As soon as I saw the name of Maureen Dowd’s column today, I howled in agreement. Oh, YES. It’s titled “All About Eve.” I didn’t even need to read further to understand what she was saying.
The story is essentially this: an ambitious actress cozies up to a fading star with the ultimate goal of replacing her. She makes friends quickly but stabs them all in the back, using their wounded bodies as rungs on the ladder to her personal success.
Wow. Is that an apt description of how I view Hillary Clinton. I read the column, and it did not disappoint.
Maureen gets it:
on the Democratic side, it is, as The Times’s Obama reporter Jeff Zeleny has written, a “hushed worry.” Barack Obama has fused two of the most powerful narratives in American history — those of Martin Luther King Jr. and Camelot — and that makes him both magical and vulnerable.
He was only 6 years old in the spring of 1968, when Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. But the unspoken fear that he is in some danger as their spiritual heir hovers over his race. He got a Secret Service cordon last May, the earliest a candidate has ever been given it.
Remember the uproar in Texas when we found the police were not screening the crowd? Normally we wouldn’t even concern ourselves with such things. But he is vulnerable, and we know this. I believe it’s not because he’s black, or liberal. I believe it’s because he truly wants to end the Iraq war. I believe strongly that’s one of the key reasons Martin Luther King and both Kennedys were killed. They opposed the empire builders, as does Obama.
On many levels, I feel Obama is a much more tepid version of those great heroes. But some part of him aspires to walk in his shoes, and for that, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. He at least knows enough TO aspire to that tradition.
Maureen also sums up what I feel is the best thing to come from Hillary’s awful comment:
Obama now has the perfect excuse not to pick Hillary as his running mate. She has been too unseemly in her desire to be on the scene if he trips, or gets hit with a devastating story.
In the movie All About Eve, Eve eventually gets her comeuppance. Hillary is finally getting hers, given the media coverage of her comment all over the channels today.
