The new writers' bloc: they've got attitude, humor, and an eye for detail. But could journalism's new stylists do more? - influence of journalist Maureen Dowd

Washington Monthly, Nov, 1992 by Katherine Boo

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Last winter, Spy magazine opened a Washington bureau with the expected agenda. Its arch, warts-and-all journalism, heretofore largely limited to Hollywood and New York illuminati, would be brought to bear, just in time for the campaign, on national politicians.

A few years back, as I read Spy's unsparing dissections of short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump and party invertebrate Jay McInerney, it crossed my mind that Washington could benefit from a few Spy treatments, that it would be good to see the Richard Darmans and Dick Cheneys held under the Spylights until they started to melt. But as I read the invitation to the bureau's grand opening just as the 1992 primary season opened in New Hampshire, it seemed that Spy, for once, was behind the curve. Beating it to the suckerpunch was-- could it be?--The New York Times.

It wasn't Spy that first called Bill Clinton a "letter-sweater smoothie"--although it swiped the line a few months later. Hillary as "Lady Macbeth in a black preppy headband"? Spy wishes. Rather, the images of Bush as the existential Yankee and Mario Cuomo as the fleshchomping Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs were conjured up by Times Washington correspondent Maureen Dowd. Her white-hot reporting on the front page of the Good Gray One is changing the standards of mainstream political journalism, for better and worse.

"Welcome to the first presidential campaign with an air of Pirandello," Dowd wrote at the advent of the Democratic primary season, "an absurdist adventure marked by ironic detachment, existential angst, black humor, and, believe it or not, a vow of celibacy." The theater metaphor is not accidental. In an overpolled, focus-group age, Dowd's great talent is to find fresh drama in the political process. For instance, other reporters variously interpreted Paul Tsongas' poll surge last winter as a mandate for deficit reduction, voter attraction to unslick politicians, or an expression of dissatisfaction with other candidates. To Dowd, it was a scene straight out of Butch Cassidv and the Sundance Kid. "The candidate keeps plodding relentlessly along the trail, gaining ground, as the party leaders look over their shoulders with fear and grudging respect, wondering, 'Who is that guy?'"

She's funny frequently, sneering when necessary, earnest almost never--a combination that makes Dowd, according to Washingtonian magazine, "the most feared" Washington reporter. She's also, hands down, the most imitated. Today's campaign planes and buses are freighted with Dowd disciples: hyperliterate capital-W Writers with an eye for detail and an ear for the shuffling going on behind the curtain. The Washington Post's David Von Drehle bluntly informs us that "minds reeled and eyes glazed" at yet another pneumatic Clinton speech; later he compares Bush without a Teleprompter to "a toddler lurching along the edge of a swimming pool." Timesman Michael Specter doesn't woodenly describe the strategy memos of sundry campaign consultants; he creeps inside the heads of "the political henchmen, the minders and puppeteers who make their living by calling the Titanic the Love Boat."

If traditional election reportage seemed to fade right at the breakfast table, this year's accounts of the orchestration of the photo ops, the pomposity behind the circumstance, are sometimes as colorful and attitudinous as Pucci prints.

So why is the Creeping Dowdism in political reporting starting to irritate me? Maybe it's just jealousy--no one writes better, faster, or with more twisted imagination than Dowd. But maybe it's also that, as Dowd might write, the strong spin might be the wrong spin. Forget the usual critic's plaint that this reporting's not objective--it's not, but Dowd's bile spreads fairly evenly across the political spectrum. (Besides, just because the Times' Robin Toner is more boring doesn't mean she's less biased.) Rather, what's unsettling is the dark vision of the pointlessness of politics that Dowd and her followers deliver, a vision that an onslaught of bright images can't obscure. Preoccupied with the feints and counterfeints, the preposterous and the poseurs, they seem to believe, and then to promulgate, Dowd's own metaphor. The democratic process is reduced to Pirandello, to theater of the absurd. Trouble is, this audience can't get up and leave.

What qualifies a political writer as a member of the growing cadre of Maureen manques? Research uncovers a few distinguishing style cues. First, in a naked bid for the video generation, pop-culture references are sprinkled through the copy. Why paint Jerry Brown as the dark horse, the underdog, or any of the other deadline-writer cliches when he can be the subversive Penguin in Batman Returns? To impress the editor, on the other hand, higherbrow references--Tsongas, according to Dowd, talks like Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby can work magic.

In the hands of these writers, politicians and their cronies seldom say anything. Instead, as Michael Specter illustrated recently, they "continue rapidly, seemingly without breathing." Twitches and gestures are uniformly construed as revelatory: When a politician picks his nose, it's a raw moment of internal excavation. And the writer never says it once if he can think up several variations: "They are to presidential politics what Bartels and James are to wine," observed Timesman Steven Holmes this fall of Clinton and Gore, continuing helpfully, "Ben and Jerry are to ice cream, and Click and Clack, the Tappet brothers, are to silly but sage advice about cars .... "