Op-Ed Column: Dowd Targets Obama for Another Attack

Just over two weeks ago, Maureen Dowd took an axe to presidential candidate Barack Obama in a catty, vapid op-ed entitled “Obama, Legally Blonde.” In her latest column, Dowd returns to her new favorite target, disseminating further received notions and negative talking points for all takers – the Hillary camp, fellow mainstream pundits, right-wing radio hosts, future Swift-Boaters, indiscriminating readers. Anyone who’ll listen now that Dame Dowd has spoken. A one-on-one interview in Obama’s Senate office inspired this cutesy, knife-twisting episode.   

She begins, "As I sit across from Barack Obama in his Senate office, I feel like Ingrid Bergman in 'The Bells of St. Mary’s,' when she plays a nun who teaches a schoolboy who’s being bullied how to box."

Dowd sets the stage with these first words, summing up her self-image and the power she wields (or wishes she did) over Obama. She’s the good nun and Obama’s her schoolboy. Yet unless Ingrid Bergman’s nun repeatedly cracked a ruler across that schoolboy’s knuckles without warrant, then Dowd's metaphor fizzles in fulfilling its intended meaning. Had she applied the same nun-schoolboy metaphor to indicate a mainstream pundit's power to unduly influence national debate, to unfairly lambaste a candidate before citizens have a chance to see where he or she stands on the issues, then it would've been apt.

"After David Geffen made critical comments about Hillary, she seized the chance to play Godzilla stomping on Obambi."

First, she infantilizes him with “schoolboy,” then she emasculates him with “Obambi.”

"If Hillary is in touch with her masculine side, Barry is in touch with his feminine side."

Dowd piles on the emasculation. (How long before Ann Coulter calls Obama a "faggot”? And other conservatives once again cheer.) Adding insult to injury, Dowd disparagingly refers to him as "Barry," his anglicized first name by which he was known to his classmates as a youth in Hawaii. She not only calls his manhood into question but also his blackness. In her prior Obama column, she referred to his "smooth-jazz facade," helping to fuel the mainstream media's blatantly racist "Is He Black Enough?" storyline.

"He told The Times’s Jeff Zeleny that he had not been engaged in the vituperative exchange because he was traveling on a red-eye flight, getting a haircut and taking his daughters to school."

More emasculation: Obama as the motherly metrosexual. I guess real men don't take their daughters to school or get haircuts. The bottom line here is that Dowd and her fellow poison pens in the media didn't get a juicy enough quote from Obama's camp, preferably from Obama himself. He didn't play their game. He didn't allow himself to be drawn willy-nilly into Hillary's hands. And so Dowd and her colleagues would make him pay by painting the received notion that this means he's weak, he's got a glass jaw; it couldn't possibly mean he might genuinely want to wage a different kind of campaign. Thus, quite the opposite of Dowd's narrative, maybe Obama feels he's strong enough, substantive enough, even likeable enough, to withstand both vapid potshots from the Hillary machine and criticisms from those members of the media who aim to penalize him for not jumping at the bait.

"Channeling Ingrid, I press on and say: 'I know you want to run a high-minded campaign, but do you worry that you might be putting yourself on a pedestal too much? Because people also want to see you mix it up a little. That’s how they judge how you’d be with Putin.'"

So diving into the trough with Hillary is supposed to make him appear presidential? More like a statesman? “That’s how they judge how you’d be with Putin.” Really? Who exactly are the “they” here? They couldn't be your colleagues in the mainstream media who failed to report that they had every reason to believe George W. Bush wasn't fit to run a lemonade stand, let alone the most powerful nation in the world, right?

No, I suppose Dowd means the public. It behooves pundits who feed on these petty political skirmishes to peddle the received notion that just how down and dirty a politician is willing to sink defines his or her ability to lead. (Which is not to be confused with an utter abdication of political common sense, as evidenced by the Kerry campaign's now infamous failure to adequately respond to Swift Boat accusations.)

Can Obama remain above the fray in American politics? One would assume that's an impossible task in the entrenched media climate, where issues always play second, third or even seventh or eighth fiddle to mudslinging. Nor should he be expected to do so just because he is suggesting there must be a better way to conduct a political campaign. But Obama can, and should, and does appear to aim to make the national political debate more worthy of the seriousness of what we as a nation and member of the world community face - the war in Iraq, extreme poverty, a spiraling healthcare crisis, the worldwide encroachment of religious extremism (which includes all religions) on democratic societies, rampant global warming, and genocide in Darfur spilling into neighboring countries. Just to name a few of our monumental challenges in this country and around the world.

Maybe it's idealistic, but a little idealism is always necessary to effect fundamental positive change. Contextually, it's also the only way - in addition to such measures as true campaign finance reform - to ensure we are choosing from the best candidates instead of our usual option: the lesser of two evils. The mainstream focus on personalities over issues is exactly what leaves us with candidates like the junior Bush from Texas. Also predictable, however, is that the gatekeepers pillory any politician who attempts to raise the level of debate. What would all those establishment pundits write and talk about if their topics always had to have a basis in substantive issues?

As Newsweek columnist and MSNBC commentator Howard Fineman wrote recently, "Presidential elections are high school writ large..." Yes, sadly, they are in this country. But Fineman, Dowd and other mainstream pundits fail to acknowledge their complicity in creating these shallow high school narratives. It is their job to ask better questions, their job to stick to the facts, their job to provide realistic, substantive and honest portraits of the candidates from which our citizens must choose. So if presidential elections are high school writ large, who do you think are the screenwriters, directors and producers of these amateurish productions?

Then comes Dowd's second questioning of Obama's blackness, particularly unseemly given the subject matter:

"When the Tiger Woods of politics goes to a civil rights commemoration in Selma, Ala., this weekend — just as the story breaks that his white ancestors had slaves — he will compete for attention with Hillary and the man billed as the first black president."

How clever. How cheeky. Tiger is of mixed race and so is Obama. He's successful, good-looking and likeable, too. Can you imagine if "respected" members of the press had referred to Joe Lieberman when was running for president as the Shecky Green of politics? Or George W. Bush as the John Bonham of Republican nominees? Does Dowd plan on designating Mitt Romney the Donny Osmond of conservatives? Or Hillary the Tammy Wynette of centrist Democrats (actually, she may have already done that)?

And, of course, there's the allusion to the story about Obama's white ancestors having had slaves - the ultimate 'gotcha' in the "Is He Black Enough?" campaign.

Maureen Dowd is familiar with the bubble effect. She's written about it skillfully in reference to the latter-day Bush's presidency. She also wrote well on the topic of Judy Miller (her former colleague at The Times) and her editors' inclination to let her "run amok" with her false WMD stories. Maybe a little time off would do Dowd some good. Maybe gaining greater perspective from hearing voices in America other than her own and those in her echo chamber, along with additional input from her editors, would help Dowd keep her sights on targets who deserve her knives now rather than on targets who may, or may not, deserve them in the future.

Comments

[MediaBloodhound]

Dowd Targets Obama for Another Attack

[scuttle]

"....Shecky Green of politics..." LOL!!!

Once again, I sent your Dowd op-ed to the person who most needs to read it: Maureen herself.

[Stanley Kirshenbaum]

How is nobody else talkin' about Dowd's treatment of Obama?? And I'm not defending him 'cause I'm some big Obama supporter. I don't know enough about him. But that's the point, isn't it? Shouldn't we get a chance to decide too? Dowd's portraits of Obama are mean-spirited, overly self-referential abstracts that have more to do with her than him. You also bring up a good point which I wouldn't normally consider, but I really do wonder if old warhorse columnists like Dowd even get more than a proofreader's eyes on her pre-printed drafts. You read her two Obama articles and it does make you wonder.