Maybe I used to know what mattered to Maureen Dowd on a substantive level, but that hasn’t been the case for a long time now. She seems to be someone whose values mainly align with the left end of the spectrum of American political thought, but she treats politics more like a spectator sport or maybe a movie to be reviewed than as something that could have consequential outcomes.
Speaking of outcomes, take a look at the result of her labors:
She has a curious fan club, don’t you think?
Of course, the Glenn Beck, Christopher Ruddy, Breitbart crew has nothing but contempt for Maureen Dowd and her employer. To them, she is just a useful idiot.
And they will, of course, find her latest column quite useful. It’s one more in a series of columns utilizing right-wing talking points as a way to savage Hillary Clinton. This particular piece also takes heavy advantage of Saturday Night Live caricatures.
I have already reported how things look from Sally Quinn’s dining room and wondered aloud why Beltway reporters are so much less amused by Hillary Clinton’s missing message than they were by Saddam Hussein’s missing weapons of mass destruction.
I have all the same criticisms of Maureen Dowd’s column this morning, but then we can add on to this the bizarre tendency of Dowd to interject a bloodless sexuality into virtually everything she writes.
President Obama is “feminized” somehow; we are not told how. In 2008, Hillary Clinton was too much as a Thatcheresque ball-buster, and now she’s too much as a doting grandmother “basking in estrogen as she emote[s] about the need for longer paid leave for new mothers.”
If I drill down and try to find the real nugget of criticism here, what I come up with is an idea that Hillary Clinton is too packaged. She’s listening to advisors who are telling her what to say, what subjects to focus on, where and how to travel, and how feminine or masculine she should be. As their advice changes, so does Clinton’s behavior and her image. The logical inference here is that Clinton should be less packaged and more authentic.
This could be decent advice. I know many people tried in vain to get Al Gore to follow this kind of advice, but the premise there was that Al Gore was privately much funnier and likable than he was on the campaign trail. I guess some people say the same about Clinton, but that doesn’t seem to be Dowd’s point. Ironically, she isn’t arguing for less packaging, but for packaging that is better calibrated.
…isn’t there a more authentic way for Hillary to campaign as a woman — something between an overdose of testosterone and an overdose of estrogen, something between Macho Man and Humble Granny?
And she thinks that she’s found the correct balance:
As she hits the trail again, Hillary is a blur of competing images, a paean to the calibrated, artful and generic, a low-key lady who doesn’t stand for anything except low-keyness. She has seen, over and over, that overcorrecting can be self-defeating for her and parlous to the nation, but she keeps doing it.
Let’s hope that the hokey Chipotle Granny will give way to the cool Tumblr Chick in time to teach her Republican rivals — who are coming after her with every condescending, misogynist, distorted thing they’ve got — that bitch is still the new black.
Unfortunately, this still doesn’t quite clear things up. For one, Maureen Dowd just said outright that if Clinton doesn’t get this right it will be “parlous to the nation,” meaning that a failed Clinton campaign would be dangerous and put us all at risk. So, we are supposed to take this column (despite all appearances) as some kind of constructive advice. This is next to impossible to do.
And then there is that thing about “the cool Tumblr Chick” that is supposed to represent the ideal packaging for Hillary Clinton. What is that?
Tina Fey and Amy Poehler showed the way in 2008, deploring the sexism against Hillary and hailing her as the unapologetically tough chick. It was a precursor to her cool “Don’t mess with me” Tumblr meme, showing her with dark glasses serenely checking her BlackBerry on a military plane.
So, we’re talking about something like this:
See, that mix of cool engaged detachment strikes Dowd as the perfect balance, not too hen-pecky and not too doting. It projects just enough ass-kicker to give her the nuclear codes, but retains enough modern professional woman to avoid male fears of castration.
So, what this column amounts to in the end is a strange kind of endorsement of Clinton’s campaign which is supposed to be so critical to the well-being of the nation that it needs just the right kind of image. And Dowd is the woman to consult if we want to avoid disaster.
I do get tired of pointing this out, but Dowd gets paid quite a lot to produce this drivel. There are others who could do better.
“…interject a bloodless sexuality into virtually everything she writes.”
That’s an accurately turned phrase to describe Dowd, all right. Thanks for crystalizing one of the many bothersome aspects of her style.
I’m having a good Sunday; don’t want to read Maureen’s bullshit right now, so I’m not clicking the link. Got plenty of her latest contribution to Bullshit Mountain from your pull quotes.
She’ll be writing a variation of today’s column next month, anyway.
God willing, the next five years. I would say nine, but I hope Dowd is retired by then.
“Bloodless sexuality.” Nice.
What do you think it is that Dowd does that others could do better? Or did you just mean the column inches could be better used? Because what she does is take politics and turn it into mean-spirited celebrity-style gossip chat, ala Joan Rivers or Chelsea Handler. She’s pretty good at that.
I don’t agree she’s good at that. If she were, I’d be entertained by her tear-downs. I never am, at the rare times I read Dowd after being directed to one of her pieces. When she does her hatchet jobs on an ox I want gored, all I’m thinking is she’s using the same trivial methods she used last week, and will use next week, to cut up somebody who opposes the person she’s cutting now.
Dowd doesn’t care about governance at all, yet she wants desperately to influence the public’s choice about who we choose to govern. To me, that implies malevolent intent.
So, again, fuck Maureen Dowd. And the editors and management of the Times. Perhaps Maureen lacks self-awareness. Her editors should do their jobs and prevent the pages of the Times from being used in ways which are destructive to our nation.
I know, fantasy, right?
It might be done better, but I, like you, don’t enjoy the genre; and it’s significant that politics and policy not enter into it in order to maintain its purity; otherwise, we could point to molly ivins.
Channel Notorious RBG. There I wrote the column.
And yet she brings eyeballs without contributing very much, a neat trick if one can pull it off. It’s a living.
Hillary Clinton seems to be a very confused person. Even at her age she doesn’t seem to have found her balance. The perfect illustration is a comparison to Elizabeth Warren, who I see as mature. Hillary Clinton is still playing with being a teener. It has nothing to do with her being a woman. So many men are the same. Obama definitely has a tinge of it, though the horrible reality of being president and seeing the truth of the US has sobered him up.
Hillary Clinton seems to be a very confused person.
IMHO the problem is that her impulses (for most people informed by our earliest social and political experiences) are those of liberal Republicans during the 1950s and 1960s. She came to her feminism through a white, upper middle-class portal. Smart and well-educated women without STEM interests or talents that didn’t want to be consigned to using their education to become secretaries and teachers and hoped to marry well.
While white, upper middle-class women did predominate in the public dissemination of the feminist movement of the 1960s, it wasn’t the only strand. There were millions of poor/middle and working class women attending public colleges and that once exposed to feminist thought were on-board with it. But economic necessities (and the Vietnam War) were more integral to their feminism. They became the on-the-ground, everyday shock troops that interacted with women that weren’t privileged. The ones that informed working class women that feminism wasn’t about bra-burning but equal pay for equal work, personal control over own reproductive medical care, and equal rights under the law for all. All the same issues that drove the earlier progressive movement with the subsequent tech advantage of effective birth control and safe abortions.
For Hillary Clinton an anti-Vietnam War position was later layered on top of her feminism. (She supported Nixon in 1968 for goodness sakes.) As was consideration that Republican feminism may be constrained or limited. As her relationship with Bill Clinton began near this time in her life, it’s not clear how much his influence contributed to her changes. It’s important to note that Reagan signed a liberal abortion law in CA in 1967 and the ERA was signed by Nixon in 1972.
The last layer came in 1973 when Marian Wright Edelman hired her as a staff attorney for the Children’s Defense Fund. The Edelman-Clinton relationship continued for a couple of decades and was somewhat instrumental in Clinton obtaining assignments from the Carter administration.
Layers that aren’t fully integrated are more easily peeled back if expedient or politically opportune as they aren’t core principles. Thus, Clinton could retain the words of being concerned about poor women and children but throw them and the Edelman’s under the bus in 1976. Being a latecomer to an anti-Vietnam War position (combined with presidential aspirations and an attempt to neutralize continuing military opposition the Clintons), she didn’t hesitate to throw “peaceniks” under the bus in 2002.
She’s not so much confused as much as she attempts to be a drilled-down, cafeteria politician. If offered strawberry jello, rice pudding, or nothing, most of us would choose one. A drilled-down cafeteria person would need to know if the jello contained fruit and if so, what kind of fruit. And if it came with whipped cream. Does the rice pudding contain raisins and if so, regular or golden. Whip cream or cherry on top? Still unsure, asks which is most popular and goes with that.
What bothers me is the idea that Hillary Clinton so easily does what others tell her to do. Beyond lacking authenticity, how much will she be pushed around by advisers as President? Remember when people were worried that John F. Kennedy would take his cues from the Pope? Substitute Wall Street/Military Industrial Complex.
Too bad she doesn’t have the confidence to just be herself and let the chips fall where they may. That is the value I look for in women I think are strong. One of the things I most admire about Suzan DelBene: 100% authentic. Tough without having to prove it.
she treats politics more like a spectator sport or maybe a movie to be reviewed than as something that could have consequential outcomes.
And who in the media including blogs doesn’t generally do the same?
speaking of focusing on image not substance, you’ve done a magnificent job of paying no attention to the man behind the curtain.
modo is well paid to write this drivel because her employers want drivel not analysis. If she wanted to write policy analysis they’d find someone else to write drivel. She, and her employers, represent the class for whom politics does NOT in fact have consequences. They’ll still be well off and privileged no matter who wins the election.
Taibbi has a nice piece up in RS on the need for the mainstream press to ‘splain to voters why we cannot have nice things.
Perfect summation on your part.
I seem to have walked into the weekly meeting of the last chapter of the Maureen Dowd Fan Club.
The New York Times will be so thrilled to know.
I thought this was the obligatory weekly Hillary post [making bootrib an internet safe zone that actually has non-Hillary posts] as a twofer.
Thanks for noticing, TarheelDem. A lot of people channeling MoDo on this thread.