She is attempting to make a bait and switch on the Obamas. MD can only speak admiringly of a woman if that woman bases her entire approach to life on being simultaneously attractive and witty, if by “attractive” you mean “thoroughly Botoxed and reeking of slim cigarettes” and by “witty” you mean “saying things that are superficially clever but really just kinda dumb non sequiturs, and pointlessly bitchy to boot”. So she’s sending a smoke signal to the Obamas here that if Michelle acts like Ms. Sarkozy, MD will then venerate her instead of turning on her as she does every other ambitious or powerful woman who isn’t MD. But of course if Michelle were to start acting like this, MD would be leading the charge of pitchfork-wielding pundits.

Personally, I think it’s a doomed strategy. But at least MD appears to be branching out a little. Oh, who am I kidding? No, she’s not.

I hate to defend MD, but maybe she is saying first ladies or first lady candidates would be more interesting if the media was not obsessed with making people pay for past sexual encounters.  Then again maybe she is saying that she would find them more interesting if they would talk about past sexual encounters as that is all MD cares about.
I had never read an entire MD column until today, after reading the collumn I feel impure and like no matter how much I wash I cannot get clean.  Thnks for ruining my life.

Dowd is a black hole of intelligent writing.

http://physioprof.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/maureen-dowd-is-physioprofs-worst-fucking-nightmare/

She’s using Michelle Obama as an example because the description of Bruni’s memoir sounds painfully similar to the one that Cindy McCain wrote shortly after John McCain’s won his Congressional seat.  All of Washington has read it.  No one will admit it exists.

Just kidding.  I got nothing.  Although this does read like a fairly standard “those crazy Europeans” piece.  The big thing missing is that nowhere does it admit that it’s the Village, not the American voters that hold the fantasy that a fairy-tale president that will ride in on a white horse to save America. 

The “virgin bride” obsession has been as disastrous for America as it was for the House of Windsor.

Maybe Dowd has a female version of “nice guy syndrome”  I am so great why do the sluts get all the men sort of thing.

The message seems to be that an attractive, social woman is a necessary accessory for a powerful man’s career. The suggestion seems to be that Michelle Obama is not this kind of woman.

BTW, that for for prompting me to read Dowd. It without a doubt the most banal thing I’ve read in weeks.

Because Michelle Obama is married to the kind of man that Dowd considers her lost birthright?
Dammit. Amanda wins.  I hope you’ll spend it wisely.

It would have made no difference in that column if she’d said “Cindy McCain”.  It makes my head hurt to think that this paper is supposed to be the best the US offers.  It makes it hurt more to think that that is probably the truth.

Perchance did any of ya’ll read the Public Editor today, just across the page from MD, but harder to find on-line. He takes on readers who complained about sexism in the primary coverage, says the Times made a few errors but wasn’t too bad, but calls out MD for her rhetoric.

Here she is defending herself:

Politically correct is never a term one would apply to Dowd’s commentary. Her columns this year said Clinton’s “message is unapologetically emasculating,” and that she “needed to prove her masculinity” but in the end “had to fend off calamity by playing the female victim.” In one column Dowd wrote, “She may want to take a cue from the Miss America contest: make a graceful, magnanimous exit and wait in the wings.”

“From the time I began writing about politics,” Dowd said, “I have always played with gender stereotypes and mined them and twisted them to force the reader to be conscious of how differently we view the sexes.” Now, she said, “you are asking me to treat Hillary differently than I’ve treated the male candidates all these years, with kid gloves.”

Post modernism: You’re doing it wrong. She seems to think that trading and perpetuating grotesque gender stereotypes that offend feminists and traditionalists alike is “playing” and “twisting.”

“I have always played with gender stereotypes and mined them and twisted them to force the reader to be conscious of how differently we view the sexes.”

No, Maureen. You have USED the stereotypes to put people down. That doesn’t force the reader to understand how differently we view the sexes, it REINFORCES those views.

Gaud what a dumbass.

The point that Dowd is making is, actually, sympathetic to Michelle Obama (and Cindy McCain, & any other American (male) candidate’s (female) spouse). She is saying that in France Carla Bruni is being considered an asset to her huband—that her somewhat “scandalous” prior career (modeling, “promiscuous” love life) and current career (the new album) have, rather than hurting the approval ratings of her husband, actually caused them to go up. Whereas, in the U.S., Fox News and their ilk, whose attacks on Michelle Obama have already caused her “soften” her image and appear more domestic, would go ballistic if they had evidence that Mrs. Obama had done a fraction of the “scandalous” things that Carla Bruni has done. And presumably this would cause the approval ratings, and electability, of Barack Obama to go down, not up.
The point is not very well made.  The writing isn’t that great, and the argument isn’t necessarily sound. After all, Dowd is overlooking the fact that Carla Bruni did not marry Sarkozy (sp?) until AFTER he had been elected. Where’s the evidence that he would have won the election if he’d been divorced, & then dated & married Bruni prior to the election?
Nevertheless, Dowd’s point of view is sympathetic towards Mrs. Obama, not critical. Dowd is not saying Obama should change, she’s saying the American press & electorate are forcing her to change.  The implication is, that’s because we are not as sophisticated as the French.

really? this article, to me, seemed to be trying to equate Michelle with Carla - make Michelle look like an oversexed vain bimbo by comparing the two (not that I think that Carla Bruni is an overseed vain bimbo; i barely know who she is, and all i really thought of her before today is “YAY! a woman who does what she wants and doesn’t care what others think” but Dowd seems to see her this way…)
er. did that make sense?

Holy Cow: you would think Dowd’s opening sentence might be a tip-off as to the nature of the comparison she is making in this article: “The French are different from you and me.”

The central comparison which frames the entire essay is *not* between Michele Obama and Carla Sarkozy, but rather between French and American attitudes to women (and specifically “first ladies”).

As a result of Dowd’s decision to focus on these contrasting attitudes towards first ladies and would-be first ladies, it is necessary for her to identify potential first ladies in America alongside the woman who currently fucks the leader of France.

The nature of comparison is precisely why Michele Obama is mentioned. That said, however, it is odd that Dowd does not envision Cindy McCain as publishing naked photos of herself or putting out CDs about smoking men like heroin. Ageism?

There is nothing derogatory toward Michele Obama in this article. Amanda’s claim that Dowd would have problems with a sexualized first lady in unfounded. The nitpicker is correct that Dowd’s conclusion is actually complimentary to brazen, uninhibited first ladies. People like Carla, she says. Even Bush likes Carla, she says. Bush finds her hot, and if the Prez of the U.S. thinks Sarkozy’s hussy wife is intelligent and interesting, then who are semi-illiterate folks like most of you to argue?

The reason I don’t think that Dowd is trying to equate Michelle Obama with Carla Bruni is that Dowd writes: “Imagine if” Obama did the things that Bruni has done.
But she hasn’t and Dowd doesn’t say that she has, and doesn’t say that she should.
To the contrary, as Dowd indicates by her allusion to Obama’s appearce on “The View,” Obama is now going in the opposite direction from Bruni: painting herself as a Happy Homemaker, rather than a Happy (arguably) Hooker.
In Dowd’s view, the US press and electorate would excoriate Obama if she did a tenth of the things that Bruni has done, and this proves that we are naive and unsophisticated, compared to the French.
 
The evidence for the proposition that the column is not well-written is that one has to read it at least three times to figure out that this is what she is saying.

Foucault’s comment, which focuses on the first sentence of Dowd’s piece, reminds me of something that is annoying about the Times’s layout. At least on-line (which is where I read it) the placement of the photo separates the first sentence from the rest of the text. It’s easy to overlook it, especially since magazines & newspapers often use that space (after the title & author’s name, before the content) for a short summary.

I usually skip such summaries. But in this case, skipping the first line, which is what the layout tempts the eye to do, makes it easy to miss the point of the column. Which is, as Foucault says, laid out in that first line. So, it’s not all Dowd’s fault. Blame the web designer too.

No sitting first lady of the US is mentioned in the article. Do you mean sitting first lady of France?

Michelle Obama is not being tossed in as a “libertine counterpart” to anyone. Dowd’s point is that there is not, and cannot be, a libertine counterpart to Carla Bruni in this country. The American electorate, and the media they support, would not, in Dowd’s view, accept such a woman. 

Your original question was whether there was any reason to mention Michelle Obama. And the answer is yes. Dowd is protesting her treatment by the press. This column, which is appearing after Obama’s stint on “The View,” is a companion piece to her earlier column, called “Mincing Up Michelle,” which protested the Republican attacks on Obama. It was sympathetic to her, as is this column.

Now you seem to be saying, well, that may be what Dowd claims, but she doesn’t really mean it: in reality, she would have problems with a “sexualized” first lady. I have no idea, not being a student of Dowd’s work. (Regardless of her views, I just don’t like her style, and never have.)  All I’m saying is that’s not what she says here, and her mention of Obama is—contrary to your first contention—reasonable in the context of this column, particularly in light of Dowd’s recent column about attacks on Obama.

Sorry Jesse,

I was still in my ass-hat mode from the Obama sell-out post.

You’re absolutely right: it is curious that Dowd didn’t make the “obvious” comparison between first lady Carla Sarkozy, and first lady Laura Bush. I personally think she skipped over Laura Bush for the reason that Laura Bush is old, or at least older. Also, LB is so naturally forgettable to begin with, although Michelle Obama seems to like her.

Laura Bush was hell on wheels in her teens and twenties, but she is now hard to imagine in the libertine role. Same with Cindy McCain, even as Cindy’s own husband called her a trollop or a cunt, didn’t he? Still, Dowd seems to lack the imagination needed to imagine these aging white women as hot, CD selling vixens. She should be able to do that, since she is their contemporary and she still runs around in leopard skin stilettos with a hard-on for Bill Maher.

By process of Dowd’s elimination, Michelle Obama is the most comparable of these would-be first ladies to Carla Sarkozy. Her comparison is laced with racial overtones, to be sure, but I find it way more pleasurable to imagine Michelle Obama circulating nude photos of herself than envisioning Laura Bush doing so. I may be an ageist and sexist too, but I think that Dowd was simply trying to offer a “credible” scenario that most readers could stomach. 

And Amanda is probably right on the other point, too. I gave up reading Dowd many years ago when it struck me that she was a bitch. Actually, I think I realized how much I disliked her from watching her on the Bill Maher show, where you can tell they just want to jump each other’s bones. They are both sort of slimy, although I remember liking them both at one time.

I guess another troubling and somewhat racist dimension of Dowd’s comparison is her decision to quote Sarkozy’s song about smoking men like drugs while wondering what would happen if Michelle Obama wrote lyrics like this. My husband recently told me that Michelle Obama grew up in South Chicago, so the image of Obama as a L’il Kim rapper type is sort of in the background.

I don’t want to come out and say “This is racist,” but most (if not all) American first ladies *don’t* act out their Amy Winehouse side while their husband is campaigning, so it is sort of odd for Dowd to imagine Michelle Obama doing so.

In looking at photos of first-ladies and would-be leaders, I think Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton are the two sexy ones, whereas Laura Bush and Cindy McCain are sort of not. But each to their own.

This is from Wikipedia on Dowd’s past treatment of the Obamas. Not too nice…

“Early in the campaign, she exhibited her ironic humor and told anecdotes about the Obama family life. However, as the press began to emphasize her sarcasm, which did not translate well in the print media, she has toned it down.[33][29] In a press ******* of her sarcasm, The New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd said: “I wince a bit when Michelle Obama chides her husband as a mere mortal — comic routine that rests on the presumption that we see him as a god ... But it may not be smart politics to mock him in a way that turns him from the glam JFK into the mundane Gerald Ford, toasting his own English muffin. If all Senator Obama is peddling is the Camelot mystique, why debunk this mystique?”

Jesse, you are correct that Laura Bush is referenced (briefly) in Dowd’s column. However, she is not discussed. The column is a compare/contrast between France/America, in the form of a comparison between Bruni/Obama. The comparison is, as Dowd paints it, to the US’s detriment.

This is a generic type of column. Remember similar columns at the time of the Spitzer episode, where the allegedly prudish & Puritanical mores of Americans were contrasted with a supposedly more enlightened attitude toward sexual matters (especially a husband’s visits to prostitutes) on the Continent? Or think of all the columns about Mitterand’s funeral, when Americans were supposed to be impressed with the sophistication of Mme. Mitterand and her children, who welcomed Mitterand’s mistress and her child to the funeral. “Ooh la la, those oh-so-silly-Americans,” is the usual tone of such pieces, and so it is here.

Why is the contrast being made between Bruni and M. Obama, rather than McCain or Bush? There’s no reason to discuss Laura Bush, because GW Bush is not running for office. Cindy McCain has for, public consumption, bought into the Stepford role. (Her real life is, of course, much more complicated.) The reason to bring in Michelle Obama is for dramatic tension. She’s the candidate’s wife who is currently facing a choice: keep speaking out, and risk being too “edgy,” or allow herself to be pushed into Stepfordism?

Many magazines and newspapers are asking the same question. Dowd tries to give her column, which is essentially formulaic, a little extra zing by holding out the hope—in the form of Carla Bruni’s example—that M. Obama won’t have to acquiesce. In the end, Dowd takes that hope away, saying what works in France won’t work here. I hope she’s wrong, but suspect she is right.

I am embarrassed to confess that, the first time I stumbled upon a Maureen Dowd column, I somehow misread her as being politically intelligent and a feminist (I was young and susceptible to any old nonsense that came along… and wasn’t aware that she had essentially called Al Gore a woman. Hey, at least I was trying!). At the same time, I wasn’t impressed enough to make an effort to read anything else by her. I moved on, discovered actual intelligent political commentary by others, etc etc. But it was surprising to discover how awful she really is. Apparently, it will always be 1998 for Maureen Dowd. Too bad, ‘cause that was a crappy year. I was there.

hbsweet may have won.

I no longer wonder why the New York Times lacks the respect for their history necessary to fire Dowd and put in anyone or anything - the obituary editor, some classifieds, random pictures of squirrels in Central Park - that would restore a modicum of relevance to the space she occupies.

Be careful what you ask for ... rumor has it that the NY Times is after Peggy Noonan.

And now I want my $20. You got your rational reason, you got it first from me, and the text of the column supports my argument. (Your views as to what Dowd “really” means, based on your readings of her work since 1992, may be correct, but are irrelevant to the contest.) You have my email address; write me & I’ll tell you where to send the money.

I’m with Nitpicker.  I think the column is sympathetic to Michelle Obama, in MoDo’s sly way.  I think she says a lot of damn foolish things, every now and then produces a gem, and also writes some columns that could stand to be more direct and less sly, but which make a good point, if you work for it.  This column falls in the third category.  The point I took from it is that here we have a politician’s wife who has done all kinds of things that would be political suicide for her husband if an American politician’s wife did them, and yet people are nitpicking Michelle Obama for all kinds of crazy things she didn’t do.  Sure, she could have *actually* said that, but sometimes I really think she prefers a more obscure approach.

Also, I agree that if she’d brought up Cindy McCain’s misdeeds, or provided some intersectional analysis, it would have been a vastly more detailed and in-depth column, but it isn’t her worst work.  (I got really tired of all that “Rummy” and little prince nonsense she was writing.)

I know that I could make Maureen Dowd a very happy woman.