re: #21 darthstar

She’s using it dismissively. She’d might as well call him “boy”. It’s borderline bigotry, really.

Now pro ball players (Barry Zito, Barry Bonds) get called ‘Barry’ all the time because they’re athletes and it’s usually pronounced, “BEH-REE!” But Dowd’s basically saying the boy in the White House is in over his head…about everything.

I don’t think she means it like ‘boy’, since she isn’t a conscious racist. But she is trying to be dismissive, snarky, and hostile and she really shouldn’t be any of those three to Barack Obama.

The irony here is that had Mitt Romney been elected and this scandal broken out afterwards, Dowd would not be dismissive. She’d still be hostile, but she’d see Romney as an ‘evil, all-knowing corporate chieftain’, rather than being in over his head. But that might point to a species of unconscious racism, might it not?