Maureen Dowd on Hillary: Not Angry Enough

Here's a few key paragraphs from Dowd's column today: Who's Hormonal? Hillary or Dick? The last paragraph is absolutely dead on: not only is Hilary not angry enough, no credible Democrat is angry enough.

The Democrats were once a party of righteous anger, with populist instincts, but over the past 30 years the Republicans have managed to portay themselves as the party of heroic masculine power, and the Democrats as whining and ineffectual women. Here's Dowd:

The Republicans succeed because they keep it simple, ruthless and mythic.
...(snip)

Now, in the distaff version of Swift-boating, they are casting Hillary Clinton as an Angry Woman, a she-monster melding images of Medea, the Furies, harpies, a knife-wielding Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction" and a snarling Scarlett Johansson in "Match Point." ...(snip)
...(snip)

The hit on Hillary may seem crude and transparent. But in the void created by dormant Democrats, crouching in what Barack Obama calls "a reactive posture," crude and transparent ploys work for the Republicans. Just look at how far the Bushies' sulfurous scaremongering on terror, and cynical linkage of Saddam and Osama, have gotten them.
...(snip)

The G.O.P. honcho Ken Mehlman kicked off the misogynistic attack on George Stephanopoulos's Sunday show. "I don't think the American people, if you look historically, elect angry candidates," he said. Referring to Hillary's recent taunts about Republicans, he added, "Whether it's the comments about the plantation or the worst administration in history, Hillary Clinton seems to have a lot of anger."
...(snip)

Hillary's problem isn't that she's angry. It's that she's not angry enough. From Iraq to Katrina and the assault on the Constitution, from Schiavo to Alito and N.S.A. snooping to Congressional corruption, Hillary has failed to lead in voicing outrage. She's been too busy triangulating and calculating to be good at articulating.

As I said in my January 7, 2006 post, in the right wing's two-tier marketing strategy:

Strong, heartful, heavily-backboned cowboy hero that he is [portrayed to be], [Bush] has sworn himself to protect the American people from near certain death at the hands of terrorists and their weak misguided liberal friends who would insist on rights even for killers.

As usual, the populist message is couched in black and white terms of good vs. evil (strong male republican leadership founded on Good principles which will defend and protect the body from evil versus the weak female democratic non-leadership founded on Evil unwilling to defend the body of the people against Evil).

And it looks like Bush PR Theater and Lie Factory is getting away with it yet again...