Maureen Dowd has an unusually readable column on the Op-Ed page of today’s New York Times. That’s possibly because, as she claims in the introductory paragraph, she didn’t write it. The conversation she imagines between Barack Obama and (fictional, sadly) President Josiah Bartlet of Aaron Sorkin’s lamentably term-limited NBC drama The West Wing contains some moments that make me believe Sorkin actually contributed his voice to the piece. It also contains this little exhortation which, in case you haven’t or don’t plan to read the column, I’ll quote for you here.

And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word “patriot” back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic…And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!

First of all, any West Wing fan who can’t hear Martin Sheen bellowing that at 9:19 p.m. on the east coast isn’t trying hard enough. And second of all, that same West Wing fan will likely be alert to a whole host of illusions that the Dowd-Sorkin piece alludes to humorously, and fails to resolve.

To wit: can Barack Obama’s “elitism” be turned to his advantage? Will the electorate be disabused of the notion that John McCain would “rather win a war than an election?” Can this all be done by telling the candidate to buck up and buckle down and grow a pair? Wouldn’t it help if Obama, like Bartlet, were a Nobel Prize-winning economist?

I’ll be thinking about this column this week. I just wanted to get it out there, since it made me laugh…and then twist a lot of frowny eyebrow muscles for a while.