Maureen Dowd Would Really Like to Know Why President Obama Isn’t More Like Scandal’s Olivia Pope

This is the greatest piece of Scandal fanfiction to date.

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Who DOESN'T want to be like Olivia Pope?

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is just like us: hopelessly addicted to the Shonda Rimes show Scandal, which revolves around a crisis management rep named Olivia Pope (played by Kerry Washington) who also happens to be sleeping with the President.

Unlike us, however, Dowd has used her national platform to pen some glorious Scandal fan fiction, the entirety of which boils down to one very important question: why isn’t President Obama, a real person, more like Olivia Pope, someone who does not actually exist?

Exhausted by cable news blowhards, Dowd found herself ensnared in Scandal‘s soap opera-like web while surfing channels one evening. Seeing Pope use top-secret emergency codes to call a meeting in a secure bunker with the President and his wife got Dowd thinking:

Why hadn’t President Obama used a pretext to lure John Boehner, Ted Cruz and Harry Reid to the White House, locked them in a bunker and kept them there until they hammered out a deal to save America’s reputation?

Indeed, why doesn’t the President of the United States behave more like someone who is a fictional character on a television show written by the creator of Grey’s Anatomy?

Finally, Dowd flat out says it: frankly, Olivia Pope is just way more badass than Obama:

Liv Pope is appealingly relentless and brass-knuckled compared to President Obama. Her mantras are, after all, “It’s handled,” and “I’m never out of options.”

To be fair, Olivia Pope is a gladiator, and maybe Obama is happy to be falling short of Kerry Washington in Dowd’s eyes if it puts the Spock chatter to rest for a column or two.