Obama as a literary figure

Maureen Dowd meets Jane Austen, or:
Barack Obama as a literary character

RICK SOISSON

Let’s play Political Counterpunch, a game that involves immediate and proximate counterpoints to published assertions. This game is far too easy to play with e-mail or Internet claims that, say, Barack Obama is a descendent of Idi Amin or that John McCain was brainwashed into a Manchurian candidate by the North Vietnamese. It’s much more fun with smarter but flawed arguments.

Take, for example, “Mr. Darcy comes courting,” Maureen Dowd’s op-ed column in the August 3rd New York Times. Dowd, a clever and often insightful writer, seems to suggest that Barack Obama is now Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pride and Prejudice– um, or Othello– or somebody June Cleaver ain't happy with.

Let me parse seven of Dowd’s 12 paragraphs; my counterpunches are bracketed and italicized.

Too lanky for American women?

“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 [which would seem to suggest that Chozick can’t identify an individual with zero body fat. To be sure, this is an oddly murky area. By certain government measures of “obesity,” which idiotically don’t take into account muscle mass, Terrell Owens is borderline obese]. ‘[Obama] needs to put some meat on his bones,’ said Diana Koenig, a 42-year-old Texas housewife. Another Clinton voter sniffed on a Yahoo message board: ‘I won’t vote for any beanpole guy.’

“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.’ [Stop there. Dowd seems to assume that women who decide to vote for candidates depending on whether or not they belong to Weight Watchers— people who won’t vote for “any beanpole guy”— have actually read Austen and understand terms like “mien.”]

Obama’s achievements vs. Darcy’s

“ ‘…[Darcy] 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.’ [Right. Obama certainly can’t be pleased with being the first African-American who will be nominated by a major party for president.]

“The master of Pemberley ‘had yet to learn to be laught at,’ and this sometimes caused ‘a deeper shade of hauteur’ to ‘overspread his features.’ The New Hampshire debate incident in which Obama condescendingly said, ‘You’re likable enough, Hillary,’ was reminiscent of that early scene in Pride and Prejudice when Darcy coldly refuses to dance with Elizabeth Bennet, noting, ‘She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me.’ [If Ronald Reagan had told Hillary she was likable, female hearts would have melted and he would have been called "brilliant."]

That note in the Western Wall

“Indeed, when Obama left a prayer to the Lord at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, a note that was snatched out and published, part of his plea was to ‘help me guard against pride.’ [Well, we certainly wouldn't want to give him any points here for recognizing a supposed character flaw, would we? Fat is OK, but pride isn’t. When Obama guts McCain in the debates, will he be resented as a smarty-pants?]

“If Obama is Mr. Darcy, with ‘his pride, his abominable pride,’ then America is Elizabeth Bennet, spirited, playful, democratic, financially strained, and caught up in certain prejudices. (McCain must be cast as Wickham, the rival for Elizabeth’s affections, the engaging military scamp who casts false aspersions on Darcy’s character.)

“In this political version of Pride and Prejudice, the prejudice is racial, with only 31% of white voters telling the New York Times in a survey that they had a favorable opinion of Obama, compared with 83% of blacks. And the prejudice is visceral: many Americans, especially blue collar, still feel uneasy about the Senate’s exotic shooting star, and he is surrounded by a miasma of ill-founded and mistaken premises. [Principal among them, apparently, that an African-American can be president.]

“So the novelistic tension of the 2008 race is this: Can Obama overcome his pride and Hyde Park hauteur and win America over?”

What analogies don’t prove

Now, it may well be that Dowd has subtly created the written equivalent of that recent, famous New Yorker cover cartoon parodying right-wing fantasies about Obama and his wife. Perhaps she’s slyly advancing the notion that those white women or blue-collar men who supported Hillary Clinton but won’t support Obama are, in fact, racist. But I wonder.

Students of logic are correctly taught that argument by analogy fails to prove one's point, nor does it even create a high level of confidence in the point. Perhaps unintentionally, Dowd has provided Obama’s critics with a clever new name to call the senator from Illinois: Black Darcy.



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