Since BitterGate got going last week, we’ve had a spate of unintentionally hilarious attempts by Washington- and New York-based pundits to paint themselves as salt-of-the earth types, as Paul Waldman pointed out yesterday in The American Prospect.
But maybe the most disingenuous comes today from The New York Times’s Maureen Dowd, who tells us that she “grew up in a house with a gun, a strong Catholic faith, an immigrant father, brothers with anti-illegal-immigrant sentiments, and a passion for bowling. (My bowling trophy was one of my most cherished possessions.)” The Dowd family, she adds, “went to church every Sunday.”
All this biographical detail, of course, is in the service of establishing the writer’s authority to declare that:
Behind closed doors in San Francisco, elitism’s epicenter, Barack Obama showed his elitism.
(By the way, why is it unacceptable to come anywhere close to disparaging small-town life, but totally fine to dismiss an economically diverse city of 800,000 as “elitism’s epicenter”?)
But Dowd’s effort to establish her blue-collar bona fides doesn’t jibe too well with her current lifestyle. A 2005 Washington Post story describes Dowd’s house as a
stately Georgetown home where the décor ranges from a pink jukebox to an expensively restored Hungarian portrait of a partially disrobed woman.
In that same story, we learn that Dowd “always looks chic at Washington parties,” and that she “once spent $195 for a seaweed concoction favored by Sharon Stone.”
And a New York magazine profile from the same year paints a similar portrait:
Possibly, there are even more naked women at Maureen Dowd’s house today than there were when this place was JFK’s Georgetown bachelor pad in the fifties. They are lounging in the vintage posters, carved into her Deco furniture, painted in huge trompe l’oeil pastorals on the living-room wall. “My girlfriend Michi [that would be New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani] said, ‘You’ve got to paint clothes on them,’ like you know how they did at the Sistine Chapel?” says Dowd, who is drinking white wine from a goblet with a naked woman carved into its stem. “But I like them. I think they’re kind of campy.” [parenthetical ours]
Among the small-town Pennsylvanians I hang out with, of course, its de rigueur to have trompe l’oeil murals on their living-room walls and drink white wine out of goblets with naked women carved into their stems.
Now obviously, Dowd can drink out of whatever glassware she prefers. To be honest, I think her house sounds kind of cool. But by telling readers about her humble roots, she’s laying claim to a particular kind of class-based authenticity from which to criticize Obama. The God-and-guns credentials are essential for establishing her authority to make the elitist charge. And however you grew up, that’s a trick that takes some chutzpah when you spend your time talking up the campiness of the naked women carved into the art deco furniture of your Georgetown townhouse.
I couldn’t help noticing that Dowd’s column appeared the day after John McCain announced an economic plan much of which amounted to, in the admirably straightforward words of The Washington Post “a corporate special pleader’s dream.” The Post’s headline: “McCain’s Plan for Working Class Offers Plenty for Corporate World.”
But that’s a form of elitism that doesn’t interest Maureen Dowd.
Zachary Roth is a contributing editor to The Washington Monthly. He also has written for The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Slate, Salon, The Daily Beast, and Talking Points Memo, among other outlets.