Who'll let the dogs out?

Image via nogarlicnoonions, Lebanon.

Verbatim Maureen Dowd, "Call Off the Dogs", New York Times, February 15 2015:

I’LL pay for this column.

The Rottweilers will be unleashed.

When I saw the first line my first thought was, hey, you mean you're not asking the Times to pay, you're doing this one for free? No, she means she'll pay in victimhood, hounded by the ruthless enemies whose crimes she plans to unveil: she thinks she's Anna Politkovskaya, courageously fighting the diabolical menace of, um,

the slippery David Brock, accurately known as a snake....The silver-haired 52-year-old, who sports colorful designer suits and once wore a monocle, brawled his way into a Times article about the uneasy marriage between Hillary Clinton’s veteran attack dogs and the group of advisers who are moving over from Obamaland.

I wonder if she was there the time he wore a monocle. I can't find a picture of it online, or of any instance of him in a suit that is not a very dark blue or gray. It also seems unlikely that he brawled his way, insofar as snakes ever can be said to brawl, into Nicholas Confessore's and Amy Chozick's article on the Clinton campaign in Wednesday's Times, though I don't suppose he made any particular effort to stop them from writing it either. He certainly didn't give them any quotes: "Mr. Brock declined to comment." (Dowd presumably means to say that his simultaneously brawling and serpentine behavior caused the Times political desk to be interested in him, but doesn't spend enough time editing herself to find out whether she's managed to say that, or indeed anything.)

As to how Brock might feel about Dowd's digest of the Confessore and Chozick article, garnished with her trademark animal metaphors and over-the-top adjectives like the plastic baran leaves festooning the plates in a third-rate sushi shop, I think he may well leave the Rottweilers at home.

The story is, basically, that there is a fight going on inside the slowly gestating presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, between the operatives more identified with Clinton herself, including Brock, and those more identified with Barack Obama, starring his 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina, in what Dowd refers to as an "uneasy marriage", not her own words (which is a bit of a Brooksian problem in this column, since she starts quoting Confessore and Chozick without attribution in paragraph 5 and doesn't mention them until paragraph 8):

Confessore&Chozick: the marriage between the two camps — based to a large degree on mutual interest, if not love — now appears more uneasy than at any time since Mr. Obama asked Mrs. Clinton to serve in his administration...

That is, Messina and his agents have been complaining (to Confessore and Chozick in particular, it seems) about Brock's use of a fund-raising consultant, Mary Pat Bonner, who takes a commission out of the donations she successfully solicits, which sounds indeed pretty unseemly to me—

Confessore&Chozick: Mary Pat Bonner, whose firm has been paid millions of dollars by Mr. Brock’s groups to court donors — some of whom have criticized the arrangement as well as Mr. Brock.

Dowd: a fund-raiser named Mary Pat Bonner, whose firm has collected millions of dollars in commissions — a practice many fund-raising experts consider unethical.

That's kind of fun, how she turned "donors" into "fund-raising experts". Anyway, Brock has gotten kind of mad at Messina et al., or,

Confessore&Chozick: Mr. Brock accused officials at Priorities of leaking an “orchestrated political hit job” on his organizations, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Times. Politico first reported his resignation.

Dowd: Brock resigned last week from the board of a pro-Clinton “super-PAC” called Priorities USA Action — whose co-chairman is Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager — accusing the political action committee of “an orchestrated political hit job”...

While Clinton, plotting in her castle fastnesses, has no time to control her squabbling lieutenants:

Chozick (February 7): With advice from more than 200 policy experts, Hillary Rodham Clinton is trying to answer what has emerged as a central question of her early presidential campaign strategy: how to address the anger about income inequality without overly vilifying the wealthy.

Dowd: She’s busy polling more than 200 policy experts on how to show that she really cares about the poor while courting the banks.

Disclosure: I personally, like most bloggers to the left as they say of Attila the Hun, value Brock's organization Media Matters for America a great deal, even though it belongs to a family of companies that apparently make him a revolting amount of money—

Confessore&Chozick: his $28 million network of media-monitoring and opposition research organizations 

Dowd: Brock’s Media Matters and Correct the Record websites, which ferociously push back against any Hillary coverage that isn’t fawning.... a $28 million cluster of media monitoring groups and oppo research organizations that are vehicles to rebut and at times discredit and threaten anyone who casts a gimlet eye at Clinton Inc.

Dowd thinks Brock has a particular vendetta against her:

He has tried to discredit anyone who disagreed with his ideological hits (myself and reporters I know included)

by which I think she means MMFA has occasionally criticized her (well, maybe 296 times) including last June's epic quantitative study by Hannah Groch-Begley and Oliver Willis of her 21-year campaign against Hillary Clinton:

Media Matters analyzed 195 columns by Dowd since November 1993 containing significant mentions of Clinton for whether they included any of 16 negative tropes in five categories (listed in the below methodology). 72 percent (141 columns) were negative towards Clinton -- only 8 percent (15 columns) were positive. The remaining 20 percent (39 columns) were neutral.

For example, Dowd has repeatedly accused Clinton of being an enemy to or betraying feminism (35 columns, 18 percent of those studied), power-hungry (51 columns, 26 percent), unlikeable (9 columns, 5 percent), or phony (34 columns, 17 percent). She's also attacked the Clintons as a couple in 43 columns (22 percent), many of which included Dowd's ham-handed attempts at psychoanalysis.

That's a pretty clarifying context for Dowd's view that

The Clintons appreciate the fact that Brock, like Morris, is a take-no-prisoners type with the ethical compass of a jackal. Baked in the tactics of the right, Brock will never believe that negative coverage results from legitimate shortcomings. Instead, it’s all personal, all false, and all a war.... Hillary’s inability to dispense with brass-knuckle, fanatical acolytes like Brock shows that she still has an insecure streak that requires Borgia-like blind loyalty, and can’t distinguish between the real vast right-wing conspiracy and the voices of legitimate concern.

The voice of legitimate concern being, obviously, her own. Her "negative coverage" of Clinton's "legitimate shortcomings" (I believe that's the first time I've seen "legitimate" used in just that way since Todd Akin's "legitimate rape").  As you can hear from the judicious, concerned language she uses to express herself.

At the cat cafe Ohmiya Nekoya, by lon dilia papa.

I think the whole apparatus of campaign funding is rotten through and through, up to and including Jim Messina, with Brock's role only partly excusable because MMFA and Correct the Record are really useful byproducts of the filthy process. I'm particularly angry at Obama's campaign apparatus and have been for years, ever since they encouraged him to break the public financing system for presidential campaigns and to cast that Senate vote on immunity for the telecoms industry; these people have been working for years, I believe, to make him a less great president than he ought to be (as I think I heard Axelrod sadly acknowledging on the Daily Show the other night). The fact that he's not campaigning any more is evidently what's made Obama so terrifically aggressive and open and left-thinking in the last couple of months, and I think a big part of that is just that he's gotten rid of those people at last, sending them off to get Hillary elected.

They will undoubtedly have a corrupting influence on the next Clinton presidency as well, regardless of who wins in these little conflicts. It's not really interesting to me who wins the contest for top dog in the campaign, unless it's somebody interested in diminishing the corruption (which is not going to be Messina, I'm afraid: the story makes it look as if what he's mostly worried about is the donors' irritation at Bonner for being a mercenary and not quite one of us, dear, an issue Dowd wipes out in her revision).

Dowd's position is that she is bravely exposing corruption in the campaign ranks, but she gives us no reason to suppose she even knows what corruption is (also wiped out of her revision of the Confessore and Chozick story is even the tiniest reference to it, like their identification of "Mr. Messina, now a consultant with a significant roster of corporate and political clients"). She can't hide that what she's really writing about is her own hatred of Brock—"all personal, all false, and all a war"—for his own (minor) part in exposing what a hack she is.

I'm not really getting why she's writing this piece the week of the publication of David Axelrod's Believers and the attendant publicity, with its oh-no-she-didn't revelation that President Obama thinks she's a hack too, and a not-nice person, like Mark Penn and Willard Mitt Romney? She's commented on that story, as far as I know, only in an email to Michael Calderone of the Huffpost

Maureen Dowd rejects Axelrod suggestion her Obama coverage changed because of tense exchange: http://t.co/CEhQEkoWJw pic.twitter.com/e8hcUKktSl
— Michael Calderone (@mlcalderone) February 10, 2015

Oh, she admits her coverage did change a bit:

Dowd acknowledged that her columns grew more critical of Obama through his first six years in office, but said the shift was a reflection on his “governing and leadership, not my relationship with him.”

But that was just a function of her disappointment, having had such high hopes for the man she called "Obambi", when they had such a fun interaction in March 2008:

he called me “MoDowd” and tweaked me for my many columns suggesting he would need to toughen up to beat the Clinton machine. “She’s trying to give me hair on my chest,” he said mockingly, plucking at his shirt.... he will now have to come to grips with something he has always skittered away from: You can’t be elected president unless you prove you’re tough.

No indeed, her coverage didn't really change at all; she just did more and more of it, on the occasions when the Clintons, who actually rule the entire earth and need to be written about every week, gave her a brief break. You can see him in that encounter, trying to be friendly-but-not-dumb, and how she receives the gesture by going home and using it to build onto her project of calling him what fifth-graders refer to as "gay" (which doesn't in fifth grade mean sexually attracted to persons of your own sex but more what Dowd calls "effete and vaguely foreign"—she's a fifth-grader with a pretty big vocabulary). It had nothing to do with governing and leadership, of which she knows nothing; it was about whether or not he has cooties. No wonder he got sick of her.

So in today's piece she does mention Axelrod's book, but in a pretty odd way: without reference to the state of her relations with the president, with a reference to previous obnoxious Clinton consultants:

David Axelrod, the author of a new memoir, “Believer,” wrote that Hillary’s past gurus, [Dick] Morris and [Mark] Penn, were nonbelievers — mercenary, manipulative and avaricious.... Axelrod reiterated to me that Hillary’s designated campaign chairman, John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s last chief of staff who left his post as an Obama counselor on Friday, “has the strength and standing to enforce a kind of campaign discipline that hasn’t existed before.”

Note how she brings in the campaign consultant Obama is alleged to dislike the way he dislikes her, and hints that Penn and Morris are in some sense in the same category as Brock (rather unfairly to Brock, I think, who is a Believer in Axelrod's sense, having undergone a public conversion to a conventionally liberal standpoint 18 years ago that he's maintained consistently ever since), in opposition to Podesta, who suddenly appears as a political about whom she has nothing nasty to say. (Not that I have anything nasty to say about him myself; indeed, I hope Axe is right.)

Also, although she opens predicting her imminent expectation of a dog attack, her title addresses the dogs' master (I'm pretty sure Times columnists write their own titles, as you can tell by the filename in the url, which is usually the same, unlike in the news articles): "Call Off the Dogs". Is she trying to negotiate with Podesta? Like, call off your Brocks and I'll make your life easier? It's clearly her response to the Axelrod gossip, but it's extremely indirect, and wtf does it mean?

Panda sushi, from Blue Candy.