Maureen Dowd re-finds her voice, too! – UPDATE

My Li’l Bro Thom sent this Maureen Dowd piece my way with the observation: She does her best writing when it’s about the Clintons.

I’ll say! Today’s column is a stunningly good.

At the Portsmouth cafe on Monday, talking to a group of mostly women, she blinked back her misty dread of where Obama’s “false hopes” will lead us — “I just don’t want to see us fall backwards,” she said tremulously — in time to smack her rival: “But some of us are right and some of us are wrong. Some of us are ready and some of us are not.”

There was a poignancy about the moment, seeing Hillary crack with exhaustion from decades of yearning to be the principal rather than the plus-one. But there was a whiff of Nixonian self-pity about her choking up. What was moving her so deeply was her recognition that the country was failing to grasp how much it needs her. In a weirdly narcissistic way, she was crying for us. But it was grimly typical of her that what finally made her break down was the prospect of losing.

As Spencer Tracy said to Katharine Hepburn in “Adam’s Rib,” “Here we go again, the old juice. Guaranteed heart melter. A few female tears, stronger than any acid.”

That’s good writing – penetrating, insightful and well-voiced.

Dowd won a Pulitzer in the 1990’s by writing about the Clintons with wit and stinging, remorseless exposure. Then with the election of Dubya, and 9/11, she seemed to lose her voice. For the last 6-7 years, all Dowd could do was namecall, sneer, shriek and stumble through her columns, which read like the weak prattle of a bitter woman in a smoky bar, who – stood up by her date – falls back on bitching about her hated ex-husband, and all men in general. She hit her nadir with her book, Are Men Really Necessary, after which she had nowhere to go but up, and up she has come.

“If you get too emotional, that undercuts you,” Hillary said. “A man can cry; we know that. Lots of our leaders have cried. But a woman, it’s a different kind of dynamic.”

It was a peculiar tactic. Here she was attacking Obama for spreading gauzy emotion by spreading gauzy emotion. When Hillary hecklers yelled “Iron my shirt!” at her in Salem on Monday, it stirred sisterhood.

Compare this column to the ones I’ve linked to above. There is such a difference in writing, in tone, voice, cerebral engagement and energy.

Her argument against Obama now boils down to an argument against idealism, which is probably the lowest and most unlikely point to which any Clinton could sink. The people from Hope are arguing against hope.

At her victory party, Hillary was like the heroine of a Lifetime movie, a woman in peril who manages to triumph. Saying that her heart was full, she sounded the feminist anthem: “I found my own voice.”

She’s not the only one.

The abject and seething hate for the Bushes did not serve Maureen Dowd well – it made her shrill and incoherent. I don’t think she ever fully understood Bush; she never wrote about him in a focused and linear manner. But the Clintons – she has their numbers, and here she is as focused and linear as a laser beam.

Welcome back from the wilderness, Ms. Dowd.

UPDATE: Buster wonders, “thirty-five years of ‘change’ and ‘experience’ and she’s only just now finding her voice? That doesn’t really make her sound formidable.”

Actually, now that I think of it, it makes her sound a lot like the woman I heard at a performance of The Vagina Monologues, who remarked to another audience member that she was 35 years old and had never seen her cervix. I only pray the Hillary campaign does not morph into a gooey voyage of “discovery, affirmation and self-actualization.” We’re never going to get out of the 60’s.