“If you’ve got daddy issues, pass the tissues.”
That’s how Maureen Dowd ended her well-timed Lecture on father-son dynamics in presidential politics just one day after Barack Obama won re-election.
Elon University welcomed 1999 Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd to the McCreary Theatre on Wednesday night as part of the Baird Pulitzer Prize Lecture series which has brought Pulitzer recipients to Elon on an annual basis since 2001.
Dowd’s lecture, “Fit to Print: Writing on Washington” highlighted what she called the “daddy complex” in presidential politics over the last twenty-five years.
“Trying to get into the heads of powerful narcissistic leaders is a bit like being the presidential shrink,” Dowd quipped. “Every president gets the psycho-analyst he deserves.”
For many presidents, Bush to Obama Dowd has been that very shrink. Her harshest quips, in fact, were reserved for George W. Bush who she affectionately referred to in the speech as “Junior”, man who spent his presidency trying to “undo his father’s mistakes.”
“Instead of being steered by the good father, his own, he allowed himself to be steered by the dark father: Dick Cheney. God, how I miss him,” Dowd remarked to a raucous laugh from the crowd.
True to form, Maureen Dowd spared President Obama no expense either--analyzing him as a man hell-bent on self-reliance in order to prove his absent father wrong.
“We’ve seen a strange pattern for a quarter-century … of presidential candidates with famous fathers or no fathers,” she said.
Dowd’s distinctive style, once described as “acerbic but playful” was ever present in her lecture. Visibly nervous but, as down to earth as one would expect her to be Dowd was sure to tell the crowd that public speaking was not her niche.
She described America’s next challenge for both parties as moving away from the “white male patriarchy” in the White House.
That next challenge may be met sooner rather than later. At a reception after the lecture Dowd said confidently that those who supported Hillary Clinton “would get their chance to vote for her again in 2016.”
That’s a big step and one that can be assumed that Dowd, cut from the feminist mold of her predecessor Anna Quindlen, would welcome. When and if that does happen, Maureen Dowd, the Sigmund Freud of presidential politics, will be ready to psychoanalyze away.
She’ll be armed with a sharp mind full of the journalistic wit and wisdom she displayed at Elon University on Wednesday night …and of course, the tissues.
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