Obama "had yet to learn to be laught at" and sometimes "a deeper shade of hauteur... overspread his features."

Maureen Dowd thinks Jane Austen's description of Mr. Darcy apply well to Barack Obama:

If Obama is Mr. Darcy, with “his pride, his abominable pride,” then America is Elizabeth Bennet, spirited, playful, democratic, financially strained, and caught up in certain prejudices....

In this political version of “Pride and Prejudice,” the prejudice is racial...

So the novelistic tension of the 2008 race is this: Can Obama overcome his pride and Hyde Park hauteur and win America over?

Can America overcome its prejudice to elect the first black president? And can it move past its biases to figure out if Obama’s supposed conceit is really just the protective shield and defense mechanism of someone who grew up half white and half black, a perpetual outsider whose father deserted him and whose mother, while loving, sometimes did so as well?

Can Miss Bennet teach Mr. Darcy to let down his guard, be more sportive, and laugh at himself?

If we're going to get all English proffy, heavy on the race-and-gender talk, shouldn't we critique Dowd for portraying the black man's pursuit of political office as a sexual exploit?

***

I like this little statement at the end of Dowd's column:

Frank Rich is off today.

Isn't Frank Rich always off?