Earth Tone Al

There is no new column by Maureen Dowd today, so it’s a good chance to ransack the New York Times archives and put to rest some canards about Dowd. As the Democratic primary season warms up, the blogging masses are already heating up the tar and plucking the chickens to scapegoat Maureen for sabotaging the election as she allegedly did in 2000 to Al Gore. The Dowd Report is on the record about her lack of culpability in Gore’s inept tin-eared campaign.

Every time Dowd’s name is mentioned in the blogosphere, one particular smear gets Pavlovianly raised: Maureen Dowd tagged Gore as “Earth-Tone Al” by relentlessly ridiculing him on his fashion choices. The truth is more nuanced and Dowd’s role is far littler than her rabid haters would have us believe.

No blog has worked harder to document the media’s supposed culpability in Gore’s defeat than the Daily Howler. For the truly wonkish, feel free to wade through the exhaustive multi-part series that excruciatingly documents the obsession over the press’s obsession with Gore’s wardrobe. I intend to focus on Dowd’s contribution, but first a little background is required.

One of the campaign advisors Al Gore hired for his 2000 run was Naomi Wolf. This was reported in the November 1, 1999 issue of Time magazine by Jessica Reeves which was the first connection of "eart tones" with Gore and Wolf:

Oh, those elusive women voters: So crucial, so mercurial, so drawn to earth tones. It's a good thing Al Gore has secured the services of feminist commentator and author Naomi Wolf to guide him through the minefield of the second sex's voting patterns. Gore 'fessed up this weekend to hiring Wolf for a reported initial salary of $15,000 a month — although her pay was recently cut to $5,000 a month — calling her a "valued advisor." The best-selling author of "The Beauty Myth" and "Promiscuities" is said to advise Gore on issues ranging from escaping his "beta-male" caste to adopting a more "reassuring" wardrobe palette in order to heighten his attractiveness to women (hence the recent influx of greens and browns).

A week later, a much more detailed Time article by Michael Duffy any Karen Tumulty became Ground Zero of the Earth Tone meme. Here are a few of the more relevant quotes:

You won't find her anywhere on the Al Gore campaign roster. Nor is she listed in the internal campaign budget, where she appears only as "consultant." Yet the mere mention of her name has a way of rendering campaign officials nearly speechless. One offered only that she was "helping out" on "outreach." Another adviser downplayed her as a "wardrobe consultant."

Sources tell TIME that since Gore 2000 set up shop in January, Wolf has been paid a salary of $15,000 a month--all quietly funneled through a web of Gore-campaign subcontractors--in exchange for advice on everything from how to win the women's vote to shirt-and-tie combinations.

Wolf made her first foray into presidential politics in 1995, as an adviser to Clinton's own once secret consultant, Dick Morris.

Dick Morris is often cited as being the secret back-stabbing source behind the accusation of Naomi Wolf as being just a fashion consultant.

By now, the Gore/Wolf connection is all over the news with pieces in the New York Times and Slate detailing her very out of the mainstream new-agey opinions. Maureen Dowd's November 3, 1999 column cites both earlier Time articles:

Time magazine revealed that Al Gore hired Ms. Wolf, who has written extensively on women and sexual power, as a $15,000-a-month consultant to help him with everything from his shift to earth tones to his efforts to break with Bill Clinton.

"Wolf has argued internally that Gore is a 'beta male' who needs to take on the 'alpha male' in the Oval Office before the public will see him as the top dog," write Time's Michael Duffy and Karen Tumulty.

Of course, when a man has to pony up a fortune to a woman to teach him how to be a man, that definitely takes the edge off his top-dogginess.

So let's see how Dowd is to blame for the Wolf whistle-blowing. One, Dowd just cites previous reporting and makes no new claims about Wolf’s role in the Gore campaign. Two, the real issue wasn’t whether Wolf gave Gore fashion advice, it was that Gore went to such a far-out flake for any advice whatsoever.

When it comes to real reporting, Maureen Dowd sat down with Al Gore and had this synopsis in her November 10, 1999 column:

So Al and I are dishing about clothes.

I figured if I covered politics long enough, I'd have uncomfortable moments when a president or vice president would want to hash over something I didn't know much about, like helium reserves or the money supply.

Nah. With this White House, I'm safe. The deeply important issues are sex and clothes.

I ask the vice president about his new color palette. He's in his casual uniform, a blue shirt to bring out his eyes, a heathery brown sweater, khakis and black cowboy boots.

"Tipper picks out my clothes," he says quickly, before I have a chance to mention That Woman Naomi.

There you have it. Al Gore less than categorically denies that Naomi Wolf gave him wardrobe advice. Of all the media frenzy over the beta-sheep in Wolf’s clothing, Dowd actually got the word from the horse’s mouth. But more importantly, HE WEARS EARTH TONES!

It’s tough to deny that in the 2000 campaign, the very phrase “earth tones” became shorthand for “obsequious pandering in an attempt to portray a folksy, feminist-friendly regular guy and not at all a stiff robotic wonk.” Maureen Dowd herself stayed fairly far away from this broad brushing. For the next year, “earth tones” appears in her columns only a couple of times. On November 24, 1999, Dowd uses the phrase to kick-off coverage of Hillary Clinton’s presidential senatorial campaign:

We knew she was running when she showed up in earth tones.

Like Al Gore, Hillary Rodham Clinton stepped onto the stage in New York all toasty-looking in a brown suit. ''So the answer is yes,'' she said with a huge smile, like a blushing fiancee.

On May 17, 2000, she uses a call out in one of her trademarked faux-soliloquies to suggest maybe he needs to act tougher instead of softer:

Do women prefer bad boys? Is that what this is all about? Fine. I can be a bad boy. I can do a bad, bad thing.

Note to self: Drop the earth tones. Buy a black leather jacket.

She goes to that well again on August 23, 2000 with this Fake Al Gore thought:

What do I have now that I didn't have before? Which new me works best for me? Were they wowed by Wednesday's earth tones or Thursday's business attire? Do they prefer Al the Lover to Al the Fighter? L.A. Al must not revert to D.C. Al!

I must focus-group myself. The important thing is not to panic. There's a throb in my deltoid. I'll pop an Altoid. But I need a factoid.

In both cases, the emphasis is on Gore’s over-emphasis on honing his image to broaden his appeal, particularly with women. This image stuck and George Bush successfully used Gore’s poor choice in consultants against Gore. As noted by Maureen Dowd on October 25, 2000 near the eve of the election and nearly a year after the first murmurings of Wolf’s influence, W is able to paint Gore as an emasculated slave of soothsayers:

And W. is still milking the flap over Naomi Wolf's alpha-male advice to Mr. Gore, the spectacle of a woman instructing a man how to be a man.

At the Al Smith dinner, Mr. Bush joked that he had run into a woman coming off the elevator at the Waldorf, "I think her name is Naomi or something like that," who had suggested that he wear more earth tones, less white tie.

"Can you imagine a grown man," he asked to the roar of the crowd, "paying $15,000 for somebody to tell you what to wear?"

If anything, Dubya owes Dick Morris for handing him this character defining faux pas.

Let’s recap. Time Magazine reports that Gore pays Wolf fifteen grand a month for consulting, which may or may not include fashion advice. Maureen Dowd comments on the kerfuffle and makes a handful of off-hand references to “earth-tones” in the context of nearly a hundred columns and over 80,000 words. That hardly qualifies as relentless harping.

Gore ran the most incompetent election campaign by an incumbent vice-president since Nixon in ’64 and lost in the closest election ever. Dowd didn’t hire Wolf. And whatever Gore paid for her wisdom, it seemed to have backfired fatally. Let's start blaming the naked emperor for listening to the fashion advice (metaphorical or actual) of ridiculous consultants and not blame the commenter in the crowd that sees through the pretense.

Democrats seem to like to kill the messenger when it's the principal that is the problem. So quit blaming Dowd for noticing the hole Gore dug himself into.

Dowd Didn't Defeat Al Gore

Whenever the name Maureen Dowd gets invoked on any political blog, but especially on any with a liberal twist, there is an immediate chorus of lament that Dowd lost the election for Gore. News flash: George Walker Bush defeated Al Gore, not Maureen Dowd. Nobody at Free Republic is crediting her with the assist. I know, I've checked. Let’s review the facts:

Ralph Nader got over 97,000 votes in Florida. If only one percent of these mostly left wing voters had voted for Gore instead of registering their protest, Gore would have won the state. And do you know how much publicity Maureen Dowd gave Nader? None. In the year running up to the election, Dowd did not mention Ralph Nader in her column once. Naderites didn't vote for Gore because of Dowd's nattering that Al was too liberal. Gore failed to carry his base, a problem his opponent didn't have.

Three thousand butterfly ballots were cast for Buchanan in Palm Beach County. The not-so-unusual butterfly ballot (I saw a couple during my three years in PBC back in the nineties. It wasn't all that uncommon.) confused voters. Buchanan got nearly six times the support he should have. Even more amazingly, 5,330 rejected votes were cast for both Buchanan and Gore as opposed to 1,631 for both Bush and Buchanan. Again, if only three hundred of these people had been bright enough to vote correctly, Gore would have been in the White House on 9/11. Indirectly, these myopic Magoo voters are why we invaded Iraq.

Al Gore lost by five electoral votes. He didn’t need Florida to win the election. He needed any other state whatsoever. He didn’t carry his home state of Tennessee, or Arkansas, the home state of the incumbent President, both of which Clinton carried in 1996. Other states that Gore lost that Clinton carried in 1996 include New Hampshire, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Louisiana, Arizona, and Nevada. Any one of these states would have indisputably swung the election to Gore making Florida moot.

Maureen Dowd was not on Gore’s legal team. The Supreme Court decision upholding the Katherine Harris certified vote tally was 5-4 from a court where most of the Justices had been nominated by Republican presidents. I doubt any of the justices were swayed by Maureen Dowd’s silly columns ridiculing Gore clothing choices.

It wasn’t Dowd’s job to get Gore elected. As an employee of the New York Times, she is not allowed to endorse political candidates. To say that Dowd should have been a team player and been less critical of Gore is to play into the right wing myth of the mainstream liberal media being a de facto arm of the Democratic Party. If your election hinges on the unvarnished support of the New York Times Op-Ed page, you as a candidate are not doing a good enough job of getting the right message to the voters.

Al Gore ran an error-prone misguided campaign. He was an uncharismatic speaker that failed to proactively respond to the attacks of his opponents. Many armchair quarterbacks cite the policy of distancing himself from Clinton and the attendant scandals as weakening support among crucial groups Gore should have carried. If Dowd’s columns pointed that out, it is no more her fault than it is the fault of the little boy in the crowd that the naked emperor let his advisors sell him invisible clothes. Don’t shoot the messenger, listen to the warnings and pay heed. Look at your candidate and realize that his flaws put him into an untenable position where the deck was stacked against him.

Crybaby sports teams blame the officiating. I never have sympathy for these athletes because if they had played a better game, the score wouldn’t have been so close that they need the support of the folk in black and white to make the decisions go their way.

After Al Gore won his consolation prize Oscar, Maureen Dowd wondered in her February 28, 2007 column if seven years of hindsight vindication have caused him to wonder the woulda, coulda, shouldas.

When he’s finished Web surfing, tweaking his PowerPoint and BlackBerrying, what goes through his head? Does he blame himself? Does he blame the voting machines? Ralph Nader? Robert Shrum? Naomi Wolf? How about Bush Inc. and Clinton Inc.?

Anyone on that list bears some of the burden for the Gore defeat. It's comforting to have a scapegoat, but Maureen Dowd is just up in the booth calling the game. It’s up to the players on the field to win.

Blog Watch: OJ Al

Updated 10/8/07 9:20 P.M.

There are basically two reactions to Sunday’s column where Dowd channels Clarence Thomas as OJ Simpson as political po-mo piece of theater. The first reaction is to blanch at the gall of Dowd passing the blame on Gore’s defeat on to Thomas when conventional wisdom is that she single-handedly scuttled Internet Al by endlessly criticizing his wardrobe and choice of college roommates. Wonkette (where yours truly has been known to be found) sees it as MoDo confessing:

It has been a while since we actually read MoDo regularly, so maybe our grasp of her grasp of irony is a bit rusty, but the whole thing is kinda funny considering how Dowd herself is nearly as responsible for Al’s political destruction as one vilified member of the court that sold him out!

It wasn’t until we were 9 paragraphs in that we even realized it was a hilarious Anita Hill joke and not just a belated admission of guilt on Dowd’s actual behalf.

The other level of umbrage was to take aim at the rather casual racism of equating a Supreme Court Justice with a Heismann Trophy winning running back. After all, football stars are respected members of society. Mike Wacker at the Cornell Daily Sun thinks the metaphor got taken a little too far:

Dowd even goes so far as to accuse Thomas of lynching Al Gore, which makes absolutely no sense not only because Bush v. Gore had nothing to do with race, but also because the victim of the lynching, Gore, is white. Honestly, Dowd needs to get off her holier-than-thou podium and discover what real lynchings were like before she ever makes such an idiotic and insensitive comparison again.

No More Mister Nice Blog objects to the minstrelization of poor Clarence:

Ripple and Marvin Gaye. That's part of what MoDo wants you to laugh at regarding Clarence Thomas -- the image of him listening to black-guy music while drinking cheap black-guy wine. It's not her only line of attack, but why is it in there at all?

Finally, Scott Lemieux succinctly just objects to the whole roleplaying aspect of the column:

Please never try to write satire in another voice ever again.

Ironically, the fake inner monologue was used by MoDo several years ago on none other than Al Gore himself. Perhaps she has gone to that well once too many times.

The Real Killer

SPOILER WARNING:
This post reveals the M. Night Shyamalan style secret twist ending in the October 7, 2007 Maureen Dowd New York Times article.

I Did Do It
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 7, 2007

O. J. Simpson wrote a book called If I Did It describing the hypothetical scenario that would explain the death of his ex-wife and her boyfriend. Many people assume it is a thinly veiled confession. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has written an autobiography titled My Grandfather's Son. Dowd has mashed up her review copies. Today’s column is written in the first person as the alleged voice of Clarence Thomas confessing to a crime.

Fine. I did it. Everything A. said — let’s just use the initial because it’s still hard for me to speak the name of my victim and tormentor — was true.

I did what I had to do and I didn’t care if it ruined A.’s life. I didn’t even care if people thought it was obscene.

We of course assume that “A.” is Anita Hill who accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment and exposing her to obscene material. More details about his disdain for A. follows:

Not the sort of person I’d like to tailgate with, listen to Marvin Gaye with, share Ripple or a Scotch and Drambuie or a blackberry brandy with — if I were still drinking.

Marvin Gaye is mentioned in Thomas’s biography as someone he admired when he went through a phase of Black radicalism. Marvin Gaye was also a famous soul singer whose smooth vocal stylings are often used to set a romantic seductive mood.

Ripple was a very cheap fortified wine associated with winos and lower class African-Americans from its many references on the 70s sitcom Sanford and Son. Judge Thomas confesses to excessive drinking in his book:

"His terrible words still burned in my memory a decade and a half later. Had Daddy been right after all?" Thomas wrote, the anguish evident in his words. "I poured myself a large glass of scotch and Drambuie over ice and downed it greedily, alone with my thoughts and afraid of what lay ahead."

The book details his decision to never drink again. Armstrong Williams in an NPR interview says he never saw Thomas drink alcohol. Dubya has also abstained from alcohol without ever entering a formal recovery program.

They’ve even shown the lighter side of Clarence. My new friend, ABC’s Jan Crawford Greenburg, called me one of “the most complex, compelling, maligned and misunderstood figures in modern history.” And thank you, Steve Kroft. I never thought “60 Minutes” could be so sweet.

Greenburg wrote an eight part Sparks Notes synopsis of Thomas’s book for ABCNews.com. Dowd should be thanking Greenburg for not making her read the whole thing. Many of the details mentioned in Dowd’s column are also covered in a long 60 Minutes profile by Steve Kroft. Portions of it are available on the official CBS website, but longer excerpts are linked to from the Mirror On America blog.

Then we get all literary:

From the time I was a kid, when my white classmates made fun of me as “ABC” — “America’s Blackest Child” — the beast of rage against The Man has gnawed at my soul.

From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy discussion of war:

"It's just their defenselessness that tempts the tormentor, just the angelic confidence of the child who has no refuge and no appeal, that sets his vile blood on fire. In every man, of course, a beast lies hidden-the beast of rage, the beast of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the beast of lawlessness let off the chain, the beast of diseases that follow on vice, gout, kidney disease, and so on." (Brothers Karamazov, ii.V.4, "Rebellion")

It is unclear whether this passage is alluded to in Thomas’s book or MoDo’s imagination.

And this is the surprise twist ending:

So I voted to shut down the vote-counting in Florida by A. — oh, I’ll just say it: Al — because if he’d kept going he might have won. I helped swing the court in case No. 00-949, Bush v. Gore, to narrowly achieve the Bush restoration.

I know it wasn’t what my hero Atticus Finch would have done. But having the power to carjack the presidency and control the fate of the country did give me that old X-rated tingle.

Atticus Finch is the hero of high school English class staple To Kill a Mockingbird, a book Clarence Thomas relates to in his autobiography (via Harpers):

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I must have been thinking of To Kill a Mockingbird, in which Atticus Finch, a small-town southern lawyer, defends Tom Robinson, a black man on trial for the rape of a white woman.

Thomas’s current wife is white.

One of the accusations Anita Hill made was that Thomas was an aficionado of x-rated movies including the African-American pornstar Long Dong Silver.

Dowd’s wishful-thinking version of Thomas sums up:

It’s a relief to finally admit it: I’m proud to have hastened Al’s premature political death, hanging by hanging chads. It was, you might say, a low-tech lynching.

Maureen Dowd is often accused of aiding George W. Bush get elected by frequently criticizing Al Gore. Finally we now know the truth. It was Clarence Thomas avenging grudges and repaying old debts that did in Al Gore. In a twist worthy of a Scott Turrow novel, MoDo is off the hook because the real killer has confessed.