THE YEAR OF VOTING DANGEROUSLY
Maureen Dowd
Twelve
432 pages; $30
This is a stranger-than-fiction campaign many of us want to forget. So is it too soon to wallow in the reality of it?
That question bedevils Maureen Dowd's book on the 2016 presidential race, The Year of Voting Dangerously, a rolling, roiling collection of her columns - mainly ridiculing the two political figures she, like most of us, loves to loathe: Hillary Clinton and Donald J Trump.
Put aside whether cobbling together a bunch of newspaper columns with a small amount of fresh material is too easy a way to publish a "new book." Ms Dowd has spent two decades mining (and mocking) the minds of these two very American, and often tragic, figures. We are living in a raging bull market for a biting New York Times columnist to describe as bull two New York grandparents ensconced in the bubble of the upper .01 per cent while championing the ordinary people they know mostly as staff.
Ms Dowd was born to write about this race. And she dissects its main characters with poison in her pen and poetic punch in her delivery.
This year, she says, "America got mad - and went mad." But we've had it coming. Ms Dowd has been tearing into the Clintons for more than 20 years - admirably so, given that she runs in the same liberal circles. Her Hillary is unteachable, paranoid and money-grubbing, and "only apologizes at the point of a gun."
"As a Clinton White House aide once explained to me," she writes, "Hillary, though a Methodist, thinks of herself like an Episcopal bishop who deserves to live at the level of her wealthy parishioners, in return for devoting her life to God and good works." She likes this barb so much it appears three times in the book. She is merciless in rehashing how Ms Clinton slimed Monica Lewinsky, pocketed $675,000 in Goldman Sachs cash for three speeches and has relied on "scummy" hatchet men like Dick Morris.
Ms Dowd has had a more complicated relationship with the Donald. They are phone friends, she tells us, and they banter about sex, stardom, silliness and strategy. Mr Trump, unlike Ms Clinton, can't help playing ball with Ms Dowd. And she in turn can't help having a ball writing about him. She started this campaign apparently charmed by the idea of a Trump presidency, given how impossible it is to divine his potential actions in office. "It's always a pig in a poke," she writes. "So why not a pig who pokes?"
She focuses most about him on the pig part. Her Trump is a thin-skinned, nativist narcissist whose campaign consists of saying crazy things, then defending them, then explaining (often to Ms Dowd herself) that he didn't really mean them, before admitting that he actually did. There are "too few operatic characters in the world. I think of him as a toon," she writes. "He's just drawn that way."
Every few weeks, someone writes about Mr Trump's plans to start behaving like a normal candidate - to hire normal staff, read normal scripts, raise normal money, say and do normal things. Gullible Republicans bought it - and bet on it. Now, they just pray for it.
But read Ms Dowd as she thinks back to 1999, when Trump started flirting seriously with a presidential run, and we're reminded this run is not a lark. He has been planning it for two decades - and never once adjusted his lust for women, attention, polls and crowds. It's mind-blowing that a guy who wanted something so badly for so long did so little to prepare for it. His warts were big and apparent in the last century - and remain uncured in this one.
Then on to Ms Clinton - possibly the best-known person in America. She's so familiar that she often seems like the supporting actress in the Trump Tragedy of 2016. With the exception of the Democratic convention, she has had to fight for coverage, unless it's about email servers and the Clinton Foundation.
Strung together, Ms Dowd's columns reflect the superficiality of the campaign, and the coverage of it. There is good reason that much of America hates the news media. Like Ms Dowd, all too many in the supposedly non-ideological press make plain their disdain for both candidates, but especially Mr Trump.
Yet it still feels as if the media is missing something big in the coverage. This isn't a race just about characters, or even character. It's about white people outside urban centres who feel like strangers in their own land; about Hispanics and African-Americans facing attacks reminiscent of the '60s; about how all of us are wrestling with the advantages and pitfalls of perpetual social media connection in our politics; and about the scary fusion of reality and fiction at a time when our world is more interconnected and combustible than ever, and in need of new paradigms. Instead, we get character sketches of two untrustworthy and unlikable candidates.
Ms Dowd surely captures the theatre of our politics better than anyone else: The Clintons. The Trumps. The Obamas. The Bushes. She has been in their heads as long as they have been on our minds. She's the establishment's resident shrink. And if you don't read her religiously or follow this cast of characters too closely, The Year of Voting Dangerously is often Doritos-delicious. Otherwise, it may be too much (and too little) too soon.
©2016 The New York Times News Service
Maureen Dowd
Twelve
432 pages; $30
This is a stranger-than-fiction campaign many of us want to forget. So is it too soon to wallow in the reality of it?
More From This Section
That question bedevils Maureen Dowd's book on the 2016 presidential race, The Year of Voting Dangerously, a rolling, roiling collection of her columns - mainly ridiculing the two political figures she, like most of us, loves to loathe: Hillary Clinton and Donald J Trump.
Put aside whether cobbling together a bunch of newspaper columns with a small amount of fresh material is too easy a way to publish a "new book." Ms Dowd has spent two decades mining (and mocking) the minds of these two very American, and often tragic, figures. We are living in a raging bull market for a biting New York Times columnist to describe as bull two New York grandparents ensconced in the bubble of the upper .01 per cent while championing the ordinary people they know mostly as staff.
Ms Dowd was born to write about this race. And she dissects its main characters with poison in her pen and poetic punch in her delivery.
This year, she says, "America got mad - and went mad." But we've had it coming. Ms Dowd has been tearing into the Clintons for more than 20 years - admirably so, given that she runs in the same liberal circles. Her Hillary is unteachable, paranoid and money-grubbing, and "only apologizes at the point of a gun."
"As a Clinton White House aide once explained to me," she writes, "Hillary, though a Methodist, thinks of herself like an Episcopal bishop who deserves to live at the level of her wealthy parishioners, in return for devoting her life to God and good works." She likes this barb so much it appears three times in the book. She is merciless in rehashing how Ms Clinton slimed Monica Lewinsky, pocketed $675,000 in Goldman Sachs cash for three speeches and has relied on "scummy" hatchet men like Dick Morris.
Ms Dowd has had a more complicated relationship with the Donald. They are phone friends, she tells us, and they banter about sex, stardom, silliness and strategy. Mr Trump, unlike Ms Clinton, can't help playing ball with Ms Dowd. And she in turn can't help having a ball writing about him. She started this campaign apparently charmed by the idea of a Trump presidency, given how impossible it is to divine his potential actions in office. "It's always a pig in a poke," she writes. "So why not a pig who pokes?"
She focuses most about him on the pig part. Her Trump is a thin-skinned, nativist narcissist whose campaign consists of saying crazy things, then defending them, then explaining (often to Ms Dowd herself) that he didn't really mean them, before admitting that he actually did. There are "too few operatic characters in the world. I think of him as a toon," she writes. "He's just drawn that way."
Every few weeks, someone writes about Mr Trump's plans to start behaving like a normal candidate - to hire normal staff, read normal scripts, raise normal money, say and do normal things. Gullible Republicans bought it - and bet on it. Now, they just pray for it.
But read Ms Dowd as she thinks back to 1999, when Trump started flirting seriously with a presidential run, and we're reminded this run is not a lark. He has been planning it for two decades - and never once adjusted his lust for women, attention, polls and crowds. It's mind-blowing that a guy who wanted something so badly for so long did so little to prepare for it. His warts were big and apparent in the last century - and remain uncured in this one.
Then on to Ms Clinton - possibly the best-known person in America. She's so familiar that she often seems like the supporting actress in the Trump Tragedy of 2016. With the exception of the Democratic convention, she has had to fight for coverage, unless it's about email servers and the Clinton Foundation.
Strung together, Ms Dowd's columns reflect the superficiality of the campaign, and the coverage of it. There is good reason that much of America hates the news media. Like Ms Dowd, all too many in the supposedly non-ideological press make plain their disdain for both candidates, but especially Mr Trump.
Yet it still feels as if the media is missing something big in the coverage. This isn't a race just about characters, or even character. It's about white people outside urban centres who feel like strangers in their own land; about Hispanics and African-Americans facing attacks reminiscent of the '60s; about how all of us are wrestling with the advantages and pitfalls of perpetual social media connection in our politics; and about the scary fusion of reality and fiction at a time when our world is more interconnected and combustible than ever, and in need of new paradigms. Instead, we get character sketches of two untrustworthy and unlikable candidates.
Ms Dowd surely captures the theatre of our politics better than anyone else: The Clintons. The Trumps. The Obamas. The Bushes. She has been in their heads as long as they have been on our minds. She's the establishment's resident shrink. And if you don't read her religiously or follow this cast of characters too closely, The Year of Voting Dangerously is often Doritos-delicious. Otherwise, it may be too much (and too little) too soon.
©2016 The New York Times News Service