One of the things that happens in the world of digital media is that your published writings are always at your fingertips and can vanish in an instant. Some publications go under entirely and their back catalog disappears. Today I was discussing a new Maureen Dowd column about the “coup,” as she put it, against Joe Biden (good lord…) and I was reminded that the first piece of journalism I ever published in an actual publication was about Dowd. I tried to find it and realized it was no longer online. But I didn’t want to leave it there, so I went back to my email archive, found the emails with the person who edited it and got the original URL. With the original URL I was able to track it down on the WayBack Machine. My memory was a bit off. But I was close. It wasn’t the first piece I published. That was two years earlier. I conflated the two because they were both published in the same publication, Feed Magazine, one of the great now-departed publications from the first wave of Internet journalism.
I was excited to find it. It was a piece I was kind of proud of because I was still very early in my journalism career and I was able to hit a number of themes that were important to me. Reading it again I realize that a number of those are ones that have been constants through my writing at TPM. I realized that since I own the copyright and the publication was defunct (for at least 20 years) I should simply republish it here at TPM so it’s resurrected digitally and I can refer back to it whenever needed.
It was published on April 19th, 1999, on the occasion of Dowd receiving a Pulitzer for her commentary on the Lewinsky scandal. The original, as published 25 years ago, you can find after the jump.
Bittersweet Nothing, published April 19th, 1999, Feed Magazine.
“LIBERTIES,” Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times, has become such a part of the New York-DC zeitgeist that her Pulitzer for commentary is less of an award than a reaffirmation of received wisdom. Dowd won the prize for what the jury called her “fresh and insightful columns on the impact of President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.” It may be the only medal anyone got as a result of the scandal, but not everyone was happy about it. Dowd’s work elicits a broad range of opinions — all of them strong. Where her admirers see an artful mixture of pop culture and politics, detractors read every column as a race-to-the-finish between nihilism and nastiness. Can anyone accuse Dowd of failing to write for her times?
And yet, Dowd’s critics say, that’s precisely where the problem lies. Since its 1995 launch, her column has blazed a trail for a new kind of political commentary; one that focuses less on ideology or policy — on good government or bad — and more on style, classiness, and panache. And by that measure, Bill Clinton consistantly came up short. After the Lewinsky scandal broke last January, Dowd spent the year shifting back and forth between alternate visions of the President, without ever deciding between them. In one, the President was a provincial hayseed who’d been invited to a D.C. society mixer and mooned the hostess. In the other, he was an Ozarks Mephistopheles who’d beguiled the nation with an ever-swelling Dow Jones. Though she tried to pass it off as something loftier, Dowd’s axe to grind with the President was never about policies, or fecklessness, or even corruption. His real crime, in Dowd’s eyes, was being feloniously gauche.
As the President came out from under the cloud of impeachment to deliver his State of the Union address, Dowd whined that he had “detached himself from the mess he caused, without even a trace of irony.” Her deepest criticism seemed to be that Clinton had created a “double-entendre Presidency, where the nightly news is now the nightly gross-out, where talk of an address to the nation collapses into snickering about a dress to the nation.” Ultimately, there was always something odd and paradoxical about Dowd’s endless array of anti-Clinton zingers: if Clintonism was defined by an abundance of talent, appetite, and ambition at the expense of any real purpose or direction, then Dowd was the ultimate Clintonite.
In its entirety, Dowd’s running commentary on the Lewinsky scandal embodied everything dubious and damaging about the press’s conduct last year. And that’s what made the decision to honor her work so appalling. When I heard that Dowd had received the award, I was reminded of Talleyrand’s assessment of the restored Bourbon monarchy, recalled from exile after Napoleon’s fall: they had “learned nothing,” he said, “and forgotten nothing.” It’s hard to resist saying the same thing about our press.
There’s nothing wrong with edgy commentary, of course. Style and verve are praiseworthy in and of themselves, and edginess is the coin of the realm for every writer today. Earlier this week, Salon columnist James Poniewozik cautioned us that mean-spiritedness shouldn’t have cost Dowd her Pulitzer, and I agree that nastiness alone is no disqualification. But I wonder if Dowd’s brand of political journalism can keep from collapsing into what amounts to a Society Page look at civic life. This is roughly what happened in 1998, as the entire East Coast journalistic elite became a sort of virtual Algonquin Club, gangling the length of the Northeast Corridor and exchanging endless bon mots, but imparting little wisdom or perspective. Cleverness, wit, and a delicious nastiness do not, by themselves, amount to a vibrant political sensibility.
Dowd’s fellow pundits exhibited just enough awareness of their decadent attraction to the whole sordid mess to save themselves from becoming insufferable. But Dowd herself lacked such self-reflective saving graces. For many, the furtive joy in following the Lewinsky scandal lay in appreciating its luscious hypocrisy: the guilty pleasure of indulging one’s prurience and prudishness at the same time. But Dowd remained militant in her frivolity. Even as the media was whipping itself up into frenzies of self-flagellation, Dowd would have none of it. “The impure history of modern America — Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-contra — proves that reporters have a duty to dig for the truth, whatever the public thinks,” she railed. “The danger is that next time, when the cover-up takes place in a less gray area, reporters will look at the numbers and go home early. Next time it may not be about sex and lies. It may be about life and death.”
Dowd was criticized mercilessly for that line, and deservedly so: wasn’t it precisely the point that Vietnam and Watergate were about life and death, while Monica-gate was just a dimwit’s burlesque? At her most strident moments Dowd seemed incapable of shoring up her outrage with facts or explanations. Which may be why the standard rap on Dowd came to be that of a marvelous stylist who didn’t really believe in anything outside of her own virtuosity.
But that judgment misses the point. The problem with Dowd isn’t that she lacks beliefs, or that she values style over content. It’s that Dowd’s values are those of the Society Page, and her questions too narrow to encompass the whole of our nation’s public life. Dowd isn’t a nihilist stylist. She’s a master theoretician for cosmopolitan moderates whose political centrism is rooted, not in an instinctual pull toward the politics of consensus, but in a blasé disdain for government in all it’s messiness. If Joe Klein represents the radical middle, Dowd is the voice of the supercilious center.
Those who rushed to the defense noted that, for all her Clinton-bashing, Dowd spilled her bile in all directions. (When things got rough for Ken Starr last fall, she turned against him, too.) But at the end of the day, Dowd’s sort of equal-opportunity cattiness simply won’t do. Serious issues were at stake in what happened last year — ones that no thoughtful political observer, whether on the Right or the Left, could ignore. Inane as the Presiden’t transgressions were, I always felt that they paled in comparison to the right’s idiot jihad against him; the perverse assaults on privacy and civil liberties, the reckless rattling of the constitutional order, and the excesses of the media. From her first column to the last, the real questions never saw the light of day.
Even in our apolitical times, commentary should be more than a collection of scissor-sharp sentences. Each year, the Pulitzers say something about how the press understands its role in our public life; the news this week was that Dowd’s apolitical scribbling now constitutes an orthodoxy. And if that wasn’t the message Pulitzer’s jurors were trying to send with their award, the real scandal is that having read through all the praiseworthy writing that appeared last year, they settled on Dowd’s not so sweet nothings.
