BlogWatch: Hillary and Hope

Maureen Dowd’s Crying Works column drew a lot of attention from the entire blogosphere top to bottom.

There’s a certain coterie of blogs that like to trash and abuse Maureen Dowd on a regular basis. Being the new kid in town I haven’t gotten to sit at the cool kids’ table like Digby, Whiskey Fire, and Echidne of the Snakes. They love to object to anything Dowd says just on principle and are often very fun to read even as they hysterically (in all senses of the word) get all indignant. They all had a blast with that column.

At a higher level are the Daily Kos and Huffington Post bloggers that take occasional potshots at Maureen Dowd. The posts themselves are often well reasoned but the commenters can sometimes be a little strident bordering on unhinged.

And then there are the professionals. People where blogging is part of their job description and not just so they can wear pajamas all day. These are guys (and gals) that get invited on television screamer shows, write magazine articles, and move and shake the national dialog. A post by one of these folk has a ripple effect as people blog about what they blogged.

Katherine Marsh of The New Republic had this to say:

What last night really showed is that Clinton herself played the gender card brilliantly (see today's Maureen Dowd column).

Another female pundit, Kathryn Jean Lopez of NRO quoted her favorite line from the column and had this to say:

"The People from Hope are Arguing Against Hope."

I'm not proud, but I'm honest: For as long as the Clintons are around — and they will be around for a long while — reading Maureen Dowd will be a guilty pleasure.

And the biggest bear on the block, Andrew Sullivan goes even farther than Dowd. He (an open Obama endorser) claims that the race is entirely about Hillary’s legacy and not any hope for a Democratic victory:

She gets the core narcissism at the heart of the Clinton machine:

There was a whiff of Nixonian self-pity about her choking up. What was moving her so deeply was her recognition that the country was failing to grasp how much it needs her. In a weirdly narcissistic way, she was crying for us. But it was grimly typical of her that what finally made her break down was the prospect of losing...

This is always about the Clintons. If the Democrats have to lose to McCain in November so Hillary Cliton can become the first female nominee for any major party, that's a price the country will just have to pay.

That is a heavy accusation. I rarely find an article claiming that Maureen is sugar-coating the situation and isn’t strident enough.