By Alison van Diggelen, host of Fresh Dialogues
Pulitzer Prize winning Maureen Dowd was a guest of Fresh Dialogues on Friday April 3rd, 2009. The interview was recorded at the Fairmont Hotel San Jose, April 2nd, 2009. Here are some select quotes from the transcript. Check back soon for the full transcript.
Are Maureen’s New York Times columns letters to her mother, Peggy?
“She is in my head in the sense that I want to amuse and inform the reader, and surprise them…tell them something they don’t know.”
On her Irish heritage
“They say that the Irish understand about politics and writing and I hope it’s true. I like to think so. I had a friend named Michael Kelly, the first journalist to die in the Iraq War…we had an editor who used to call us Gael Force.”
On America’s taste for all things big
“That’s who we are – we like big cars and McMansions, Costco…the question is, how big do we need to be to still feel American, while Obama tries to downsize us?”
On the failure of American car manufacturers to go green and embrace smaller, more efficient cars
“A French psychologist was hired by the American car manufacturers to justify why they didn’t go green earlier.. .why they kept making those huge SUVs, pickup trucks and Hummers long after they should have realized these brands was not really where we needed to go…. He asserted -a reptilian part of the brain seeks tools of survival, especially when the United States remains under threat of attack…You don’t want to go to war in a little Pinto. That’s where their head was.”
On GM’s Rick Wagoner and his firing by President Obama
“Reporters who cover Detroit were so relieved about Wagoner being fired. They’d watched the industry for years and years and years refuse to just embrace the future and make all these stupid decisions. And reward themselves.”
On Obama, his brain and his focus
“What’s depressing about the last decade is that America seems stupid and that’s what Obama is focusing on turning around. He himself is a real smarty pants. His favorite thing is to be in a room with a bunch of eggheads and he wants Americans to be smarter and kids to be better educated.”
On Dick Cheney’s role in derailing Vice President Nelson Rockefeller’s alternative energy plans in the 1970’s
“Rockefeller was a very moderate Republican and he developed an idea for an energy plan that would get us into alternative fuels. It was killed by (President Gerald) Ford’s chief of staff who was Dick Cheney. If Dick Cheney hadn’t done that then, our energy future would have been so much more advanced.”
On H.W. Bush’s attitude to environmentalists in the 80’s
“Bush called Al Gore ‘Ozone Man. ‘ That’s just how they treated environmentalists… as tree hugging, sandal wearing idiots.”
On Maureen calling Al Gore “practically lactating” due to his eco-sensitivity
“I was sympathetic to his ideas. I was just teasing him a little bit because he was so earnest. He could be a little righteous and self important; and it’s not always the most effective way to communicate your ideas, even if your ideas are right. ..He was sometimes a pompous messanger.”
On her green mentor and ‘office husband’, Tom Friedman, the NY Times columnist
“I try to get advice from Tom Friedman, who is Mr. Solar around our office. ..his whole house is solar designed. He’s trying to coach me in how to be more environmentally correct. ..When he gets depressed about the environment or the Middle East…he’ll come in and go, ‘let’s get a daiquiri!”
On Obama’s plans to embrace green tech and green energy
“Hillary and Obama in the primaries were both competing to come up with a plan for green jobs and for me, it’s very exciting because for the last 8 years it felt like we were going backwards in every way and that we weren’t coming into the 21st Century. We were like the Flintstones: not moving forward. So I love all that.”
