Is Howard Dean trying to score points with conservatives by stiffing Maureen Dowd? Matt Drudge writes, in his characteristically breathless copy, that:
NEW YORK TIMES op-ed queen Maureen Dowd was left waiting by the phone by Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.
After scheduling a phone interview with Dowd at her hotel in Des Moines, the candidate never called!
Add this to the Kerry flip-flop over gutting the Agriculture Department, and if you didn’t know better, you’d say that these guys were trying to reach across the aisle for voters.
But I think in the case of Dean and Kerry, sometimes an F-up is just an F-up.
(And for those of you who don’t remember the Adam Clymer incident, click here.)
UPDATE: Maybe there’s more truth to this than I thought. I hadn’t read the Jonah Goldberg piece about Clymer since it first ran back in September of 2000. But Jonah wrote that “sticking it to the press is a bipartisan tradition”:
Journalists hate to admit it, but beating up the press is a populist gambit. The media ranks at the bottom of almost every survey when it comes to public trust and confidence. More than a third of America actually thinks our press hurts democracy, according to one major survey. For all of their–often sincere–convictions that journalists are looking out for the little guy, most people see the press as an arrogant and unaccountable priesthood of kingmakers or, in the common vernacular, @$#&*!s.
It will be interesting to see what sort of reaction this very minor tempest in a thimble gets.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Must have been a deliberate effort by Dean. Pejman Yousefzadeh writes, “my respect for Howard Dean just skyrocketed”.
ONE MORE UPDATE: Orrin Judd writes, “Memo to Howard Dean: If you’re a fire hydrant already, best not to give MoDo any more reason to whiz on you”.
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