Maureen Dowd is the canary in the liberal coal mine. If she begins to gasp for air, you know there is an impending shortage of political oxygen for the Democrats, and specifically for the media’s favorite candidate. In Sunday’s column, she (like a nervous poker player) drops her game face now and then to reveal that, beneath her bubbling and enduring contempt for Republicans and the Clintons, there lurks the realization that the liberal media’s new knight in shining armor is not so shining. She allows that Obama’ s tossing his “typical white person” Grandma under the bus was a bad idea:

Pressed about race on a Philly radio sports show, where he wanted to talk basketball, he called his grandmother “a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, well there’s a reaction that’s in our experiences that won’t go away and can sometimes come out in the wrong way.” Obama might be right, but he should stay away from the phrase “typical white person” because typically white people don’t like to be reminded of their prejudices. It also undermines Obama’s feel-good appeal in which whites are allowed to transcend race because the candidate himself has transcended race.

So even if Dowd cannot quite admit the intellectual and moral shortcomings of a man who equates the woman who raised him with a hate-mongering preacher, she nevertheless allows that it was politically clumsy of him to bring it up. Well, that’s something.

Then she tip-toes up to an equally troubling issue for Obama:

Even swaddled in flags, Obama is vulnerable on the issue of patriotism. He’s right that you don’t have to wear a flag pin to be patriotic, and that Republicans have coarsely exploited patriotism for ideological ends while failing to do truly patriotic things, like giving our troops the right armor and the proper care at Walter Reed. But Republicans are salivating over Reverend Wright’s “God damn America” imprecation and his post-9/11 “America’s chickens coming home to roost” crack, combined with Michelle Obama’s aggrieved line about belatedly feeling really proud of her country.

While Dowd cannot resist a cheap dig at Republicans (or, apparently, distinguish between administrative ineptitude and lack of patriotism), she gets it, somehow: Obama has a patriotism problem, which will  only become worse in the general election. (There is a reason why John McCain continues to remind voters of his biography.)

So if the doyenne of Obama’s media fan club can figure all this out, I’d imagine that  voters and a few hundred superdelegates (who may actually talk to and understand the views of people outside of Manhattan) can too. Whether they have the time and the will to do something about it remains to be seen.