Maureen Dowd's Latest Clinton Attack Is Infused With RNC Talking Points

Dowd Adopts Nixon Comparison Being Pushed By The Republican Party

Maureen Dowd's latest column attacking Hillary Clinton with comparisons to former President Richard Nixon echoes attacks from the Republican National Committee (RNC).

In a New York Times op-ed on April 11, Dowd predicted that Clinton's presidential campaign will “take the Nixon approach” by “trying to charm people one by one in the early states for 2016, an acknowledgement that she cannot emulate the wholesale allure of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.”

Dowd's Nixon comparison has been made before, repeatedly, as part of the RNC's “Stop Hillary” campaign. As the Washington Post noted on April 11, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus “habitually describes Clinton as a cold, Nixonian liberal millionaire.”

Priebus made the comparison in March when discussing Clinton's email use while serving as secretary of state, saying “even Nixon didn't destroy the tapes” (an implication that the deleted personal emails on Clinton's private server were equivalent to Nixon's involvement in the Watergate conspiracy).

Conservative media figures followed his lead, and the Nixon comparison found its way onto a variety of Fox News programming, into the pages of National Review, and even into the mouth of conservative MSNBC host Joe Scarborough on the March 29 edition of NBC's Meet the Press.

Dowd has now followed suit. The columnist has been attacking Clinton on often personal terms repeatedly for more than twenty years. She's accused Clinton of being power-hungry, unlikeable, phony, and an enemy of feminism, among other attacks. Now it appears she's looking to the Republican Party for new inspiration.