by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

October 16, 2008

Maureen Dowd insists she is neither a “red person nor a blue person,” preferring to treat politicians from both parties with a suspicious perspective.

“I love Shakespeare,” said The New York Times columnist in an interview with NJ Jewish News. “He wrote about the corruption of power.”

And whether this election results in a comedy or tragedy rests not only on its outcome but on how the victors choose to govern come next January.

Although he hasn’t shown many signs of it lately, John McCain may revert to being the “maverick” he was when he first ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, Dowd said.

“He did reach across the aisle and make a lot of his fellow Republicans upset” with his campaign finance legislation, she said. The Arizona senator also won the respect of many in the press corps.

“He liked reporters, and reporters are human beings, too,” she said. “We like to have friends.”

As for Barack Obama, Dowd said, as president “he could surround himself with intellectuals and become irrelevant like Jimmy Carter,” or he could “deal successfully” with critical problems and become “an effective leader.”

When she appears at Temple B’nai Abraham in Livingston on Oct. 23, Dowd said, she would prefer the whole evening be devoted to a question-and-answer exchange with the audience.

“I don’t like giving speeches,” confessed the Pulitzer Prize-winner. “I don’t do them well.”

But in a telephone interview from her office in the newspaper’s Washington bureau, she told NJJN she has enjoyed speaking before Jewish audiences because “they seem to invest the Times with a sacred trust.”

As well-known and controversial as she may be, Dowd said she disdains the spotlight of celebrity.

“I do not like doing television,” she said. “I used to go on Meet the Press because I was friends with Tim Russert” — the longtime moderator of the NBC public affairs program who died in June. “But I was always uncomfortable, and my doctor, who is very anti-drug, gave me anti-anxiety medication to take before I go on TV.”

Dowd’s own career has been on a successful trajectory since she became a journalist in 1974. “I got into journalism because my mother told me that working as a tennis instructor and going to work every day in a tennis outfit was not a proper job for a college graduate,” she said.

She became a Washington correspondent for the Times in 1986 after an early career at the now-defunct Washington Star. She covered four presidential campaigns before moving to the op-ed page as a Times columnist in 1995.

Four years later, she won the Pulitzer for her commentary on the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair.

While she has admirers who enjoy her frequent verbal skewering of higher-ups in the political establishment, Dowd frequently receives criticism that is as harsh and outspoken as her own words have ever been.

Her writing was assailed in the conservative National Review by Mark Hemingway as “incoherent, disjointed, unintentionally funny, [and] badly lacking context.”

From the Left, AlterNet writer Don Hazen described her columns as “almost purely gossip, innuendo, and meanness; worst of all, they are often wrong.”

Dowd told NJJN she generally ignores such jabs from her critics, “but I keep a file of my hate mail for the FBI, just in case somebody shoots me.”

As for the future, she said, “Right now I am very caught up in the election campaign. After that’s over I’ll decide what to do next.”

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