When Maureen Dowd is good, she’s very good. But when she’s bad, she’s not always better.
Dowd has written some brilliant columns over the years. When she’s on, she can be hilarious, incisive, morally outraged and lyrical all in the same article, often in the same sentence. But when she falters, it's almost invariably because of one recurring weakness: an unchecked cattiness that causes her to stray from substance and overly project onto her subjects. Further compounding the matter, when this does happen she's given to overstating her observations as if to make up for the fact that they’re built less upon issues or facts than a kind of high school pettiness.
In today’s column, “Obama, Legally Blonde?”, Dowd begins with a projection: “Barack Obama looked as if he needed a smoke and he needed it bad.” And then follows it up with a barrage of them:
He was a tad testy. Traipsing around desolate stretches of snowy – and extremely white – Iowa to go into living rooms and high school gyms and take questions like "Are you willing to stand up for independent family farmers?" makes me want to sneak out for a drag, too, and I don’t even smoke.
In addition to ascribing more feelings to Obama, what else could she be implying from “Traipsing around desolate stretches of snowy – and extremely white – Iowa...” other than part of the reason Obama was “a tad testy” was a result of being in a predominantly white area of the country? If intended, it’s a particularly unseemly and irresponsible projection on Dowd’s part; if unintended, a most unfortunate editorial oversight.
“I’ve been chewing Nicorette all day long," he told reporters at a press conference in Ames on Sunday, where he was getting irritated at suggestions that he lacked substance and at the specter of his vanishing privacy.
The Howard Dean-ing of Obama continues, now literally taking a page from Dean’s prior critics in the mainstream press. Look out: every now and then he’s not ready with a smile and curtsying profusely for his media courtiers.
The Illinois senator didn’t have on an implacable mask of amiability, as Hillary did in Iowa. He didn’t look happily in his element, like Bill Clinton.
Quick! Someone tell Obama that he has to be less genuine. Quick! Before the masses take to a politician who might not be full of it 24/7.
Beyond his smooth-jazz façade, the reassuring baritone and that ensorcelling smile, the 45-year-old had moments of looking conflicted.
Uh-oh. More moments devoid of soulless calculation (if he indeed was “conflicted” to begin with). Ponder such crack observations for his alleged unease:
In the lobby of the AmericInn in Iowa Falls on Saturday night, he seemed a bit dazed by his baptism into the big-time. He was left munching trail mix all day while, he said, "the press got fed before me."
Everything was a revelation for him: The advance team acronym RON, for Rest Overnight. Women squealing. "I saw a hat," he noted with a grin, "that said, ‘Obama, clean and articulate.'"
How many trivial slights and pejorative descriptions can Dowd pack into this article?
Senator Obama’s body language was loose — and he’s so slender his wedding band looked as if it was slipping off — but there was a wariness in his dark eyes.
Yes, a “wariness in his dark eyes.”
He is backed up by a strong, smart wife and a professional campaign team, but he doesn’t have a do-whatever-it-takes family firm with contract killers and debt collectors, like Bush Inc. and Clinton Inc.”
Well, hallelujah! Tell me how that's not a positive thing? I don’t want my president to have a “family firm with contract killers and debt collectors,” thank you. Just like I don't want my presidential candidate's most memorable quote thus far to be "I'm in it to win it."
He was eloquent, if not as inspiring as his advance billing had prepared audiences to expect. He made his first Swift-boat-able slip when he had to apologize for talking about soldiers’ lives “wasted” in Iraq. He sounded self-consciously pristine at times, as if he was too refined for the muck of politics. That’s not how you beat anybody but Alan Keyes.
In this one paragraph, Dowd slags his undeniable gift as an electrifying speaker (though the best she can muster is say he wasn't quite as electrifying as advertised), tosses raw meat to the Swift Boat crowd (as if they'll need it) and paints the junior senator from Illinois as an elitist (i.e., paging Al Gore).
To make sure you didn't miss Obama's holier-than-thou 'tude, Dowd notes:
After talking to high school journalists, he took a sniffy shot at the loutish reporters who were merely whispering where’s the beef: “Take some notes, guys, that’s how it’s done.”
No fewer than three times last week, Mr. Obama got indignant about the beach-babe attention given to a shot of him in the Hawaiian surf.
Using the dreaded third person that some candidates slip into, he told the press that one of their favorite narratives boiled down to “Obama has pretty good style, he can deliver a pretty good speech, but he seems to prioritize rhetoric over substance.” After an ode to his own specificity, he tut-tutted, “You’ve been reporting on how I look in a swimsuit.”
"He took a sniffy shot"; "Mr. Obama got indignant"; "Using the dreaded third person that some candidates slip into" (no, Maureen: he's using their words, not his; he's not speaking of himself); "After an ode to his own specificity, he tut-tutted."
Maureen Dowd does not like Barack Obama. And so, dear reader, she's going to do her damnedest to convince you not to like him either.
He poses for the cover of Men’s Vogue and then gets huffy when people don’t treat him as Hannah Arendt.
Are we really going to start grading the candidates based on which media outlets they show up in or on? Besides, Dowd is creative. If it weren't Men's Vogue, she'd be knocking him for posing in another magazine or turning up on another radio program or TV show: Rolling Stone (insert marijuana and coke jokes), Air America (is he the next Mondale?), The Economist (see prior elitist remarks), The Colbert Report (more lightweight fodder), and on and on. It's not merely pointless. It's so bloody random as well. She's accusing Obama of being a lightweight for showing up on the cover of a particular magazine, yet she fails to see how meaningless - how very lightweight - it is worth noting.
For some of us, it’s hard to fathom being upset at getting accused of looking great in a bathing suit. But his friends say it played into this Harvard grad’s fear of being seen as “a dumb blond.” He has been known to privately mock “pretty boys” (read John Edwards, the Breck Girl of 2004).
Well, OK, this has degenerated into nonsense now. Get a load of this guy, all you regular Joes and Janes out there: he's complaining about being good-looking. Meanwhile, she knows it's not about that. It's a cheap shot. Also, which "friends" of Obama's would be spilling to Dowd his fear of a "dumb blond" label? And for good measure, Dowd manages to knock Edwards in the process for being "the Breck Girl of 2004." (That former Breck Girl now happens to be only one of the three leading Democratic candidates to call for an immediate withdraw from Iraq. There's not one word in this column as to Obama's position on the war, or, for that matter, on any of his positions.)
He doesn’t lack confidence, but he’s so hung up on being seen as thoughtful that he sometimes comes across as too emotionally detached and cerebral with crowds yearning for an electric, visceral connection. J.F.K. mixed cool with fire.
Does this sound even remotely like the Barack Obama we have all seen? "J.F.K. mixed cool with fire"? What does that even mean? Maureen, please stop lunching with Tom Friedman. I'm afraid his forced metaphors might be rubbing off on you. Though I pray not.
For a man who couldn’t wait to inject himself into the national arena, and who has spent so much time writing books about himself, the senator is oddly put off by press inquisitiveness.
They all write books about themselves. That's what presidential candidates do these days, and have done for quite some time now. This is but another intellectually dishonest attack, intended to pile on to her portrait of arrogance. That, of course, is sandwiched between the first and third attack in the sentence: too much ambition and a surly secretive quality, respectively.
When The Times’s Jeff Zeleny asked him on his plane whether he’d had a heater in his podium during his announcement speech in subzero Springfield, Mr. Obama hesitated. He shot Jeff a look that said, “Are you from People magazine?” before conceding that, unlike Abe Lincoln, he’d had a heater.
Finally, a projection from Dowd that seems dead-on. It does sound like a question posed by a People magazine reporter. And, go figure, maybe Obama expected something a little more substantive. A question befitting a serious journalist from a serious newspaper. I hope that's what Obama was thinking. It's the same thing many of us have been saying and thinking for years now: Hey, why don't you guys do your job?
Appalled by the Bush administration's criminal negligence and complete disregard for the rule of law and human suffering, Dowd, rightly, has skewered and, at times, hammered this president and his henchmen. But in writing a column that so desperately seeks to highlight potentially niggling flaws of a potentially great leader, she only increases the chances that we'll end up with another presidential lightweight. Or worse.
Dowd ends her column with this parting shot: "Take some notes, senator, that’s how it’s done."
With all due respect, Maureen, I suggest you do the same.
Dowd Does Hatchet Job on Obama
Posted by: MediaBloodhound | February 15, 2007 at 11:28 AM
I e-mailed the link and text of your post to the one person above all who needs to read it: Maureen. ([email protected])
BTW: When I read this column before you posted, I couldn't help but wonder
what the hell the following means:
".....his smooth-jazz facade..."
Is that a Bidenesque inspired comment meaning because Obama is part white, he's more Kenny G than John Coltrane?
Posted by: scuttle | February 15, 2007 at 11:55 AM
Nice Mae West reference! I heartily approve.
Posted by: Chicken Nuggets | February 15, 2007 at 03:08 PM
Scuttle, I meant to note that as well. Same thing I thought. I think it's a notch just below the extremely white Iowa comment in offensiveness.
Chick Nuggets, Mae West reference...??
Posted by: MediaBloodhound | February 15, 2007 at 04:39 PM
Not knowing what the Mae West reference was will haunt me in perpetuity...
Posted by: MediaBloodhound | February 22, 2007 at 08:29 PM