The secret life of Maureen Dowd

The New York Times columnist reveals her first great love, her family's Irish ties and her real take on Obama, Bush, Biden and Geffen

All these years later, the little girl that her father worried was too shy to get on in life has certainly proved him wrong on that score.

Dowd’s meteoric rise to the top of the media pile was achieved through sheer dint of hard work and an unerring eye for the critical detail that everyone else was missing. Along the way she has ended forever the cozy view of women writers as softly-softlys who leave the meaty stuff to the men.

Maureen’s assessment of the current crisis and its origins is direct and to the point.

“W is the guy who crashed the family station wagon into the globe. Obama is the guy who has to have the wreck towed and the globe repaired and the damages paid and the hard feelings soothed. From the lawless and heedless to the law-abiding and mindful,” she says.

Maureen makes no secret of her admiration of Obama, and points out her gleefully her Republican sister, disillusioned with Bush, has become an “Obamacon.”

She says Obama is “doing really well. He inherited the worst foreign and domestic policy crises of anyone since FDR and Lincoln. Just what he has to deal with is mind-blowing.

“We grew up in Washington. We’ve never seen a president treat Washington like a real city.  He and Michelle are out on date night, they are going to local restaurants and homeless shelters – that means a lot to me. As a native we’ve never had that.”

As for Obama’s cool image she says, “Americans love having a Joshua Bartlett type,” she says, referring to the fictional president of The West Wing TV show. “He’s elegant, intelligent, well-spoken.”

She has found him incredibly self-assured in private conversation. They also share a bond as children of immediate immigrants --Obama is the first president since Hoover to have a parent born outside the country, and only the seventh ever. 

She says it is an overlooked factor about Obama, an issue that weighed heavily with other would-be White House contenders.

“I interviewed Mario Cuomo when he was thinking of running, and everyone said he was going to run, and he was obsessed with being the son of an immigrant. It reminded me of the Aesop Fable, where the dog has the steak in his mouth and he sees the reflection of another dog with a steak and drops it. He didn’t want to drop his steak.

“He had come so far, his father was an immigrant, he was the governor of New York, and he was all twisted about his worthiness as president. It was very ethnic to me, and I was going, ‘Yes but if you don’t run, you leave the field to people like George Bush Senior, who never question their worthiness.

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