Dowd And Bruni On Food

If you ever wanted to listen to a former New York Times food critic discuss the ins and outs of the restaurant business, tonight is your night. The talk is being moderated by Maureen Dowd at 7 pm at Politics And Prose in DC.

Dowd Disengaged

From Rich Cameron's Rich's Musing blog we get a first person account of a recent public appearance by Maureen Dowd. She, along with Mike Murphy and Donna Brazile, was part of the American Jewish University’s 2009 speaker series. Fellow copper-headed pundit Arianna Huffington moderated, proving once and for all she and Maureen are not the same person. The Dowdcentric portion of the post follows:

NY Times columnist Dowd seemed detached from the discussion all evening. She is bright and articulate and had interesting answers whenever Huffington drew her in to the conversation, but she seemed otherwise unengaged. In fact, she spent most of the evening with her body slightly turned away from the rest of the group. While others were sure what they wanted to say, she had to spend moments deciding what she wanted to stay.

In retrospect, this should not be too surprising. In podcasts I’ve listen to of other lectures she has given, this is her speaking style. She’s a great writer, but less-than-enthusiastic speaker.

Her most memorable moments of the evening were when

• Huffington cornered her in to sharing a dinner-table admission that she had twice placed notes in Jerusalem’s West Wall, while on assignment, asking for a Jewish husband. She’s come to the conclusion that God probably doesn’t think pairing a Jewish man with a Black Irish Catholic woman is a good idea; and
• She revealed that after Obama’s almost embarrassing acceptance on his European trip after securing the Democratic nomination that she asked him if he “needed a cigarette” after the experience, implying that the treatment he got was almost like having sex.

Rich also notes that Donna Brazile got most of the speaking time and carried on a running gag about offering to let Mike Murphy fondle her ample bosom.

Dowd and King

Maureen Dowd was the guest on Larry King Thursday night with her unique take on current events. The full transcript is here, but I've distilled some of the better quotes.

On Obama's start:

I think that Obama is getting a huge and deserved amount of credit for doing things that are normal things, but have not been done in politics here for a long time.

On the power of liquor as a poltitcal lubricant:

Remember Bob Strauss, he told George Bush Sr., just have some people for cocktails on the Truman Balcony. They will do whatever you want. They will help you get your tax plan passed and everything.

On BFF Caroline Kennedy:

I'm very disappointed, because I think she's really smart and is very -- had the nerve to endorse Obama, and she can push back against pressure. And I think the Senate could have used someone like that, because too often they don't have profiles in courage. They have profiles in conventional wisdom. I think she would have been great.

On social engineering:

Bush and Cheney had this huge social engineering scheme, where they were going to change the psyche of Americans, and make us less afraid of using force overseas after Vietnam. And they were going to change the psyche of the Middle East and make them scared to death of us.

But Obama also has a social engineering scheme. He said the other day he wants kids to have different priorities about service. He wants neighbors to have different priorities about how they treat each other. He wants to integrate the city of Washington with the political Oz of Washington, because in -- in the past, Washington has been a place where there's a high crime rate and a lot of poverty, and it all happens in the shadow of the Capital and the White House. And no one has ever treated it like a real city. And he's doing that right off the bat.

On Sarah Palin's future as talk-show host:

She has presence and I think she could make a comeback in politics, or she might get a show on Fox, competing against you, Larry. You never know.

On Secretary of State Clinton:

I think she could be a superstar. She said something very critical today when she had her first meeting with employees. She said she welcomes people pushing back against her and she welcomes open debate. If that is true, she could have an amazing run. But her history is to confuse dissent with disloyalty and bad management. So it depends if she's learned lessons from that in the past. She could be amazing.

On Barack dealing with Bill:

[Obama]'s trying to separate the little bit of tackiness and all this foreign money that Clintons get from their amazing ability to be great public servants. And if he can do that, then I think he can use them both effectively. But that's never been done before.

On whether it's fun to knock her subjects:

I feel like I owe it to the readers to try to pull back the veil and give them the honest version of what's going on. But it's not more fun. If Obama, as he does sometimes already, gets a little snippy with me about something I've written, you're thinking, oh God, the president of the United States is already annoyed with me.

Her ambitions with Barack:

I'm going to try and keep [Obama] on his toes, but I also want to celebrate the moment of trying to obey the Constitution again. So I took some champagne to the Lincoln Memorial at dawn the other day, just for that purpose.

There you have it. Watch your back, Barack because Maureen is watching you.

Maureen On The Mall

MSNBC has a huge tented studio on the Mall in DC to cover the inauguration and they have been broadcasting live from it all weekend. Yesterday they scored an interview with Maureen Dowd. Our equipment here at Dowd Central failed to capture it, but the cheeto-stained interns at Gawker edited it down to a few soundbites for their snarky ridicule. You can see the video here, but below is a partial transcript.

MSNBC GUY:Tell me about how you put together that amazing guest list for all those people that showed up last night?
MAUREEN: Well, my heart is broken because I was always bad at math, so I didn’t know how many people would fit in the house. I just found out that not only was Tom Hanks outside and not able to get in, but Bruce Springsteen was not able to get in.
MSNBC GAL: It sounds like one of those New York nightclubs where they deliberately shun celebrities.

{snip}

MSNBC GAL: Could Obama be too cocky?
MAUREEN: Well, it’s possible…The crowd says ‘NOOOO!’
MSNBC GAL: We’re too close to the fire here
MAUREEN: We had an off-the-record session with him and, um, and I’d just like to say this is a very confident president.
MSNBC GAL: Will you be as tough on him as you have on Bush?
MAUREEN: Um, given the crowd here, absolutely not.

[on the racial interaction that Barack’s election has brought]

I find this so interesting because I am a native Washingtonian. I grew up in a Black neighborhood and Washington has always been basically segregated and even reporters are corny. I went to the Lincoln Memorial this morning with champagne and croissants. I just wanted to celebrate myself because it’s so great to see the city, blacks and whites, finally integrated.

The Gawker commentariat (of which yours truly is one, albeit without a star) latched onto how nasal Dowd's delivery is.

mfnher: Holy shit. I had no idea her voice sounded like that.

i'm_a_bottle: I can't get over how nasal Maur's voice sounds. I would love to see Fran Drescher and her have a conversation. Actually, strike that, I would rather not.
Dagrolord: Seeing that conversation would be bad enough...hearing it would scar you for life.

Perhaps they need to review her last This Week appearance. Maybe it's for the best that she has a voice for print.

Maureen's House Party Was Off The Hook

Maureen Dowd threw a bold-names-only pre-Inauguration party at her house Sunday night and it was packed. The Washington Times reports some celebs couldn't even squeeze in.

We're also told that at Maureen Dowd's house party in Georgetown, the crowd is so thick that not even Tom Hanks could get in the door.

SFGate lists some of the other attendees:

Jerry Brown and Anne Gust attended a Sunday night party hosted by Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, crammed with glitterati including Ron Howard, Tom Hanks, Alan Greenspan, Chris Matthews, Brian Williams, Anderson Cooper, Tom Brokaw, Diane Von Furstenberg, Larry David and San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris.

Steve Clemons of The Washington Note was there and had a full report including these juicy bits:

But the real stars were in her living room -- and one corner of the party was owned by David Geffen and his boyfriend Jeremy, who were both charming...
{snip}
And then entered Rahm Emanuel, his wife Amy Rule, and three beautiful kids who Geffen's Jeremy (whose last name I missed -- but who is a great guy) promised to romp with next time the little Emanuels were in Malibu.

Clemons gives a full list of celebs that were there and confirms (or was the source of) the Tom Hanks anecdote.

And as the Hollwood A-List continued to arrive, I had the opportunity to meet and chat with George Lucas, Ron Howard, Larry David, Tom Hanks -- who pretty much stayed at the doorway.

Others at the Dowd gala were California Attorney General Jerry Brown and Anne Gust, Andrew Sullivan and Aaron Tone, Alan Greenspan, Helene Cooper, Chris Wallace, Alison Silver, Al Kamen, Janice O'Connell, Aspen Institute President and historiographer Walter Isaacson, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, New Yorker writer and torture policy chronicler Jane Mayer, Arianna Huffington, Tammy Haddad; Politico's Ben Stein, Jonathan Martin, and Mike Allen; Chris Matthews, Margaret Carlson, 'Results the Gym' owner Doug Jefferies, Adam Clymer, Brian Williams, Anderson Cooper, Tom Brokaw, Michael Hirsh, John Harwood, Arianna Huffington, Atlantic Monthly editor James Bennet and his brother Michael Bennet (who is the newly appointed Senator from Colorado succeeding Ken Salazar), David Sanger, Diane Von Furstenberg, David Shuster and Julianna Goldman.

The DC Examiner says there were 400 invitees and at least that many attendees:

Roughly 400 invitations were sent out and nearly all 400 showed up for her party, which quickly became buzzed about as the party to go to that evening.

As a result, Dowd's house on 32nd and N streets quickly became a can of sardines and more than a few attendees told Yeas & Nays that it was simply one of the most crowded parties that they've ever attended.

I was even in the neighborhood yesterday since I had gone to the inauguration concert. I should have dropped by.

Update: The Daily Beast is the latest with an on the scenes party report:

There was gridlock, too, on the narrow staircase to the third floor, where David Geffen and George Lucas were entertained by Dowd in the first hour of the party. Larry David and Ron Howard were also part of a robust Hollywood contingent, which may be what atttracted New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams. Brian Williams, Jill Abramson, and Andrea Mitchell and Alan Greenspan were gamely trying to wiggle into the party as we were leaving. Bob Woodward and Chris Matthews were attempting to leave. There were warnings that the coat-check had already devolved into complete chaos.

Gala Geffen Inauguration Bash Planned

According to the New York Post's Page Six column, Maureen Dowd is planning a little gathering just in time for the Obama Coronation Inauguration.

MAUREEN Dowd's love of the Hollywood elites continues unabated. The Times columnist and avowed liberal, who has dated Michael Douglas and Aaron Sorkin, is hosting an inaugural weekend bash at her DC home honoring David Geffen. Insiders say she's hoping President-elect Barack Obama will stop by. Geffen helped turn the tide against Hillary Rodham Clinton in California by stating in Dowd's column that Clinton was "polarizing" and "ambitious" and calling Obama inspirational. Geffen then held several Obama fund-raisers.

I guess my invitation got lost in the mail.

Hat tip to New York magazine's website that added this gratuitous aside:

([Dowd]'s looking more and more like Arianna Huffington ... just check out the picture!)

They say that like it's a bad thing.

Update (1/20/09): Maureen's party was the must invite of the Inaugural season. Full report here.

Maureen at Claremont McKenna

Maureen Dowd's college tour continues with a recent talk at Claremont McKenna College in California. Joared of the Along The Way blog has a very detailed two-part blog post.

In Part 1, she talks about some background info about Dowd's early pre-journalism days.

After graduation, she became gainfully, happily and contentedly employed as a waitress, possibly as a respite from intense studies, I speculate. Eventually, her parents penetrated the comfort level of what might be described as an insulated cocoon that she was in no hurry to leave. They informed her, she said, that having paid for her higher education they expected her to seek work in a more professional arena offering a potential in keeping with her educational level.

The second part had plenty of juicy excerpts from the talk itself including Barack Obama's opinion of her:

Ms Dowd talked of accompanying Barack Obama on a return flight from Europe during his travel to various nations before he was the official Democratic Party presidential candidate. She was pleased to have been given an interview with him, then surprised when their talk concluded with him dismissing Aides to speak to her alone. His demeanor took on a very serious tone, she reported, as he said to her, "You're really irritating." Furthermore, she added, he repeated the same statement a second time.

It sounds like it was a delightful time.

Maureen's College Tour

The normally reticent Maureen Dowd has been doing more public appearances than usual lately. Near the end of September she made two appearances at Angelo State University. The first was to a select group of journalism and politics students and a second to the general public. An article on the Go San Angelo website offers plenty of bon mots, but the most relevant to this blogger was this:

Blogging - With so many people producing so much commentary on the Internet, originality becomes more difficult, she said.

Then on October 20, she made a joint appearance at the University of Nevada Las Vegas with fellow New York Times columnist Alessandra Stanley as part of the Moskow Distinguished Speaker Series. The article in the Rebel Yell (which is also the source of the accompanying picture) had this to say:

Dowd and Stanley touched on recent and current events, particularly the 2008 presidential campaigns of Seantors Barack Obama and John McCain, the "MBA presidency" of George W. Bush and media influence on politics.

Her trend of West Coast junkets continues next month with a trip to UC-Santa Barbara. The appearance is being puffed thusly:

The only female op-ed columnist at The New York Times, Dowd is known for her witty, incisive and often acerbic portraits of the powerful. She became a media celebrity for her withering attacks on President Bill Clinton’s infamous affair and his accusers.

Couldn't have said it better myself. More details including how to get tickets can be found here.

As always, here at Dowd Central we are always looking for quotes and sightings of the Times's loveliest twice-weekly op-ed columnist.

McCain Bans Dowd

Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post in a post-debate spin wrap-up lets slip that a certain red-tressed NYT columnist is persona non grata on Straight Talk One.

Outside, on a summerlike evening, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs held forth for the likes of NBC's Chuck Todd and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who was wearing an Elvis T-shirt. (The company may have been more pleasant than that of McCain aides, who have barred Dowd from the candidate's plane. And the Obama camp seemed to show its media leanings when it texted followers to watch the debate -- on CNN.)

So much for an open and honest campaign. Hat-tip to the Washington Independent that notes that snubbing Maureen is a Republican rite of passage. Here at Dowd Central, we're more interested in getting a pic of that Elvis shirt.

Maureen at Angelo State

Maureen Dowd made one of her rare public appearances Thursday at Angelo State University in Texas. She talked to a mixture of journalism and government students.

On the importance of newspapers as primary sources she said:

"The nightly news still takes its cues from The New York Times and the Washington Post."

More quips and quotes are available here.

Dowdspotting: Douglas and Dowd

The Reliable Source in the Washington Post spotted former flame of Maureen (and who isn't?) Michael Douglas noshing sans wifey Catherine Zeta Jones.

Michael Douglas lunching at the Bombay Club yesterday with former flame/New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. Douglas, in town to lobby for global nuclear security, arrived first (gray suit with tie); chatted with two women at the next table until Dowd showed up in a red dress. The pair were an item between his divorce from Diandra Luker and marriage to Catherine Zeta-Jones in 2000.

Maybe he's doing research for a movie version of Brenda Starr. Or another Basic Instinct sequel.

Dowd Defends The Funny

The Harvard Review printed an interview with Maureen Dowd that presumably took place when she was in Cambridge giving a speech back in October. I've heard of long lead times, but really. In it she professes her well documented love for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert:

Well, I watch the Colbert Report and the Daily Show more than I watch the nightly news. And I really think the alarm about that is silly, because I think if you watch Colbert and Stewart, you learn a lot.

Plus you can talk them into writing columns for you. She thinks humor has a place in political discourse.

When I first started my columns, Michael Kinsley and Bill Safire said to me, “You have to stop doing humor columns because you’ll be seen as too girly.” And I said I would never take humor out of politics. I think it’s a fantastic way to tell the truth, but to take a fresh angle that can lure people in and tell them something true. And I grew up loving Johnathan Swift and Evelyn Wong, and I think we can use humor and satire to get at the truth and a larger and different audience.

And by "Evelyn Wong", she (or the under-educated transcriber) means Bennett Cerf.

But I'm not expecting her to drop into the comments section of this blog anytime soon. While recent columns display a dazzling skill with Google and YouTube, she professes to be technologically ignorant.

I’m not very technological. Someone gave me an iPod a year ago but I’ve only just learned how to turn it on. And I don’t blog or anything but I think journalism is about the story or the narrative.

But she doesn't dismiss the power of blogs:

It doesn’t matter to me what the delivery system is. The more, the better, the more populist, the better, the more people engaged, the better, but in the end, it’s about the story and about human nature.

And who should now more about human nature than her.

This Week With Maureen

Maureen Dowd was a member of The Roundtable on "This Week With George Stephanopoulos". The full video segment is available here.

When asked about Obama on the campaign trail, she mashed up some recent columns and said:

It was very painful watching [Obama] carbo-loading all the time. This week in Indiana he was reduced to saying that he really does like pot roast and jello and pleading with the reporters that he's not a GQ cover. I think that that basically when he had that cris de cour(sp?) about "Why can't you just let me eat my waffles?", he was saying "Why can't I just be President?" or maybe "Why can't I be ex-President?" and get rid of the pesky reporters and Hillary and everyone.

On Bill Clinton's contribution to the campaign, she says:

The Wall Street Journal had a story yesterday that in the suburbs where [Bill Clinton] worked really hard, [Hillary] got a larger margin of the vote. So even though he was the first politician in history to play the Caucasian Card {Stephanopoulos chuckles}, some Democrats think he is really hurting her, there is some proof otherwise.

And back to Hillary:

That's the power of Hillary Clinton. That even though rationally we think that she can't possible make it mathematically, irrationally we keep saying "How is she going to make it?" I think she has done real damage in turning him from incandescent to ineffectual. She has repainted him as Bambi.

About McCain trying to distance himself from 527 groups running ads featuring the speeches of Reverend Wright:

Having been beaten that way by Dubya in 2000, a very painful way for him, I don't think he's going to to do that again. He does want the best of both worlds. There was a story in the Washington Times about how he can't get control of his party again. On the other hand, I think this is good for him the more Wright is on TV.

She was looser and more forthcoming during the Green Room segment. Asked if McCain is doing a good job getting the message out about the economy.

John McCain is not doing a good job and I don't think Barack Obama is either. He should have had a great economic speech ready to go in that last week in Pennsylvania. And he should have had a great patriotic speech ready to go also. He had one he was working on and delayed it after the San Francisco "bitter" comments. He thought it would seem to opportunistic to do it so soon, but he shouldn't have. His campaign is very static and stale on the economy.

It should just be an organic part of what he is talking about. He has a real problem relating to lower class people. Somebody said after the bitter thing, a Pennsylvania voter said, he makes us feel like we just fell off the apple cart.

On if the campaign is fun:

Well, I'm having more fun than Obama.He finds it so painful. And I'm carbo-loading. I had two cheesesteaks to do a taste comparison between the two places. He gave away his french fries. But you try to make it look fun.

Asked for suggestions, she said, "Get rid of that hi-def."

The Green Room handler said, "But you look great."

She replied, "We'll see. My hand was shaking according to Matt. It was sheer terror."

Matt then confessed that it was just a ploy to hold her hand. And who could blame him?

Disclaimer: The transcription is my own and has been editted for clarity and continuity. Any errors are mine alone.

For a backstage look at the production of the show read this blog entry by Dowd Report contributor yellojkt.

Dowd Alert: This Week With Georgie

Maureen Dowd makes fairly infrequent guest stints on the Sunday morning yakker shows. Her last appearance was on "Meet The Press" on January 27. (Dowd Central of course has a link to that in the archive.) This Week (literally) she snubs fellow Obamaphile Tim Russert to go into the lion's den of former Clintonista George Stephanopoulos. It must be some sort of penance he is paying for his uniformly panned debate moderating.

From ABC's press release:

And on our "Roundtable," the New York Times' Maureen Dowd and ABC News' Donna Brazile, Matthew Dowd and George Will debate the week's politics.

Tune-in Sunday for "This Week" from the Newseum.

The Newseum is a news oriented musuem (duh) on Pennsylvania Avenue that is the new site for the "This Week With George Snufflupagus" studio. As this video explains, it will be the first Sunday morning talk show broadcast in high definition. So if you have ever wanted to see Maureen Dowd's copper tressed visage in all its glory, tomorrow morning is your chance.

One Night Only: Dowd And Kristol Together

The two most polarizing pundits on the New York Times opinion page will be making a joint appearance at Hofstra University this Thursday, April 24. Maureen Dowd and Bill Kristol will be speaking as part of The President’s Educate ’08 Event Series. For more information see the news release

I fully expect a pie to be thrown, I'm just not sure at whom.

DowdSpotting: Her Hair Was Perfect

Wednesday night, Maureen Dowd was working/stalking the Democratic Debate and drew as much attention as the candidates. Natasha Chart of Open Left was working the press room with her fellow press-credentialed bloggers and spotted Dowd. Wanting a quote, she approached her.

Then Valania suggested that I ask Maureen Dowd what she thought, since she was coming our way. I scanned the direction I was more or less facing, as he indicated, spotted her, then looked back at him. She wasn't that far away, our eyes briefly met, she must have gotten a load of my bleached buzzcut or something, and then she pretty much kept staring most the rest of the way over to where she'd have to file past me in our narrow confines. It made me kind of twitchy.

But she was rebuffed:

"I've got to go to the spin room," she said, raising a warding hand with haughty languor. She sauntered off with her entourage, surveilled the back section of the room for a scosh, and then headed off to be spun. Well.

I wonder what Maureen Dowd would write about someone who acted like that towards her?

Because Maureen really doesn't have anything better to do that chit-chat with bloggers while the fate of the Democratic Party is being decided. Which leads to some catty remarks to the effect that Dowd is too pretty to be knocking other candidates on their appearance.

Which brings up more questions for me: Why should Maureen Dowd, whose own meticulously coiffed and dyed locks seem to have been airbrushed directly into reality by some fashion photography genius (seriously, her hair is surreal in its perfection,) have ever been allowed to make a national political issue out of John Edwards' hair? And why, by contrast, shouldn't her job be given instead to a real lifestyle reporter like Booker, who still manages to care about nontrivial issues and had a reasonable, human reaction to last night's festival of horrors?

The whole incident was confirmed by Jonathon Valania of Citizen Mom who also got a picture.

It all went down the way Chart says, including the contrast between MoDo, who minced around the press room in an expensive-looking (if oddly bedazzled) sweater, and Candy Crowley, who spent the debate tapping away on her keyboard and prepping for her live shot by fixing her makeup in a compact mirror.

So we don't want any stories about Dowd sending stringers to get quotes when we have photographic proof that Maureen was working the press room and annoying her star-struck groupies with her indifference. So keep up the catty remarks about clothes and hair, fellow bloggers. That way Dowd will know you are serious journalists like her.

Photo credit: Jonathon Valania

Wait, Wait, It's MoDo

Maureen Dowd will be the guest on this week's edition of National Public Radio's quiz show Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! (h/t to FishbowlDC).

Of course we will have full links and highlights later in the week.

Dowd Alert: St Mary's College

According to Southern Maryland Online, Maureen Dowd will be giving a speech tonight at St. Mary's College of Maryland in (appropriately enough) St. Mary's City, Maryland.

Dowd will speak as part of the College's Margaret Brent Lecture Series. Her talk is titled "Political Follies." It will offer a seasoned journalist's take on the most interesting political blunders of recent times. As a veteran of four presidential campaigns and now covering a fifth, Dowd's commentary on the American political process promises to be timely and razor sharp.

The lecture is scheduled for 8 p.m. in the Auerbach Auditorium of St. Mary's Hall on the college campus. This event is free and open to the public.

While St. Mary's is a little too far for yours truly to travel, I hope to catch some news reports of proceedings. Since the so-called Potomac Primary is Tuesday, perhaps some candidates would like to show up to steal some thunder.

Get Well Soon

The mystery of the missing Sunday column is solved. While in the press enoturage with Dubya's week-long Middle East blitz, Maureen Dowd developed a stomach flu and required the help of Dubya's personal physician to beat the bug. Michael Abromowitz of the Washington Post gave the full story including more information than we needed to know:

Once she arrived in Jerusalem last Tuesday (the day of the New Hampshire primary), Dowd fell sick - and started second-guessing her decision to leave the campaign trail for the presidential bubble abroad. She was suffering some kind of stomach bug that left her nauseous, weak and feeling feverish.

"I'm not sure it was a New Hampshire fever or Jerusalem food poisoning," Dowd said.

Presidential aides, including press secretary Dana Perino, made clear early on that Dowd could see Dr. Richard J. Tubb, the Air Force brigadier general who oversees the White House medical office and takes care of the president at home and abroad.

But Dowd declined. With no medication, she tried to soldier on by grabbing whatever rest she could in her hotel room--not easy to do in a trip of constant movements. By the time the presidential entourage moved to Bahrain from Kuwait on Saturday, she felt even worse. She was so sick, in fact, that she could not write her regular Sunday column.

Dowd finally decided to take up the White House on its offer.

A young press aide, Carlton Carroll, helped arrange for Dowd to visit Tubb at the Emirates Palace, the over-the-top $3 billion luxury hotel where the president and his aides were staying. The hotel is so vast that Dowd and her escorts got lost twice in the marble and gold hallways. She finally found herself in a fully-staffed doctors' office with a trunk full of various medications, a solicitous nurse and a super-competent White House physician.

Tubb gave her a few tablets of Cipro and some Pepto-Bismol and told her to check back with him the next day. She turned down Tubb's offer of an IV (so there was no chance of an "accidental" poisoning, she joked).

In order for Maureen to be near the doctor in case of a relapse, they made room for her on Air Force One instead of the press plane. Dowd was grateful and gracious for the assistance.

"I was thinking that if I ran into Bush, I would have to apologize for it not being a fatal disease," Dowd said. "He was very generous to share his doctor--even if he didn't know it."

Dowd said Tubb and the rest of the White House staff who helped her were "fantastic"--and nobody complained about her columns.

"That's not the time they take you to task," Dowd said.

The one part of the article that is raising eyes in the media at places like mediabistro and Gawker is the $20,000 bill for a journalist to travel with the prez.

The only people who might be complaining about the whole affair could well be Dowd's editors, who may end up paying for one the most expensive columns in her illustrious career. The Middle East trip could well cost upwards of $20,000 for each journalist along. With no column last Sunday, Dowd was doing the math Tuesday afternoon to figure out how much each word of her Wednesday column would cost the Times.

"I am not sure my bosses will think this is money well spent," she acknowledged. "The only thing to come out of it so far is a Washington Post item."

She did file a Rich-sized travelogue today, but that still comes to more than ten bucks a word.

Dowd Dateline Debate

Lots of blogs find fault with one phrase Maureen Dowd uses in a column and nitpick it. Mega-blog Talking Points Memo has taken issue with, of all things, the dateline. Yes, that little location the reporter claims they were when they reported the article. It seems Dowd had to leave the Clinton un-pity party early and allegedly an uncredited assistant did the actual quote collecting since Dowd had to wing her way to the Middle East with Dubya on deadline. The umbrage goes as follows (added emphasis mine):

The piece reads as if Dowd was on the scene at Hillary's victory party, interviewing voters reacting to her win. But it turns out Dowd couldn't have been at the party at all -- instead, she'd already jetted half way around the world to cover the President's Middle East trip, I'm told. An eyewitness tells TPM that on Tuesday night he spied Dowd typing away at the reporters' media filing center in Jerusalem's Dan Panorama hotel.

If Dowd was nearly 6,000 miles away from these people on Tuesday night, how did the quotes get into her column? A reporter I know tells me that Dowd's assistant was floating around at the Hillary victory party that night. So it seems almost certain that Dowd's assistant did the reporting for her. But there's no other byline on the piece.

The article has a lot of arcana about dateline ethics, the long and short being that the reporter at some point has to have actually set foot in the location used. This would be a tempest in a teapot, but journalists have been flogged for similar faults before.

The TPM article was passed along uncritically by several other blogs such as DragonFlyEye.Net, Portfolio and mediabistro mostly on the schadenfreudistic strength of vague accusations of wrongdoing by a prominent Times columnist.

Spencer Ackerman goes further and cites the case of Rick Bragg who resigned in disgrace and makes this bolder accusation (which the TPM article no longer links to):

My boy Greg Sargent catches Maureen Dowd in -- why mince words? -- a lie. Dowd datelined yesterday's column Derry, N.H. But at the time, it turns out, she was in Jerusalem, covering the president's trip. Apparently, she was following her paper's lead. Greg confirmed that the paper allows such dateline manipulation as long as someone contributed on-the-ground reporting to a piece. In this case, that someone is Dowd's assistant, who is uncredited in the column. The Times says that's OK.

But it isn't. In the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, Rick Bragg, resigned after it turned out he relied heavily on an uncredited stringer for a series with an Apalachicola, Florida dateline. That was the honorable thing to do when faced with such a misrepresentation. But Dowd's is worse. At least Bragg, in the words of the paper, "indeed visited Apalachicola briefly" for "his" piece. Dowd was half a world away from events she claimed to witness firsthand.

Ackerman cites Rick Bragg as the cautionary example, so it's worth examining. Rick Bragg was writing an article on the Gulf Coast and sent an unpaid informal stringer of his to Apalachicola, Florida for some reporting. Bragg eventually made it to Apalachicola but used the free lancer's reporting uncredited for most of the article. When this came to light it brought down a lot of scrutiny on other stories and Bragg resigned. Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post wrote a comprehensive article which included these items:

David Firestone, a former Atlanta correspondent now based in Washington, said stringers were used mainly "when you couldn't be in multiple places..."

[S]ome Times staffers say Bragg is being unfairly singled out for working within a system in which interns and assistants -- what the newsroom calls "legs" -- are regularly assigned to do extensive firsthand reporting but almost never receive credit.

In a statement, Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said: "Like most newspapers, the Times has long relied on non-staff journalists to assist correspondents in their reporting, by conducting interviews, providing research assistance or helping to stake out the scenes of news events, especially when spot news is being gathered against a tight deadline." She said employees have been reminded that "such non-staffers should be used to supplement a correspondent's core reporting; they should not be used to substitute for that reporting."

A contemporaneous New York Times article added the following:

In an e-mail message to his colleagues on the national staff yesterday, Peter T. Kilborn, who is based in Washington, said: ''The interventions of editors and rare feeds from stringers notwithstanding, we dig stuff up ourselves and chase things down ourselves and put it together ourselves.''

Mr. Kilborn's comments were lauded, and amplified, in messages from other national reporters.

While the correspondents acknowledged that they relied periodically on researchers during breaking news, they said they had never gone as far as Mr. Bragg had: using a stringer to do almost all of the reporting on a feature article.

Let's analyze the kerfuffle to see if Sargeant and Ackerman are making a mountain out of a molehill or if we are facing the return of Jayson Blair.

• Sargent quotes an unnamed sources that allege Dowd was somewhere else. The source saw her working on something but had no direct conversation with her about what it was.
• Dowd met the test implied by the Times for using an assistant, she was on assignment elsewhere (and I think most readers of TPM would think tracking Dubya's misdeeds more important than attending a victory party). We have no idea who this assistant was and what his or her professional relationship to Dowd or the Times is.
• Dowd was writing on deadline about breaking news. The election results came late Tuesday night and Dowd's column had to be posted by midnight.
• The three people in the article were quoted by name. A real muckracker could easily track these folks down and determine when and by whom they were interviewed.
• The quotes used were anecdotal filler supporting Dowd's thesis that the emotional event energized her supporters. The story could stand without those three paragraphs. Here at Dowd Report Central we read a lot of commentary on her columns and nobody was citing these quotes as pivotal parts of the article.
• Dowd did plenty of leg work in New Hampshire over the rather abbreviated campaign cycle. As noted here, multiple sightings of the celebrity pundit were made at an earlier event by Obama.
• The only genuinely first person observation in the column was her observing fellow reporters commenting on Hillary's histrionics.

When you put this altogether we are looking at a rather mild case of a national reporter using resources available to her to fill out a piece that had to make deadline. It's not like Dowd was eating bon-bons on the beach while phoning in files.

We'll see if Dowd faces a feeding frenzy over what seems to be a heroic effort to get a column filed on time of if this is just a case of Dowd haters stirring the pot.