Last week New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd won the Pulitzer Prize for it. The award sanctified what many consider to be a heretical shattering of the hallowed granite of the Times op-ed page–Opinions From the Mount, each pinned neatly to an ideological matrix. Instead, she’s the dinner-party columnist, a must-read obsession for a generation of left-liberal boomers who haven’t felt inspired by anything besides their mutual funds since some long-ago Cuomo speech. No race. No environment. No foreign policy. No abortion. Her compass is whatever offends her sensibility. Clinton is the “priapic President” whose “escapades are cheesy and depressing.” Hillary’s a “counterfeit feminist” who looked the other way in exchange for power. Starr’s a “stalker” who “couldn’t stop thinking about the thong underwear.” Politics is on some level showbiz–who can argue?–and she’s the snarkiest critic. She hates navel-gazing, feel-your-pain New Age earnestness, psychobabble, pomposity. Her much-imitated style is a species of knowing, ironic Valleyspeak. Duh. So over. Knew that. Three-word paragraphs. Please. She flashes passion only for a few subjects, including scruffy journalists (media monitors Steve Brill and James Fallows are on her hit list). She also cares about Ireland . And clothes. She’s cutting yet vulnerable. She writes how she wilted when a fire-breathing Monica confronted her in a restaurant about being so mean. “She’s Daria,” wrote Michael Wolff in New York Magazine, referring to the MTV character. And indeed, some critics complain she writes about world leaders as if she’s dishing about high-school classmates.
She drives her detractors to distraction. They say she’s nihilistic, cynical. She fails the shoe-leather test by staying mostly safely inside the Beltway media bubble. She’s prettifying conventional wisdom with sitcom one-liners. But her enemies are heavy-breathing stalkers, too: if they claim their eyes don’t ogle her column first, they’re lying. Part of this is personal mystery. She writes constantly about herself, but reveals little. Declining to be interviewed for this article, she said, “I should go back to work. As one of those old Greek guys said, the thing about success is not to get it but to deserve it.”
Here is some of what we know about her: 47 years old, unmarried, steeped in TV and movies and 19th-century novels. Talks to a tight circle of Washington media types–and her mother. Schooled by nuns. Daughter of an Irish-born D.C. police detective who guarded the Capitol at the end of his career . An aunt worked as a maid for a branch of the Gore family. She’s class-conscious: she lionized the dutiful Betty Currie, and as a controversially opinionated reporter prior to getting her column in 1995, she tortured George Bush as an out-of-touch preppy. But, significantly, she liked Bush. He respected the dignity of the office. He didn’t whine. He had class, in an old-fashioned, Cary Grant-Fred Astaire kind of way. Guess, in her opinion, who doesn’t? And it was Dowd’s eye for this, more than anything, that earned her prize.
