as that brutally outlined in her weekend op-ed. “Maybe,” Dowd concluded, “Obama was not even the person he was waiting for.” The New York Times columnist argued that Obama must know “[he is] in trouble” now that even “Harry Reid says [he] should be more aggresive,” but one could equally argue that the president must truly know that the game is up, now that the barometer of establishment opinion is lurking around the steps of the Senate, dressed in a toga and carrying a dagger.
The piece is fiery, even employing many of the criticisms that the Right has made of Obama from the outset. Echoing the notion that he is an empty suit, obsessed with speech-making and convinced that the sole role of the president is to make endless use of the bully pulpit, Dowd accuses Obama — who she sarcastically refers to as “The One” — of suffering from “Speech Illlusion,” which she defines as:
the idea that he can come down from the mountain, read from a Teleprompter, cast a magic spell with his words and climb back up the mountain, while we scurry around and do what he proclaimed.