corrente

Maureen Dowd is filing from Des Moines, these days, unsurprisingly, being primarily a political columnist, although reading her first two from there, one could be forgiven for being surprised she's chosen to be primarily a political columnist, or that anyone is willing to pay her to write primarily political commentary. Then again, maybe not.

Both columns are vintage MoDo, the same tripe she’s been peddling for years, cunt-ish, clever, and ultimately clueless in its unstated insistence that all political targets are equal because all things political are either substanceless matters of style, or substantive matters so tawdry with compromise, so gooey and gummy from the press of sticky fingers that even her lordly contempt can't redeem them.

Okay, time out. How dare I use a gender-charged cliche like "cunt" to attack a female columnist? Am I really saying that MoDo's "ideas" arise from her vagina? Would I ever use that word in reference to a male columnist, even one who is as corrupted by cynicism as she is?

Quick answers: I dared, despite hesitations, because it was the word that came to mind. But possession of an actual vagina should not be considered causal here. As to male columnists, probably not, though many are as deserving of that epithet as she is. It’s a word with a nasty history, I admit, but it conveys with a certain street authenticity the nastiness that Dowd is about (as a columnist, not as a private person, information about which I have none) that a word like "snarky" doesn’t come anywhere near getting at. Okay, enough "cunt" talk.

So why even bother: haven't we established there’s a good MoDo, and a bad one; isn't it enough she's been willing to attack Dubya, and found herself reviled for it?

No. There is only one MoDo; she's the bad twin and there is no other. Even when she takes on the Bush administration, even when her "take" is well-taken, it's outweighed by her underlying contempt for politics, which is to say, democratic governance.

Ask yourself what this column is about. Then tell me. Please. Topics are certainly mentioned, Bush, the moon, Iraq, the Clinton’s transcendentally wacky marriage, but the flow of words and ideas resists being about anything, which, as Larry David has taught us, isn't the same thing as being about nothing. Dowd has no interest in the political quotidian; she abhors the nit and the grit, the nuts and the bolts of a working democracy. Nor is she an astute social observer, except in the sense that she has an unerring eye for what clichés are au courant, and what clichés can be dusted off and made new again.

The first hard evidence most people had that Howard Dean was actually married came with a startling picture of his wife on the front page of Tuesday's Times, accompanying a Jodi Wilgoren profile.

In worn jeans and old sneakers, the shy and retiring Dr. Judith Steinberg Dean looked like a crunchy Vermont hippie, blithely uncoiffed, unadorned, unstyled and unconcerned about not being at her husband's side — the anti-Laura. You could easily imagine the din of Rush Limbaugh and Co. demonizing her as a counterculture fem-lib role model for the blue states.

Uh, I don't know, Mo; shouldn't Howard's many verbal references to "his wife," to one "Judith," and sometimes to a "Judy," (oh dear, hope that doesn't indicate a possible identity crises on the part of either Dean) rate as fairly hard evidence? What’s the issue here; that Howard Dean may have invented a fantasy wife who doesn’t exist, like that wacky, fearful-of-Virginia Wolfe couple, Martha & George with their imaginary child? If so, surely there have been other telltale indications that Judith Steinberg Dean is real; other Vermonters who remember meeting her, like her patients, or her children, or her children's friends and their parents; Vermont must have newspapers; surely their archives could have provided evidence that the Governor’s doctor wife exists? And there's always the AMA.

Crunchy Vermont hippie? A slight refreshening of the utterly stale granola reference; really slight. But in what alternate universe does "hippie" call to mind "worn jeans and old sneakers," "unadorned, unstyled"? Hippies were all about style; their jeans and sneakers were festooned with adornment, not to mention their impulse to use their bodies as a canvas.

I’ll give this to Dowd; her rhetorical sloppiness is of a very high order. And if the very notion of a Doctor who takes seriously the Hippocratic oath she swore to uphold is, as MoDo asserts, easily imaginable fodder for the Limbaugh demonizing machine, does that tell us more about Limbaugh, the lady doctor, or Maureen Dowd, to whom it would never occur to ask such a question?

Bubbling below the surface of this particular brew-haha is this never quite stated gossipy question: since as those in the know (variously referred to as "some women," "many political analyists," "even some who admired," and "one political reporter here,") agree, Howard Dean could use his wife’s help about now, to add "warmth" to his "heat," to vouch for his possession of core values, or just to share his "wild political ride," under which category it is appropriate to include, in the world according to Dowd, "the repatriation ceremony of his brother's remains in Hawaii," which, in fairness MoDo does call "poignant," isn’t there something weirder than weird about his wife's absence, and maybe about the marriage itself?

If Dr. Dean, the wife, has so little passion to see Dr. Dean, the presidential candidate, succeed, shouldn’t voters be asking why?

Perhaps Dowd is as unclear as she is about what she’s really getting at because Tim Noah already beat her to this particular sucker punch.

And if Dr. Dean, the wife, does show up in Iowa, as one would imagine she might for the last couple of days, be assured, the trap is ready to snap shut.

It will be interesting to see, if her husband falters, whether the exigencies of politics will require her to make a house call on his campaign. (emphasis mine)

What Maureen Dowd can be trusted always to report straightforwardly, and with a generous respect, is what's being said at the lunchtable where all the cool kids eat.

Since the frugal, no-frills couple does not subscribe to cable TV, she has not even seen much of the virtual campaign, and has to go into his Vermont campaign headquarters if she wants to watch a debate.

"What will she tell their grandkids?" wondered one political reporter here. "Yeah, Grandpa was once a front-runner for president with crowds all over America cheering him but I was too busy to go see it?"

Only the cool kids could think that keeping track of your husband's campaign by watching C-Span at home on your own cable TV is somehow more real and involving than a wife going down to her husband's campaign office to do so, or that frugality is the only reason for not having "cable." The stunningly silly crack about the grandkids is beneath comment.

For those of you who have come this far with me, I can almost feel your unease at this heavy expenditure of time and energy on someone who could as well be ignored. I wish. I'd like to think I'm wrong. But I don't. I think Maureen Dowd shapes the landscape of our political discourse a lot more than we voters do.

In Part Two, I propose to widen this discussion to include two much better writers, Frank Rich and Michael Chabon, who, nonetheless, sup at that same cool kids lunchtable; my hoped for purpose, to initiate a discussion of what we can actually do about adding a few more landscape shapers to the democratic (small "d," please note) equation, and what self-exmination we may need to submit our own attitutdes toward "politics," and "politicians" to be successful in such an endeavor.