The Maureen Dowd you've never seen

NY Times columnnist reveals her first great love, her family's Irish ties and her take on Obama, Bush, Biden and Geffen

She says the recent Oliver Stone movie about Bush got it right, that Bush did end up finally with some self-awareness that something deep had gone wrong.  In his case she says his refusal to pardon Scooter Libby despite Dick Cheney’s frantic attempts to get him one was the clear signal.

As for Poppy Bush there is no doubt that Dowd and himself retain a soft spot for each other.

“George Bush Senior has written me twice in the last week because I sent him a Christmas present. He signs his ‘love’ but then crosses out the love and say ‘not yet’ indicating he’s mad about the coverage of W. I’m sure at some level they must be disappointed too.”

She says Bush senior “must be angry” with Cheney and Rumsfeld. She says it would be hard for him not to be. W’s whole presidency, she says, was an “attempt to be the reverse of everything Bush Senior stood for.

“I can’t believe he never called his dad for advice even when going to war in Iraq.”

Maureen expresses grudging admiration for Hillary Clinton, the woman she was hyper-critical of during the campaign. She quotes Harold Ickes, a key Clinton aide, as saying that Hillary told him during the campaign, “I knew that Bill was good at what he did and it was hard to be that good, but I had no idea just how hard it was.”

Dowd said Hillary had to go through the baptism of fire to become the good politician she now is.

Dowd started a Hillary blaze in February of 2007 by revealing that David Geffen, the Hollywood record mogul and key Clinton supporter, was switching allegiances to Obama.

At the time Clinton was considered a virtual shoe-in for the Democratic nomination, but the fissures which emerged after Geffen’s comments in Dowd’s column would never close over and heal.

As Patrick Goldstein wrote subsequently in the Los Angeles Times, “When historians start looking for turning points in the trajectory of the Obama campaign for the presidency, they will inevitably turn to February 21, 2007, the day that The New York Times' Maureen Dowd ran a column where Geffen blasted then-Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton.

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Nster.com