Daisy Does Des Moines

Deign or Reign?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 2, 2008

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…
-The Great Gatsby

In the final day before the Iowa caucuses, Maureen Dowd fires a final salvo against the Big Dog and Daisy:

She is speaking in a soft, measured voice in these final days, so that, as with Daisy Buchanan, you have to lean in to listen. But is she really different than she was in the years when she was so careless about the people around her getting hurt by the Clinton legal whirlwind that she was dubbed the Daisy Buchanan of the boomer set?

The Daisy dubbing was done by Joe Klein, then of Newsweek, back in 1995 surveying the damage done by Clintons quelling bimbo eruptions. The Jazz Age metaphor took root and has been used by Gail Sheehy and Bob Woodward, and of course the Dowdster herself. Back in 1996, she dedicated an entire column called Gulp Fiction to the arc of the Clintons-Klein relationship.

In the most explicit terms possible, Dowd reiterates her long held thesis concerning the Clinton candidacy:

The underlying rationale for her campaign is that she is owed. Owed for moving to Arkansas and giving up the name Rodham, owed for pretending to care about place settings and menus when she held the unappetizing title of first lady, owed for enduring one humiliation after another at the hands of her husband.

In the interest of equal time and to add a veneer of reporting justifying hotel nights in Iowa for an Ames byline, she quotes a potential caucuser that switched from Obama to Edwards.

Across town, Nancy Hibbs, a 57-year-old nurse, came to listen to John Edwards give his son-of-a-mill-worker rant against corporate greed, complete with a sneer aimed at Obama that anyone who thinks you can “just nice” the carnivorous Republican fat cats into submission is in “Never-Never Land.”

Ms. Hibbs had decided after seeing Barack Obama a year ago that she would vote for him. She saw him again Monday night in Ames and felt even more certain that he was the one. After listening to Edwards for 40 minutes on Tuesday, she up and changed her mind, deciding to vote for him.

That is the first time Dowd has spent as much as a full sentence on John Edwards since early July. But she prefers to focus on the other two lawyer couples in the race.

The presidential anglers here are dancing on the head of a pin. The Democratic race — three lawyers married to lawyers who talk too much — is very tight and very volatile. Even the jittery pack of seasoned political operatives gazing into their BlackBerrys doesn’t seem to have a clue which way the Iowa snowdrifts are blowing.

Maureen is off her game. The angels/anglers dancing on the head of a pin is just baffling and you don’t need a Weatherman to know which way the snowdrifts blow. She does valiantly stretch the dancing anglers line to shoehorn in one pop cultural call-out:

But Bill very much wants to be in the White House again. He is going around the state relentlessly, giving a speech as tightly choreographed with Hillary’s as a “Dancing With the Stars” routine.

But the focus is on the Hillary/Obama showdown. Dowd mixes a royal metaphor to emphasize the sense of entitlement:

If elected, would the old Hillary pop up, dragging us back to the dysfunctional Clinton kingdom?

And if Hillary is Guinevere to Bill’s Lancelot, Michelle Obama is Lady MacBeth keeping Barrack’s courage screwed to its sticking place.

Oddly, Barack and Michelle Obama also radiate a sense that they are owed. Not for a lifetime of sublimation and humiliation, but for this onerous campaign, for offering themselves up to save and uplift the nation, even though it disrupted their comfortable lives.

She told a group gathered at a nursing home in Grinnell on Monday that “Barack is one of the smartest people you will ever encounter who will deign to enter this messy thing called politics.”

So it comes down to this: Will Queen Hillary reign? Will Prince Barack deign? And who is owed more?

Might I suggest a Dancing with Lawyers dance-off between the Big Dog and Lady Michelle?

Curses!

Am I A Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Chameleon?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 30, 2007

If I hear your wicked words every day
And you used to be so sweet I heard you say
That my love was an addiction
Where we'll be our love is strong
When you go you're gone forever
Just dream along, just dream along

Karma karma karma karma karma kameleon
You come and go, you come and go
Loving would be easy if your colours were like my dreams
Red, gold and green
Red, gold and green
-Boy George

In her second column in a row, Maureen Dowd goes current-events-free tipping us off that this column could have been written anytime in the last six months. She opens with a New Agey bimbo prancing about her apartment.

Faith, the faith healer, is twirling a crystal over my green couch.

That would be the same couch that she sits on while Stephen Colbert guest writes her column for her.

Faith — yes, that’s her real name — explains that there are two common forms of curses. If you send out something negative, you also hold on to it. It’s like a cosmic fax machine. “So,” she says, “it has a definite negative impact on the soul.”

“I hope that doesn’t include writing critical columns,” I mumble.

I hope that this is not another hint that we are looking at a kinder gentler MoDo in the new year. Faith and Maureen dredge up some older bad karma:

The second kind is when someone curses you.

I think back. There was that time John Sununu, Poppy Bush’s raging-bull chief of staff, blew up at the White House after reading one of my stories about his arrogant behavior.

“I will destroy her,” he growled. “If it takes me the rest of my life, I will destroy her. I don’t know where or when, but I’ll get her.”

Could Sununu’s curse be hanging around my house, like gooey green smoke?

The Sununu Curse goes back to a column from July 16, 1995 called Running For My Life where she first found out that she had crossed George the First’s chubby chief of staff. From that column:

Naturally, I was thrilled. I knew about epic curses, the kind they have in Rigoletto and the Bible and "The Count of Monte Cristo," marked by fearsome magnitude and eternal duration, red plagues and green smoke.

But I never thought I would have one of my own.

I immediately called Mr. Sununu at home in New Hampshire to see if he was still trying to destroy me. But his wife, Nancy, said he was out. Uh, oh.

Mr. Sununu never called me back. It's just as well. I have had a change of heart about making up. Lunch I can always get. But an epic curse -- that's hard to come by.

But back to Faith, and the lack thereof:

Faith Green, a pretty, curvy 31-year-old green-eyed blonde, says she has studied tribal shamanism, rolfing, Pilates, tango, movement and stretching. She calls herself a “kinetic therapist.”

And a Google search reveals that rolfing is not what you do after drinking too many Dirty Cosmotinijitos. Rolfing is some sort of mystical variation on massage therapy and spinal adjustment, just without any of chiropractic medicine’s rigorous scientific underpinnings.

Her crystal pendulum also identified some “discordant energy” in my house from angels who were meant to protect me but who had fallen prey to bad energy themselves, and from disconsolate spirits who may have been in a religious order.

“Was I a nun in a past life?” I ask, conjuring up a glamorous image of myself as Audrey Hepburn in “The Nun’s Story” rather than Rosalind Russell in “The Trouble With Angels.”

No, Faith explains, these bummed-out trapped souls are lurking from the past. She suggests they may just be unhappy with their vows of poverty, chastity, celibacy and obedience. You don’t need a Ouija board to know that.

And I think its safe to say Maureen hasn’t taken any of those vows in her current life.

Faith puts stones under my back and tells me she can feel my heart opening like a flower blooming. I don’t really feel the blockages or the bloomings. But it’s a lot nicer lying on a table and listening to floaty, flute-y New Age music than it is sitting at a table and making a long list of insincere resolutions.

Finally, some hint at the year to come. No insincere resolutions, but definitely more resolute sincerity.

BlogWatch: Holiday Hopes

In keeping with the holiday spirit, in this week’s BlogWatch we are only going to cite people that have good things to say about Maureen Dowd. Our lead-off mashnote comes from Robert Bell who gushes about the latest Billary Bashing column:

She can turn a phrase, can't she?

She has put into words succinctly what I have been thinking.

Smart woman! Smarter than you-know-who!

Now Robert wrote that on BarackObama.com, so his partisanslip is showing. But on the other side of the blogosphere is Pajamas Media blog Classical Values that also liked the column.

Who is responsible for what Maureen Dowd says in her column? I'd like to give credit where credit is due, and I don't just mean the link. While I saw it this morning, I now see that Glenn Reynolds linked it late last night. He liked the "humiliating Hillary and lighting an exploding cigar when things are going well" part, but the whole thing is a hoot.

I have to say, it was gratifying this morning to see some of my own thoughts echoed (if not seconded) by a left wing feminist.

Plenty of conservatives like Maureen even when she isn’t Bobbitting the Clenis. Tom Roeser makes this unusual comparison:

I gush over Maureen Dowd who is about as good as Ann Coulter in her way.

The Dowdster is about the only nominal liberal on his reading list. Roeser loves Bill Kristol and thinks National Review is much better since they got rid of that pompous windbag Bill Buckley, so comparing Maureen to Coulter is a good thing in his eyes.

Dowd’s Christmas column got a lot of links from people that normally don’t delve into politics. Library Crunch loved the maternal wisdom of the piece:

Thanks to Maureen Dowd (and her mother) for this wonderful holiday season reminder:

“Don’t cry over things that can’t cry over you.”

The Errant Æsthete called it

A surprisingly sentimental column from The New York Times‘ mellifluous scourge Maureen Dowd.

I like “mellifluous scourge” and intend to borrow the phrase some day.

And finally, from the New Years predictions of the National Review Online staff comes a left-handed right-wing compliment from Jonah Goldberg:

Maureen Dowd will become readable again because she can write about what she knows, bitchy liberal gossip and backbiting.

And in the holiday spirit we’ll take that as a good thing.

The Christmas Horse

A Tale of Trigger
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 26, 2007

As re-reported in Dowd Report earlier, Maureen Dowd was spotted getting a bagful of copies of Caroline Kennedy’s A Family Christmas signed at Politics and Prose in DC. She can now expense her Christmas shopping as research since she made it the centerpiece of her Boxing Day column.

She mines the book for jokes by Groucho Marx, doggerel from Calvin Trillan, letter’s to the Macy’s Santa, and the personal letters of Caroline’s daddy, JFK.

And in a heart-warming story, she tells just how long she can hold a grudge:

When I was little, I got one of those wooden horses that bounced on springs for Christmas. I loved him and rode him every day.

One morning, I came down to the porch and the horse was gone. My mom explained that a poor woman and her son had walked by, and the little boy had stopped and stared longingly at the horse.

My mom’s world was turned upside down when she lost the father she adored at 12, so she had a soft spot for children who hurt. On a police widow’s pension, she was always mailing a few dollars off to St. Jude’s or to children she had read about who were hungry or needed an operation.

When she told me that she had given my horse to another child — a stranger — I was crushed. Whenever we fought for the next 16 years, I reminded her of her perfidy.

On my 21st birthday, I came home to find a bouncing horse with a handwritten sign in its mouth. “Hi. I’m back!” It was signed: “Trigger.”

According to her Mormon Temple tale, she still just a kid when that happened, but she took away an important lesson from her mother’s passive-aggressive behavior:

Her lesson was lovely: that materialism and narcissism can only smother life — and Christmas — if you let them.

She ends the column with another quote from the Kennedy kid book:

In a piece reprinted in the Kennedy anthology, Henry van Dyke writes: “Are you willing ... to own, that probably the only good reason for your existence is not what you are going to get out of life, but what you are going to give to life; to close your book of complaints against the management of the universe and look around you for a place where you can sow a few seeds of happiness ... to make a grave for your ugly thoughts and a garden for your kindly feelings ...? Then you can keep Christmas.”

Does this mean we can look forward to less sarcastic bitterness from the Dowdster in the coming year? Let’s hope not. I like it when she gets on her high horse.

C'est Moi

Savior or Saboteur?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 23, 2007

C'est moi! C'est moi!
I'm forced to admit
'Tis I, I humbly reply
That mortal who
These marvels can do
C'est moi, c'est moi, 'tis I
I've never lost
In battle or game
I'm simply the best by far

-Alan Jay Lerner
and Frederick Loewe

Maureen Dowd returns to what she does best, Billary bashing. She claims to be reluctant to draw from this well again.

Just when I thought I was out, the Clintons pull me back into their conjugal psychodrama.

Methinks she protests too much, since he does it with such relish and gusto. Her thesis is that the Clintons symbiotically thrive on crisis.

Is Bill torn between resentment of being second fiddle and gratification that Hillary can be first banana only with his help? Their relationship has always been a co-dependence between his charm and her discipline.

She identifies Hillary’s biggest weakness as the person without whom she would never even be considered a candidate, Slick Willie. Bill of course has a different opinion.

Hillary advisers noted that when Bill was asked by a supporter in South Carolina what his wife’s No. 1 priority would be, he replied: C’est moi! “The first thing she intends to do is to send me ...” he began.

With the “C’est moi!” interjection, Dowd is not implying that Bill thinks he is the Sun King. Instead, she is comparing him to the very arrogant Lancelot from Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot, which provided the central metaphor of a much older Democratic dynasty.



In this case, history is repeating itself not as tragedy, but as “endless soap opera”.

And Billary bashing brings out the best in in Maureen’s alliterative alacrity:

Is Bill a loyal spouse or a subconscious saboteur?

Or is he freelancing because he relishes his role as head of the party his wife is trying to take over?

Certainly Bill wants to repay Hill for those traumatic times when he had to hide behind her skirt.

He suggests to Matt Bai in today’s Times Magazine that she can be F.D.R. to his Teddy Roosevelt, getting through the ideas that fell flat the first time.

Maybe the Boy Who Can’t Help Himself is simply engaging in his usual patterns of humiliating Hillary and lighting an exploding cigar when things are going well.

And in that line, Dowd gives Bill a new moniker. In 1992, he flopped in Iowa only to show promise (but not winning) in New Hampshire. He dubbed himself the Comeback Kid. Now as the Boy That Can’t Help Himself, he is the loose cannon prone to friendly fire. Not only can’t he help himself, he will end up hurting Hillary and sinking her hopes for higher office.

BlogWatch: Rush To Agreement

Check for falling mercury in Hades when Rush Limbaugh and Maureen Dowd agree on something and that something is defending Hillary Clinton. The reaction to Dowd’s 12/19 column about that Drudge picture got a lot of reaction all over the map. Mark Finkelstein at NewsBusters braced himself for outrage that never came.

Surely Dowd would seek to unload on Rush for having said, in commenting on an unflattering photo of Hillary that turned up on Drudge.

To the contrary, Dowd seconded Rush's read, added some analysis of her own of Hillary's looks . . . and ended with a hit on Hillary rougher than anything Rush had said.

The Hillary Project concurs:

Rush Limbaugh's ruminations on the Drudge photo of Hillary's wrinkles prompt Maureen Dowd to say Limbaugh is right about our living in a looks-obsessed society.

From the distaff side, Jill of Brilliant at Breakfast comes up with a great jab at Dowd’s perpetual relationship navel-gazing:

We know that the way our society treats older women is vexing to Dowd, who continues to behave in interviews with men as if she's the cutest girl at the malt shop and can't understand why they treat her like a columnist for one of the most prestigious newspaper in the country instead of like the cheerleader they want to take up to Lookout Point.

It's sad, then, that Dowd, whose Hillary-loathing probably outdoes even Limbaugh's, can't even put that away long enough to recognize that the furor over "Teh Photo" represents the very ageism that has MoDo, who is a good-looking woman for any age, having difficulty getting a date.

I love the malt shop metaphor. It just nails it.

Ron Coleman at Likelihood Of Success also takes a more critical look:

In a clever piece called “Rush to Judgment,” decently-well-aging Maureen Dowd accuses Rush Limbaugh of jumping in on the Hillary-is-aging-fast bandwagon.

The worst thing Rush Limbaugh can be accused of here is acknowleding (sic) that this picture exists, and that it could have a political effect. For Maureen Dowd, however, actually reading, comprehending and considering a Rush Limbaugh essay is out of the question. He’s all fat and stuff.

It seems Ron is the one obsessed with looks and weight. Maureen didn't call anybody names, for once.

But does Limbaugh think Dowd misunderstood or misrepresented him? Here are his exact words from the December 20, 2007 transcript of his show:

Now, Maureen Dowd and some others have understood, and the gals on The View got it right.

If Rush said it, then that settles it.

Age Lines

Rush to Judgment
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 19, 2007

What does it take to get Maureen Dowd to write a column sympathetic to Hillary Clinton? How about a tag-team drive-by attack by Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh insinuating that the 60-year-old Hillary Clinton looks like a 60-year-old woman and that is somehow a Bad Thing.

When men want to put down a powerful woman in a sexist way, they will say she’s a hag or a nag or a witch or angry or hysterical.

Dowd observes that these attacks haven’t stopped Hillary as her campaign team finds way to soften her image, if not her age lines.

But some conservative pundits who disagree with a woman on matters of policy jump straight into an attack on the woman’s looks or personal life.

And so the inevitable came to pass this week when Rush Limbaugh began riffing about an unflattering picture of Hillary in New Hampshire that Matt Drudge put up on his Web site with the caption, “The Toll of a Campaign.”

Rush Limbaugh uses this as the jumping off point for a trademarked bloviating rant on how the office of the Presidency prematurely ages its occupants. At one point he almost wistfully regrets:

Do you think a bloated president could win? We had plenty of fat-guy presidents. Do you think one could get elected today? There's not a prayer!

But the line that draws Maureen’s ire is:

Observing that Hillary is stuck with a looks-obsessed culture and that the presidency ages its occupants, including W., Limbaugh observed that “men aging makes them look more authoritative, accomplished, distinguished. Sadly, it’s not that way for women, and they will tell you.”

And Hillary, he noted, “is not going to want to look like she’s getting older, because it will impact poll numbers, it will impact perceptions.” So, he added, “there will have to be steps taken to avoid the appearance of aging.”

He said that voters lean toward attractive men, too, and that since TV, it’s less likely that a bloated “fat-guy” president would get elected — recalling that some were gauging whether Al Gore would run by checking his weight.

I wonder if Dowd isn’t referring to herself in the third person here. From her May 23, 2007 column, “Pass The Clam Dip” she had these observations of the earth-sized Al Gore:

It’s no wonder Al Gore is a little touchy about his weight, what with everyone trying to read his fat cells like tea leaves to see if he’s going to run.

He was so determined to make his new book look weighty, in the this-treatise-belongs-on-the-shelf-between-Plato-and-Cato sense, rather than the double-chin-isn’t-quite-gone-yet sense, that he did something practically unheard of for a politician: He didn’t plaster his picture on the front.

The Goracle does concede a small author’s picture on the inside back flap, a chiseled profile that screams Profile in Courage and that also screams Really Old Picture.

Diane [Sawyer on “Good Morning America”] was not so easily put off as he turned up his nose at the horse race and the vast wasteland of TV, and bored in for the big question: “Donna Brazile, your former campaign manager, has said, ‘If he drops 25 to 30 pounds, he’s running.’ Lost any weight?”

In her defense, Dowd concludes that it shouldn’t matter what Al weighs if he wants to weigh in on the campaign.

Mr. Traub said that, as he followed the ex-vice president around, the Goracle was “eating like a maniac: I watched him inhale the clam dip at a reception like a man who doesn’t know when his next meal will be coming.”

If Al Gore is really unplugged and uncensored, as Tipper and his fans say, then he is no longer bound by the opinions of gurus, mercenaries and focus groups. He can be himself, and inhale away and still run if he wants.

But back to Hillary, the double standard where men are “distinguished” and women are “well-preserved” makes Dowd fume:

Women are still scrutinized more critically on their looks, which seem to fluctuate more on camera, depending on lighting, bloating and wardrobe.

Mitt Romney, Barack Obama and John Edwards almost always look good, and pretty much the same, in dark suits or casual wear. Fred Thompson always looks crepuscular and droopy. Often Hillary looks great, and sometimes she looks tired, heavier or puffier. Jim Cole, The Associated Press photographer who took the offending shot, said that there were several other pictures that day where she looked “radiant.”

As a case in point, Wonkette, the usually kick-them-when-they’re-down snarkfest, puts together a more flattering picture of Hillary and compares it to recent photos of other candidates in their early sixties and Senator Clinton doesn't fare too badly.

Maureen compliments Hillary and her handlers on the consistency they have brought to the former First Lady’s image.

Since this is the first time we’ve had a woman who was a serious contender for president, it’s been an adjustment to watch her more changeable looks, and to see the lengths she goes to get the right lighting and to make the right wardrobe choices. She has a much more consistent look than she did as first lady, when she made a dizzying — and disconcerting — array of changes in her hair and style.

Dowd concludes by saying that if you are going to attack Clinton, go for her apparent lack of substance, not her appearance.

Hillary doesn’t have to worry about her face. She has to worry about her mask. Back in the ’92 race, Clinton pollsters devised strategies to humanize her and make her seem more warm and maternal. Fifteen years later, her campaign is devising strategies to humanize her and make her seem more warm and maternal.

The public still has no idea of what part of her is stage-managed and focus-grouped, and what part is legit. It’s pretty pathetic, at this stage of her career, that she has to wage a major offensive, by helicopter and Web testimonials, to make herself appear warm-blooded.

And nothing gets Dowd hotter under the color than cheap shots at women of a certain age who manage to remain relevant as they age gracefully.