In her column in the New York Times yesterday, "Desperately Seeking Street Cred," Maureen Dowd focuses her Pulitzer-prize winning intellect like a laser beam directly on the forehead of Barack Obama, who in previous articles she deemed "Obambi." This time around Dowd claims that Obama's problem is that he has lost his "fizz." A few paragraphs later she treats her readers to this observation: "He doesn't emulate Bobby Kennedy, who defied political tropes and underscored his concern about the poor by taking reporters on treks to rural Appalachia or odysseys to roiling inner cities for speeches on street corners." On this point Dowd reveals herself to be both wrong and lazy.
Even the most cursory look at the forces within the Democratic Party that Obama is currently organizing and mobilizing -- young people, low-income whites, African-Americans, Latinos, unionists, highly-educated professionals -- quickly shows that they mirror in both form and substance exactly the coalition that Robert F. Kennedy was attempting to pull together in 1968.
In the very next paragraph, Dowd gets snarky at Obama for trying "to recapture the magic -- and erase the bowling debacle -- by shooting hoops with kids in Kokomo on Friday night." Dowd's petty dig here contradicts her own lament that he is no RFK. For Dowd, Obama taking time out to shoot some hoops with young Hoosiers is not at all Kennedyesqe. But she should have taken note that on April 4, 1968, when Robert F. Kennedy spoke to the African-American section of Indianapolis on the night Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered he was speaking at the "Broadway Center Outdoor Basketball Court," a community center that featured after school basketball programs for kids.
Dowd also regurgitates the right's misconstruing of the words of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr. during his recent interview. Writes Dowd: "Obama is burdened by Jeremiah Wright's . . . comment to Bill Moyers that Obama 'does what politicians do.'" She obviously didn't bother to watch the Moyers interview with Wright because it was perfectly clear what Wright meant: Pastors and politicians speak to different audiences and are required at times to say different things. Wright wasn't demeaning "politicians" or putting down Obama for distancing himself from the sound bites generated by his more inflammatory sermons. I would urge people to dispense with Dowd's derogatory filter and just go and watch the interview on Youtube. In about 750 words, Dowd has transformed herself from someone who disparages Obama for losing his mojo and not being like RFK to dutifully repeating the "burdens" he faces that the corporate media spun out of whole de-contextualized cloth.
In the 1990s, Maureen Dowd didn't like the Clintons and won Pulitzers by lampooning both Bill Clinton and Kenneth Starr as being equally to blame for the impeachment witch hunt. In 2000, she didn't like Al Gore and reinforced all of the right's stereotypes about him as being haughty and nerdy and "effeminate." In 2004, she didn't like John Kerry and again echoed the right's smears against him as a wannabe tough guy who windsurfed in spandex tights. And now, unsurprisingly, Dowd doesn't like Barack Obama either, calling him "Wonder Boy," and chiding him for qualities the right and Hillary have been wildly exaggerating.
In all of her commentary relating to Democratic presidential candidates over the past 12 years Dowd finds them all insufficient and deserving of her patented brand of Catholic schoolgirl ridicule. They are always too "effeminate" or conniving or naive or deficient or having too much testosterone or too little, ad infinitum. That's why she always ends up helping the Republicans in national elections because she regurgitates their tropes and frames of the "weak" Democrat versus the "strong" Republican. (Glenn Greenwald's new book, "Great American Hypocrites," documents fully the Republicans' deep frame of Democratic presidential candidates that Dowd never ceases to flog.)
Maureen Dowd's brand of "analysis" emphasizes not only the personal over the political, but the puerile over the personal AND the political. She never has anything insightful to say about the social forces at work in national elections, and she lacks understanding of the historical context of 2008, which has allowed Barack Obama to surprise everybody, especially the Clintons, and to rack up a lead in the popular vote, pledged delegates, and states won. Obama has accomplished this feat through hard work, grassroots activism, and by energizing newly-registered voters. The 2008 narrative was supposed to be a Hillary coronation, and Dowd had her scalping knives ready to attack the first woman nominee for president. Now she must shift gears and become an equal opportunity put-down artist. Meanwhile, Dowd whistles past the most important election in recent history. Someday a future generation of journalists will comb over Dowd's Monica Lewinsky era columns and exclaim: "She got a Pulitzer Prize for that!?"
The Times should balance the neo-con shrieks of William Kristol and David Brooks by hiring a real political analyst to take over the precious column inches that Dowd so fruitlessly fritters away. After enduring eight years of the most reckless and damaging administration in American history -- an administration that launched aggressive wars and suspended habeas corpus and spied on Americans without warrants and tortured prisoners and destroyed the regulatory functions of the state and ballooned the national debt and destroyed our reputation abroad and so on and on and on -- Dowd is determined to party like it's 1999 and wallow in trivialities designed only to make herself look good.
Maybe at this important juncture in history -- a period so momentous that Times editors felt it necessary to add the wise and venerable William Kristol to its stable of editorialists -- maybe it's time to replace Maureen Dowd with another female columnist who can do a better job. Maybe the Times can hire Susan Faludi or Barbara Ehrenreich or Patricia Williams or Susan Douglas or Naomi Klein or Katha Pollitt or Arianna Huffington or Rachel Maddow or any number of other qualified women who are far better at serious political analysis and even write with more zing than Dowd's prurient and irrelevant revelries.
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Ouch! and well argued too. The Times is taking their comeuppance, circulation is down, and there are fewer bird cages for the editorial pages to cover.
Don't be so hard on Maureen. She's just in love.
As much as I dislike Maureen Dowd, I have to say she has become one of the most rational and realistic Obama supporters out there. She has demonstrated that it is possible to support Obama and not display a cult-like devotion to him where he can do no wrong, and to question him is evil and stupid. She wrote this article and other recent ones because she is once again frustrated by a candidate that she really likes who refuses to do what it takes to win. Unlike you and the Obamabots, she realizes that despite the fact that he is the best candidate for president, unless he changes something and acknowledges the political realities of the general election we are heading for trouble. She still clearly wants Obama to win the nomination because she hates Clinton more than life itself, but she is worried that his current course will pave McCain's way into the White House, and until he and his supporters realizes that he is not RFK and that he does have flaws that should be addressed before the general, she and many Democrats are facing another 4 years of Republican control of the presidency.
I like some of the work of Bob Herbert, but man, I am sick of Thomas Friedman, and when I see the by-line "William Kristol" it triggers an instant gag reflex in me and I throw up a little in my mouth.
i usually just blow off anything dowd writes, but i have to agree with her that obama is no bobby (or jack) kennedy...no matter how teddy tries to symbolically reincarnate his dead brothers, it won't work...
It is true. Obama is no RFK.
RFK was Obama with true political experience. Unlike Hillary, RFK had security clearance and was JFK's closest advisor, especially in times of great crisis like the Cuban Missile Crisis. RFK also had a greater knowledge and understanding of where power really existed in this country and had the courage to openly oppose those power centers.
That being said, Obama is the closest thing to RFK I have seen in the past 40 years and is far and away the best chance this country has to dig out of the incredible hole in which bush has pushed us.
Unfortunately, the Times is the "paper of record" and cannot be ignored, or I would love to -- it is the mouthpiece of the Establishment, especially on "free trade," wow, they're to the Right of the WSJ on trade -- and their Middle East coverage is all Judith Miller-Michael Gordon -- terrible -- but the Right calls the Times a "liberal" paper -- So it goes -- as Kurt Vonnegut used to say.
When are people going to realize that the NY Times is the propaganda arm of AIPAC, the Israel lobby? Everything becomes clear if you come to that realization.
ahhhhh...so it iss ze Chewzz who iss schmutzink up effrysink? jahwohl, herr joyboy!!!!
Dowd's usually unbiased and says observational stuff in a funny way. Easy to read & just as easy to forget. But the heading on yesterday's column stopped me cold. I was a bit down because it, all day. I was glad to see this by Joseph Palermo. Joe and the commenters here have it right: just what the heck do these people want? Dowd's been hard on Bush - & for danged good reasons - over the years, as well as the Clintons. The night we saw Obama was the perfect metaphor for the media's relationship with him or LACK thereof. We waited two hours in the freezing cold to see him with thousands of others. The place filled up & made it well worth it. A column in Slate reported the next day one the same event. He and others in the media arrived way late, for whatever reason & could not get in. His column was all about what it was like to be locked out. The story was inside. The MSM has missed that story for months now. Anyone, would "lose their fizz" after all these grueling months. And BTW, Maureen, did Obama ever claim to be RFK? RFK Jr. endorsed Hillary. What if's are not history or historically accurate. 1968 might parallel 2008, but these are different times, generations and players. I saw JFK, Nixon, Dukakis, Carter at rallies over the years and Edwards in 2004. All paled in comparison to Obama - please finally get
I find Maureen Dowd to be both smarmy and pugnacious at once. She is her own best enemy as she denounces hypocrisy in a most hypocritical fashion. So, she is not so much humorous as she is pitifully laughable.
Joe,
I think you've almost got to write of the MSM including the N.Y. Times sad to say. They have all been corporatized to the point that their columns are propaganda for the masses who want to be told what to think rather than doing their own analysis and homework. The media has now found it fashionable to turn on Obama as earlier they turned on Clinton and before that McCain. The media tend to be followers rather than thought leaders. I find the internet, magazines like "The Nation", or books like "The Israel Lobby", to be the best sources of real information and analysis. The N.Y. Times hasn't even earned the honor to be criticized by the right any more.
Amen, I too have noticed that Dowd's articles are much more bent against Obama. She is not the only one either, Dick Polman of the Inquirer, and a few others. No one talks about the issues. They constantly bring up the right wing pundit points, I always thought the Media was to be fair and unbiased.
Thank you. I too used to enjoy Dowd, but find her increasingly snarky and less relevant. I'm beginning to believe that our only hope for survival as a species is for people to migrate their attention from TV and NYT to Huffpost.
Great comments, I didn't know she could be called "MoDo" -- the only reason I bothered was because she brought up RFK and I always lament my subscription to the Times when I see her by-line and Kristol and Brooks and Kristof is usually off on one of his pet causes, and Krugman's a great economist but he loves Hillary Clinton too much and Gail Collins is good but sometimes she tries to be too Dowdian and the only person they have who can write and think and analyze is Frank Rich, and he's only on Sundays and a little inconsistent but I look forward to his work. Kristol? I mean how low can you get?
Excellent post! Thank you so much.
I'm amused by Dowd sometimes, but also find her insufferably smug and more prone during election time to crap on the Democrats she allegedly has high hopes for than the Republicans. I'll never forget her ridiculous, insensitive attack on Howard Dean's wife because she wasn't glamorous enough for Mo, and should have gotten a make-over to make her husband look better. And her repeated trashing of candidate Al Gore's stiffness, his wardrobe, his seriousness, etc.
This is, sadly, what passes for intelligent political satire in the NYT these days. I'll stick with Huffington's Andy Borowitz, thank you.....
And is it just me, or is anyone else getting royally sick of these smug, obiquitous media-ites, who between print and TV seem to be picking up a dozen paychecks? When do they have a minute to think about what they're saying or writing, or do any honest reporting? And how easy is it for them to be wagging their finger and getting all huffy about some minor faux pas or alleged personal failing of a Barack Obama, when they've done virtually nothing to expand public discourse or highlight the crucial issues in these races?
I'm gettin' cranky.......
You're right, Joe. In these critical times you would think Ms. Dowd would have something positive to offer in her writings and not denigrate every candidate. She is one sour woman with nothing constructive to say about anyone. Aside from Ms. Dowd, Paul Krugman, whom I once admired, has been a tremendous disappoint to me with his unfounded and gratuitous criticism of Obama. You would think he was on Hillary's payroll. Also, given his political slant and economic expertise, I was suprised by his mild criticism of McCain in todays NYT column. McCain is a phony and a fake and when it comes to economic issues, is the dumbest person on the face of the earth. George Bush is a genius compared to him. Krugman is an economist of considerable knowledge and stature. I don't understand why he hasn't come down on McCain with more ferocity. Krugman and Dowd should focus their attention on the damage the Republicans have inflicted on this country and the American people and what used to be American values: truth, justice, peace, equality, and respect for the Constitution. I would hate to think that those values I grew up with was just bullshit for the masses.
"...wallow in trivialities designed only to make herself look good". Indeed. And to what heights is Dowd reaching when "looking good" is imagined to come from snark and ad hominem vitriol? THAT is rewarded with column inches and notariety?!
NYT is dying a slow death, reflective, albeit, of our culture. Which, I suppose, they consider their saving grace; and they profit from thier contributions to our demise.
Poor Mo-Do ... I don't think this tail-wagging in front of Obama is going to get her the Marilyn Monroe treatment she desires. No matter, she will have plenty of time to fine tune her approach.
Why o why must America put up with stupidity passing for political discourse in the great nation?
And why is it that the only sensible political punditry comes from comedians. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Colbert Report. They maintain intelligence and are funny.
Shes gone after Clinton (recently) and Bush pretty hard too.
I am a fan of MoDo - even though I avidly support Obama. She frequently cuts to the heart of an issue. I don't always agree with her - but I always enjoy her take. Her Sunday column had a kernel of truth to it, and Obama should take it to heart. He hasn't made a sufficient effort to connect with working class voters - who should be his natural constituency. He's not RFK, and he shouldn't try to be - he's himself. But his campaigning has been a little flat lately. He looks tired, and not so self confident. As one pundit said - he has to campaign in Indiana intensely, as if it's his last chance at victory. He has to toughen and sharpen his message - detailing what he will do for the economy, and raising Hillary's negatives ie tell the voters what the Republicans will throw at Hillary in the fall.
Why waste space taking Dowd to task? Her column's content is consistently lighter than air, she neither helps nor damages candidates, nor does anyone take her seriously. The sharpest political writer after Frank Rich is already on the Times. Gail Collins, brought back from that barren wasteland that calls itself the NYT editorial board, should be producing more columns each week!
I totally agree! And.....I am an Obama supporter, but I haven't been able to stomach Maureen Dowd for a long, long time. When you say she writes "trivialities to make herself look good", you are so right. I can't believe she won Pulitzer's for her 'biting analysis' either. It 'bites' alright. Her writing is actually banal and immature. Who needs her, besides Chris Matthews? She is one of those writers(?) who always wants to appear 'balanced and objective' to the point that she doesn't really have any voice at all. I am so sick of "fair and balanced" in every news report, newscast, etc., etc., etc.. What do you learn? I find it incredibly boring.
Thank you for saying what I have been feeling for a long time. I thought it was only me. I used to like her a lot, but she doesn't even have any punch in her articles anymore. She isn't even humorus must less factual.
She has proven to be very shallow and most of her articles are so flawed.
That really only leaves Frank Rich to carry on as a great liberal columnist. Too bad. Where is Molly Ivins when we need her?
I would like to add to my previous comment: I like Paul Krugman, as long as he sticks to economics which is his forte. He has been venturing into politics recently and appears to support Hillary. I think that is a huge mistake. If he does not like republican economic policy, then he should not like Hillary. She is simply a republican-lite candidate for President.
Her economic rhetoric is more progressive than Krugman, as is her healthcare platform -- that is kind of hard to dispute. I like Obama better too, but he is no maverick on economic policy
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Posted April 28, 2008 | 09:32 AM (EST)