Second, the argument continues, she has squandered that gift to write cynical, nihilistic riffs on the connections between pop culture and politics. (An impression she did little to alter by remarking, on winning the prize, "I'm just so grateful to President Clinton that he never spoke the words, 'Young lady, pull down that jacket and get back to the typing pool.'")

I'm with Dowd's critics on many points, but I don't think either of these arguments holds. First, I've never grasped the hyping of Dowd as master stylist, at least in her op-ed columns -- pretty much standard-issue metro-column fare, with generous deployment of teeny-weeny sentences, one-sentence grafs and repetition, repetition, repetition, e.g.:

Once Ross Perot wanted to make the Patsy Cline song "Crazy" his campaign theme.

At the rate things are deteriorating in our capital, we might consider it for the national anthem. Cher could sing it today at the Super Bowl.

Washington has wigged out.

Conversely, it's in linking politics and pop culture -- the very trademark that marked her as superficial -- that she has made a positive contribution. Dowd recognized that such a hybrid perspective was essential to understanding a politics in which presidents use recovery-movement speech and send signals by eating pork rinds. I say that knowing full well that she's used the strategy to wildly overreach (using "Seinfeld," say, to portray the baby boom as a generation about nothing) and used it as a crutch (i.e., to write columns about nothing). And when she applies it outside domestic politics -- e.g., writing lately on Kosovo -- she seems hopelessly petty and out of her depth. In other words, Dowd popularized an important tool for understanding the world today -- but herself uses it poorly. And ironically, Dowd actually takes the most flak among media- and culture-crit professionals who owe far more to her success than they'd like to admit.

Does Maureen Dowd believe in nothing? When New York magazine published a hand-wringing poll last year showing the public's disdain for the media, Dowd was one of the few writers to say that journalists who whine about their poll numbers are no better than Dick Morris. Dowd is willing to be hated, even if -- as Kennedy points out astutely -- she generally deals with it by isolating herself from the people she writes about (she once described being struck dumb when Lewinsky cornered her in a restaurant to ask why Dowd was so nasty to her). You could say that Maureen Dowd believes in being an asshole, which is not an insignificant journalistic tenet.

More to the point, why is it so important to us that Maureen Dowd believe in something, other than showing our leaders in a harsh light? That her writing, and her imitators, reflect a growing disillusionment with politics that has festered for decades? Come on. We have a president who took a vacation based on polling results; we routinely watch our elections go to the highest bidder. And yet Maureen Dowd and her ilk have made us cynical? In fact, these criticisms of Dowd often come off like frustration with politics and the electorate in general. Why can't the media force people to care more!

Would I have given Maureen Dowd the prize? No -- because, shallow me, I think she's not that hot a writer, not because she hasn't restored America's faith in politics or made a better world. But I have to admit that she took a topic that was perfect for her -- whatever that says about her -- and for better or worse, owned it for a year. If that's not the dictionary definition of Pulitzer-worthiness, it's at least a reasonable argument. For all of her nastiness and embarrassing Hollywood-on-the-Potomac dancing, she was perhaps the columnist in the Lewinsky scandal who advanced the truism "I hate both sides of this mess" and actually sounded like she meant it -- at least as evidenced by the legions on both sides who ended up hating her. In the end, you might be able to gauge her worthiness for the prize by the cries that she should never have gotten it.
salon.com | April 14, 1999

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