In the spring of 2008, I was sitting in a coffee shop on Broadway, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and a tall, straight, fine-looking woman, about eighty-five years old, mysteriously stopped at my table. We were complete strangers. She was holding a copy of the New York Times in her hand. “Did you read that woman today?” she said. “I think she’s mad.” And then she walked out, without another word.
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Maureen Dowd, the popular Washington columnist of the Times, can make other political writers look obtuse and bland. She assumes certain things that give her an enormous advantage – rhetorically, at least. She assumes that everyone in politics is out for himself; that principles or beliefs in a politician are a set of self-flattering delusions; that the powerful are moved by jealousy, rivalry, narcissism, and fear of every sort – fear of being thought weak, most of all. She knows everything about poseurs and posing. But does she know anything else about politics?
Utterly repelled by piety and righteousness, she also seems bored by genuine advocacy. Disgusted by unbounded ambition, she never seems to wonder what an ambitious leader might do besides gratify himself. Her appetite for ridicule equals any politician’s appetite for power, and maybe the two hungers aren’t all that different. On the page, she attempts to dominate the mighty, exacting the revenge of the weak. Of course, political writers have often done that. If they aren’t insiders, what else can they do? Yet there’s something oddly naive and puritanical about Dowd. How, one wonders, does a politician define himself, attract others, and assume leadership without some degree of calculation, conscious self-dramatization, and even mythmaking – exactly what Dowd sees as ridiculous?
Comedy can be as savage as a serpent’s tooth if it’s accompanied by a few good ideas, and that’s where the problem begins. Maureen Dowd has rhythm, pace, timing, an extraordinary ear, an amazing memory for odd bits of cultural flotsam. She’s a brilliant aphorist who, in a few words, can say something it would take another writer paragraphs to spell out. She uses all the traditional tools of comedy – exaggeration, lampoon, insult, outrageous puns, fantasia – and gives them her own twist. She seems to have read everything, and she’s shrewd about popular culture, particularly about the way movies colonize the country’s unconscious.
Yet she has not – as far as I can tell – a single political idea in her head. Not one. Not a policy she wants to advocate or defend, a direction she thinks the government and the country should be heading toward. What is the purpose of politics and government, anyway? She writes as if personality, appearance, and attitude were the only things that mattered. For her, politics is a stupid, despair-inducing entertainment, a tale told by an idiot signifying vanity. Despite all her larks and inventions, she’s essentially sour and without hope. In brief, she’s the most gifted writer of snark in the country.
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Take Dowd’s treatment of the emergence of Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate. Here were the embarrassing and exploitable possibilities of gender and sex roles, all in play at once. In January, in New Hampshire, Hillary momentarily broke into tears:
There was a poignancy about the moment, seeing Hillary crack with exhaustion from decades of yearning to be the principal rather than the plus-one. But 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.
One can find insinuations like this dazzling in their quick procession yet also wonder if any of them are true. Maybe no such calculations and regrets took place; maybe Clinton was just exhausted and lost control for a few seconds. In any case, why was Dowd pretending to be angered that someone who had long sought the presidency might have been upset by the thought of losing it? What’s surprising about that?
At times, Dowd seemed eager to punish Hillary for her ambitions, as if deep down she were alarmed by the idea of a woman making so great a claim for herself, and snark filled the space where sympathy – or perhaps rueful appreciation-should have been. And, of course, what Clinton actually wanted to do as president – which, after all, might have validated her presumption – was of no interest to Dowd. Policy is for drips.
Dowd went back into her damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you don’t mode. She scored off Hillary for her momentary self-pity (if that’s what it was) and then for opportunism and ruthlessness. Hillary was a sobbing weak sister dependent on her husband; Hillary was a ball-breaker. Snark exults in the tropes of gender, and Dowd genderizes everything, sexualizes everything.
If Hillary Clinton is essentially masculine, Barack Obama is essentially feminine, a man in touch “with his inner chick.” After years of mocking the macho posturing of the Bush administration, Dowd was suddenly back in the bar with the boys, teasing a woman who wanted power and a man trying to handle tough competition with grace. Barack Obama was “Obambi”; he was “a pretty boy” and a “diffident debutante.” There’s something both grasping and pathetic in Dowd’s dissatisfaction, and she passes that dissatisfaction on to the reader as a kind of blight. The laughter dies before it hits the belly.
Dowd recast a rough but not especially vicious nomination battle into an imaginary sex war; she tabloidized something that was actually far more interesting. Her writing was a desperate, disjointed, and demoralized performance, and it left many readers enraged.
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Let us propose the simplest possible ambiguity – that Hillary Clinton hungrily wants power and, with equal desire, wants to alleviate poverty and help people get medical coverage. Isn’t it likely that both drives fully coexist within her, rather than, as Dowd would have it, ambition simply runs roughshod over everything else? Hillary got away from Dowd; the journalist never pulled together a coherent portrait of a woman who had obsessed her for years. Before the Democratic convention, in late August, Dowd concocted a fantasia in which Hillary and John McCain were colluding in an attempt to destroy Obama. When both Hillary and Bill Clinton performed well at the convention, selling Obama as best as they could, Dowd never acknowledged the performance, never admitted her misjudgment. Again, she came off as naive: In the end, Bill and Hillary Clinton were not quite the self-absorbed narcissists that Dowd made them out to be but professional politicians, doing their best to sustain their currency in the Democratic Party. And as Hillary was slipping away from her, Dowd found it harder and harder to get a handle on Obama.
At one point, she wrote a column in which she complained that Obama’s ascendancy meant the country was in danger of losing its sense of humor – as if Dowd’s inability to solve her compositional problems were a national issue that everyone should be concerned about.
Like the ravenous Cyclops, snark sees with one eye. And then it complains that other people lack dimensions.
Excerpted from “Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal and It’s Ruining Our Conversation” by David Denby, copyright 2009. Reprinted with permission of Simon & Schuster.