Here at NewsBusters, the last thing we'd want to do is sow discord among the liberal house columnists of the New York Times. But present purposes oblige me to let Bob Herbert know that his colleague Maureen Dowd doesn't read his column.
That's the only way to explain Dowd's claim in her column this morning that the people "tut-tutting" about Barack Obama's presidential ambitions are Republicans. According to Dowd, those mean GOP types are putting Obama down because of his lack of foreign policy experience.
You, mean, Maureen, as in this statement?:
"In an appearance on “Meet the Press” yesterday, [Obama] made it clear that he was considering . . . a run. With all due respect to Senator Obama, this is disturbing. . . [he] has a very slender résumé, very little experience in national politics, hardly any in foreign policy."
So who wrote that? Karl Rove? George Will? Some right-winger blogger? Nope. As hinted, it was none other than Bob Herbert in his Obama Bandwagon column of barely a week ago. Herbert flatly asserts that Republicans, far from discouraging an Obama run, "would like nothing more than for the Democrats to nominate" him, and that the GOP believes "they could pretty easily put together a ticket that would chew up Barack Obama in 2008."
For that matter, Herbert is far from the only Dem with doubts about Obama. Pop "Obama lack foreign policy experience" into your search engine and you'll find plenty of Dem critics. A quick perusal this morning turned up this one, a HuffPost columnist who is a former aide to Dem VP candidate Lloyd Bentsen, and this column from "The Democratic Daily."
In any case, Dowd's logic on the importance of foreign policy experience is as twisted as a soft New York pretzel. On the one hand, she approvingly cites Obama's claim that "judgment is more important than experience." On the other, she writes
"Those who declaim on the need for Senator Obama to have more experience must forget who’s running the country. It often seems that the most inexperienced person alive is George W. Bush — even after six years in office."
But since Dowd is a bitter critic of W's foreign policy, hasn't she just made the argument against inexperience? A woman's perogative and all that, but make up your mind, Mo!
