THE ONE WHO DOESN'T LIKE MODO:

Ravishing Rabinowitz of the Right (George Gurley, 5/02/04, NY Observer)

Dorothy Rabinowitz, the sexy, five-foot-tall Wall Street Journal columnist and editorial board member, hosted a dinner party recently at a downtown restaurant and, for a good 20 minutes, she smiled as her guests denounced Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Finally, she let it rip.

"I revere John Ashcroft," she said.

There was a lengthy silence. Things went downhill after that. [...]

Above Ms. Rabinowitz's desk were photographs of her with Henry Kissinger, Harper's Magazine editor Lewis Lapham and the late Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley. Although she's a registered Democrat, the last one she voted for was Lyndon Johnson.

She said Howard Dean had been the Democrats' best candidate.

"The more integrated personality of them all," she said. "It's his speech: He connects one thought to another, he is absolutely jargon-free, he doesn't talk like the others--he was a male person in a really serious way. There's a kind of a sexy core to him, even in his little, short-armed way.

"I thought everything he said was absurd," she added, "but not the kind of absurdity that's deep and corrosive."

How about the nominee-presumptive, John Kerry? The phrases "grinding condescension and babble," "sheer mindless demagoguery" and "bombastic lordly presence" escaped her lips. [...]

Ms. Rabinowitz has never been married and said she's never been lonely. In 1971, she moved into the one-bedroom Greenwich Village apartment she shares with a Tibetan terrier named Simon. "I would say he's the best-looking male that has ever entered my life," she said.

The building's residents hardly embrace her. "People don't even say hello," she said, adding that she's overheard herself being referred to as "the person who doesn't like Maureen Dowd."

She's right about Howard Dean too.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 2, 2004 11:36 PM