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

Similarly, when the writer executes a lengthy campaign profile of Tsongas two days before New Hampshire, we learn all about a "Saturday Night Live" invitation, the effort to get him to sit up straight for debates, and his uncanny resemblance to a beagle. But there's just one substance-related sentence in the piece, on his controversial support for nuclear power. And this reference is made only to set up an anecdote in which he gets angry at a collegiate questioner.

Of course, you can't expect one writer to be a master of all trades. And even the crabbiest editor would balk before inflicting upon such a good stylist only subjects drier than a rash. But because Dowd is so good at limning character, and because her forum at the Times is so formidable, a generation of bright young writers is now imitating her--the flaws as well as the flourishes. Substantive political and policy pieces desperately need talented writers to make them come alive for the reader. Unfortunately, the more talented writers are desperately chasing after character and style. In piece after piece, this substance gap begins to look like more than an innocent sin of omission. One begins to sense a political nihilism undergirding the carefully chosen words.

While not every literary fillip from the Dowd Crowd is revealing, many of them are reducing. Von Drehle compares Ross Perot's appearance to Elmer Fudd's, and Bush's to that of an "oddly unfashionable" commercial air line pilot; Clinton and Gore are, as Dowd and Frank Rich have it, the "Double Bubba ticket" and "political Doublemint Twins." Reducing politicians--who calls them public servants with a straight face anymore? --to cartoons is as much a marker of Dowdstyle as the literary reference, only it's more troubling. It's fine to leave the fulsome profile to People, but there's often a conspicuous lack of empathy and generosity in the new writers' character deconstruction-- and sometimes an unmistakable lack of interest in providing meaningful insight. Do we get any closer to the essential Tsongas when Dowd draws him as a turtle "10ok[ing] around him with a slow, blinking bemusement at the vaganes of fate"? Is the picture of a campaigning Bush "plucking at his chest as though he could pull his soul out of a buttoned-down shirt" really telling, or is it a well-turned cheap shot? And more important, does it help us find out what we really need to know about the candidate before November 3: How will the damn fool lead?

Yet among Dowd and disciples, the characterpainting continually shoulders out meaningful questions about what the pretenders to the Oval Office have in mind. Once Dowd allows us to know that Kerrey has "large blue eyes and a light-bulb shaped head that give him the look of a bemused extraterrestrial," can we really take seriously the mechanics of his health-care proposal? Of course, in her preprimary profile of Kerrey, the health-care issue--his campaign centerpiece--never comes up. And why would it? In Dowd's character-centered conception, issues don't merit too much concern. They're largely props in "meticulous Kabuki dramas in which the candidates enact the themes they want to sell to voters in November."