Broder Versus Dowd: Real Reporter Versus Over-The-Hill Stand-Up Comic
December 23, 2007 -- 10:44 AM EST // //
If you have a minute to do this, it really is instructive to compare David Broder and Maureen Dowd's columns today. Both columns are very much from the "politics as theater or entertainment" category.
Yet one of these columns is the work of a real reporter, and as such shows that there can at times be real value in this sort of approach. The other reveals how useless this approach is when it's based on mere "riffing" -- that euphemism that's often used to justify columns that have nothing in them in the way of real reporting or analysis.
Broder's column today -- rather than delivering another sermon about empty centrism -- tells you something that many readers are likely not to know: What it's like to watch Barack Obama deliver a speech in the closing days of the Iowa and New Hampshire races. Yes, Broder focused largely on style and rhetoric -- on theatrics. But because Broder did some actual reporting -- because he watched multiple speeches, then conveyed in clear and vivid English what it's like to be on the scene -- the column will be useful to many readers. Broder reminds us that this sort of political writing definitely has its place.
Dowd, by contrast, devotes yet another whole column to the "psycodrama" that is the Clinton marriage. Worse than that, she actually blames the Clintons, rather than her own obsession, for the fact that she's returning to the topic yet again:
Just when I thought I was out, the Clintons pull me back into their conjugal psychodrama.Right, right, right. The Clintons pulled her back to the subject. Because Dowd has proven so resistant to addressing it in the past. Because she just can't bear to address it again. She has no choice. The Clintons made her do it.
Just to be clear, the Clintons' marriage is in some ways a valid topic, and some of Bill's antics in recent days are certainly worthy of treatment by a political columnist. The problem here, though, is that if you obsessively "riff" about this topic in often inane and trivial ways for years and years, as Dowd has, no one is going to take you seriously if you weigh in at a time when such a discussion might be warranted or even useful.
Anyway, here you have a very useful contrast. Broder shows us what can be accomplished with the politics as theater approach -- telling readers something new and conveying a real sense of the candidates and the crowds to readers who don't have any other way of getting one. Dowd, meanwhile, gives us this genre -- again -- at its most useless and vacuous.
Comments section disabled until next month. To reach the homepage of this blog, click here.