Maureen Dowd on "The Obama Brand": Who's Sari Now?

[King 5.45]

Usually, Maureen Dowd turns my stomach so much that I even have a hard time pointing a shaking finger at what she's done this time, as I cradle my nauseous-green face in the other hand.

Nonetheless, the sense of disgust and abandonment, on the part of the political spectrum that fairly defines me by being what I am pretty much not, or vice versa, is interesting, for lack of a word that less smacks of schadenfreude.

Money ¶s:

Yet Washington has always been a town full of poseurs, arrivistes, fame-seekers, cheaters and camera hogs.

Lots of people here are trying to crash the party, wangle an invite to the right thing, work the angles and milk their connections to better insinuate their way into the inner circle.

Barack Obama is the ultimate party crasher. He crashed Hillary’s high-hat party in 2008 and he crashed the snooty age-old Washington party of privileged white guys with a monopoly on power

...

Desirée Rogers, who has also been asked to testify Thursday, has been cruising for a bruising since telling The Wall Street Journal in April: “We have the best brand on Earth: the Obama brand. Our possibilities are endless.” She wanted to pose for The Journal in an Oscar de la Renta gown in the first lady’s garden, but the press secretary, Robert Gibbs, vetoed that.

The statuesque social secretary brandishing a Harvard M.B.A. and animal-print designer shoes is not any mere party planner. The old friend of the first couple from Chicago has the exalted and uncommon title of social secretary and special assistant to the president.

Instead of standing outside with a clipboard, eyeballing guests as Anne Hathaway did in “The Devil Wears Prada,” Desirée was a guest at the dinner, the center of her own table of guests, just like the president and first lady.

Are we a few more social gaffes from the moment in which the limousine liberals gather together like a Grecian chorus and curse Barry, Michele, and their mobocratic functionaries for their hubris and naïveté? Are we about ready to smack them with a riding crop and shout "parvenus" in their general direction?

For those of you with online NYT accounts: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/02/op...gewanted=print