My president went to Latin America, and all I got was this lousy figure of speech

Gaeta. From the Italian blog "La Solitudine Verticale—'Stay hungry, stay foolish'"

Dowd apparently got to travel with the entourage to Havana and Buenos Aires, and she must have had a fairly good time, because she's in a fairly benign mood toward Obama, and lays off the presidential candidates altogether, and doesn't have a truly harsh word for anybody but George W. Bush—even Raúl Castro comes off more as cute—and I don't feel like fisking through the whole thing, because what for, but I was very startled for literary reasons by her opening:

WASHINGTON — BARACK OBAMA is tangoing into history, and there’s something perfect about that.

The tango has been described as vertical solitude. And this president is all about vertical solitude.

Really? It doesn't take two? And where did you pick up this cliché-destroying observation?

Maybe from Maureen Dowd, 2007, describing John Kerry in her "book" or perhaps listicle collection Bushworld?

No, that's just a reprint of her March 7 2004 column. The quotation marks seem to indicate she got it from somewhere but Maureen Dowd is, as far as Dr. Google and I can determine, the only person who has ever called tango the dance of vertical solitude, as she has done at least twice in print, or three times, depending how you count. And inevitably one finds oneself wondering why anybody would call tango the dance of vertical solitude even once, let alone twice, given that (a) it isn't, it really does take two, and (b) wtf could it possibly mean?

We did find a clue, perhaps, in the "vertical solitude" of Jesus as described by René Barbier in the Journal des Chercheurs, January 2011?

The Gospels furnish us with two examples of these moments of fragility. Jesus makes two entrances into the double solitude that I call horizontal and vertical solitude. He witnesses horizontal solitude with regard to others, his dearest disciples, on the moutainside of Gethsemane, when he asks them to keep the vigil with him but they fall asleep. He encounters vertical solitude when he cries out, dying on the Cross, to his Father, "Why hast thou forsaken me?" This double solitude, horizontal and vertical, is an ontological test known to the wise man as he makes his journey to the realm beyond sense and nonsense. [my translation]

Well, beyond sense at least.
 
And of course following Professor Barbier's interesting conception we might posit tango solitude as the third phase, when Mary Magdalen comes on Sunday (John 20:17) and finds the tomb emptied, and the dead and resurrected Jesus suddenly appears, but asks her not to touch him: Noli me tangere (the infinitive of Latin tangō "I touch"), with what Maureen Dowd would no doubt call the catlike aloofness that Jesus shares with Obama, John Kerry, and Michael Dukakis, or his

anthropological detachment — the failure to viscerally connect and vigorously persuade, the lip-curling at needy lawmakers, jittery Americans or anyone else who does not see things as he does...

Come to think of it, I believe the tango has been described as "anthropological detachment" (kidding).

So the whole thing is somehow her insanely densely allusive Easter message?

Soledad Vertical. Photo by Mira Destoni, Barcelona, January 2011.

Or is there something tango-related in The Vertical Solitude: Management in the Public Sector by David Zussman and Jak Jabes, Renouf Publishing 1990, Amazon price starting at $473.01? Something I won't be finding out any time soon.