The Obamas, especially Michelle, have radiated the sense that Americans do not appreciate what they sacrifice by living in a gilded cage. They've forgotten Rule No. 1 of politics: No one sheds tears for anyone lucky enough to live at the White House.

Maureen Dowd

Politics Age White House

The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.

Maureen Dowd

You Than T

Celebrity distorts democracy by giving the rich, beautiful, and famous more authority than they deserve.

Maureen Dowd

Famous Us Thor

Everybody is continuously connected to everybody else on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Reddit, e-mailing, texting, faster and faster, with the flood of information jeopardizing meaning. Everybody's talking at once in a hypnotic, hyper din: the cocktail party from hell.

Maureen Dowd

Art Wit Very

Wooing the press is an exercise roughly akin to picnicking with a tiger. You might enjoy the meal, but the tiger always eats last.

Maureen Dowd

You Woo Wit

When I started as a White House correspondent, there was a lot of criticism from guys saying, 'She focuses too much on the person but not enough on policy.' I never understood that argument at all. I just didn't agree with the premise.

Maureen Dowd

Men Art Yin

The guilty pleasure I miss most when I'm out slogging on the campaign trail is the chance to sprawl on the chaise and watch a vacuously spunky and generically sassy chick flick.

Maureen Dowd

Chance Watch Us

When you go into a fight saying you're probably going to lose, you're probably going to lose.

Maureen Dowd

You Yin T

As blue chips turn into penny stocks, Wall Street seems less like a symbol of America's macho capitalism and more like that famous Jane Austen character Mrs. Bennet, a flibbertigibbet always anxious about getting richer and her 'poor nerves.'

Maureen Dowd

Famous Ways Way

Obama sees himself as such a huge change that he can be cautious about other societal changes. But what he doesn't realize is that legalizing gay marriage is like electing a black president. Before you do it, it seems inconceivable. Once it's done, you can't remember what all the fuss was about.

Maureen Dowd

Marriage Legal Change

The Republican game is hilariously transparent: if Obama doesn't shift to more muscular postures, he's not a patriot. If he does, he's a flip-flopper.

Maureen Dowd

USC Us Trio

Eric Schmidt looks innocent enough, with his watercolor blue eyes and his tiny office full of toys and his Google campus stocked with volleyball courts and unlocked bikes and wheat-grass shots and cereal dispensers and Haribo Gummi Bears and heated toilet seats and herb gardens and parking lots with cords hanging to plug in electric cars.

Maureen Dowd

Car Yes Wit

The C.E.O. of Google doesn't look like a Dick Cheney World Domination sort whom we should worry about as Google ogles our houses, our oceans, our foibles, our movements and our tastes.

Maureen Dowd

Men Worry World

I'm into clothes, but in a way that's related to wanting to walk into a film noir movie. You know, I love to go to vintage stores, but mostly it's stuff that I don't have anywhere to wear... I don't have the life that goes with the clothes.

Maureen Dowd

Love Life Age

The Obamas, especially Michelle, have radiated the sense that Americans do not appreciate what they sacrifice by living in a gilded cage. They've forgotten Rule No. 1 of politics: No one sheds tears for anyone lucky enough to live at the White House.

Maureen Dowd

Politics Age White House

My eating habits were so bad for many years that I didn't actually know the intricacies of making a salad.

Maureen Dowd

Years Year Were

Reagan didn't socialize with the press. He spent his evenings with Nancy, watching TV with dinner trays. But he knew that to transcend, you can't condescend.

Maureen Dowd

You Wit Watching Tv

I find having a column a very difficult form of journalism. I'm not a natural like Tom Friedman and Anna Quindlen.

Maureen Dowd

Very Tom T

Americans want to be protected, but not at the cost of vitiating the values that make us Americans.

Maureen Dowd

Want Values Value

As a woman, I know that if I write about another woman, it will be perceived as a catfight.

Maureen Dowd

Write Woman Will

For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both.

Maureen Dowd

Fear Two Takeover

We are supposed to believe that every dollar given to a Clinton is a dollar that improves the world. But is it? Clintonworld is a galaxy where personal enrichment and political advancement blend seamlessly, and where a cast of jarringly familiar characters pad their pockets every which way to Sunday.

Maureen Dowd

F.D.R. achieved greatness not by means of imposing his temperament and intellect on the world but by reacting to what the world threw at him.

Maureen Dowd

Digital platforms are worthless without content. They're shiny sacks with bells and whistles, but without content, they're empty sacks. It is not about pixels versus print. It is not about how you're reading. It is about what you're reading.

Maureen Dowd

If Americans are worried about money in politics, there is no larger concern than the Clintons, who are cosseted in a world where rich people endlessly scratch the backs of rich people.

Maureen Dowd

It takes a lot of adrenaline and fear to make me actually write.

Maureen Dowd

One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly.

Maureen Dowd

Maybe Obama was not even the person he was waiting for.

Maureen Dowd

I feel like I owe it to the readers to try to pull back the veil and give them the honest version of what's going on. But it's not more fun. If Obama, as he does sometimes already, gets a little snippy with me about something I've written, you're thinking, 'Oh God, the president of the United States is already annoyed with me.'

Maureen Dowd

Why can't Google, which likes to see itself as a 'Don't Be Evil' benevolent force in society, just write us a big check for using our stories, so we can keep checks and balances alive and continue to provide the search engine with our stories?

Maureen Dowd

Washington is a place where people have always been suspect of style and overt sexuality. Too much preening signals that you're not up late studying cap-and-trade agreements.

Maureen Dowd

Journalism, spooked by rumors of its own obsolescence, has stopped believing in itself. Groans of doom alternate with panicked happy talk.

Maureen Dowd

And as far as doing God's work, I think the bankers who took government money and then gave out obscene bonuses are the same self-interested sorts Jesus threw out of the temple.

Maureen Dowd

It's passing strange that Obama, carried to a second term by women, blacks and Latinos, chooses to give away the plumiest Cabinet and White House jobs to white dudes.

Maureen Dowd

If there's one thing white men have never had a problem with in this clubby, white marble enclave of Washington, it's getting pulled up the ladder by other men.

Maureen Dowd

President Obama thinks he can use emotion to bring pressure on Congress. But that's not how adults with power respond to things.

Maureen Dowd

Obama hates selling. He thinks people should just accept the right thing to do.

Maureen Dowd

The Clintons want to do big worthy things, but they also want to squeeze money from rich people wherever they live on planet Earth, insatiably gobbling up cash for politics and charity and themselves from the same incestuous swirl.

Maureen Dowd

The wound-tight, travel-light Obama has a distaste for the adversarial and the random. But if you stick too rigidly to a 'No Drama' rule in the White House, you risk keeping reality at bay. Presidencies are always about crisis management.

Maureen Dowd

Obama invented himself against all odds and repeated parental abandonment, and he worked hard to regiment his emotions. But now that can come across as imperviousness and inflexibility. He wants to run the agenda; he doesn't want the agenda to run him. Once you become president, though, there's no way to predict what your crises will be.

Maureen Dowd