Looks Like the Blogosphere Had Some Influence on Maureen Dowd

I usually don't read Maureen Dowd (if I want funny, I'll go here), but my eyes wandered and I ended up reading today's column. Either all of the shouting from the bloggysphere did some good, or else she's been replaced with a pod person. About the charge of 'elitism' leveled at Obama by Karl Rove, Dowd writes:

Unlike W., Obama doesn't have a chip on his shoulder and he doesn't make a lot of snarky remarks. He tries to stay on a positive keel and see things from the other person's point of view.

He's not Richie Rich, saved time and again by Daddy's influence and Daddy's friends, the one who got waved into Yale and Harvard and cushy business deals, who drank too much and snickered at the intellectuals and gave them snide nicknames.

Obama is the outsider who never really knew his dad and who grew up in modest circumstances, the kid who had to work hard to charm whites and build a life with blacks and step up to the smarty-pants set.

Then she actually sounds like a Dirty Fucking Liberal Hippie Commie Islamofacist blogger:

Conservatives love playing this little game, acting as if the "elite" Democratic candidates are not in touch with people like themselves, even though the guys doing the attacking -- like Rove, Limbaugh, O'Reilly and Hannity -- are wealthy and cosseted.

Haven't we had enough of this hypocritical comedy of people in the elite disowning their social status for political purposes? The Bushes had to move all the way to Texas from Greenwich to make their blue blood appear more red....

Rove's mythmaking about Obama won't fly. If he means that Obama has brains, what's wrong with that? If he means that Obama is successful, what's wrong with that? If he means that Obama has education and intellectual sophistication, what's wrong with that?

Many of Obama's traits are the traits that people in the population aspire to

.

Oh my. I'm going with the pod person hypothesis.

Update: Bob Somerby thinks similar thing, although he lays more credit at the feet of the Times' public editor, Clark Hoyt.