Dowd became a columnist on
The New York Times op-ed page in 1995, Dowd was named a Woman of the Year by
Glamour magazine in 1996, and became the first Mary Alice Davis Lectureship speaker (sponsored by the School of Journalism and the Center for American History) at the
University of Texas at Austin in 2005. In 2010, Dowd was ranked No. 43 on
The Daily Telegraphs list of the 100 most influential
liberals in America; in 2007, she was ranked No. 37 on the same list. Dowd's columns have been described as letters to her mother, whom friends credit as "the source, the fountain of Maureen's humor and her Irish sensibilities and her intellectual take." Dowd's columns are distinguished by an acerbic, often
polemical writing style. Her columns display a critical and irreverent attitude towards powerful, mostly political, figures such as former Presidents
George W. Bush and
Bill Clinton. She also tends to refer to her subjects by nicknames. For example, she has often referred to Bush as "W" and former Vice President
Dick Cheney as "Big Time"; and she has called former President
Barack Obama "
Spock" and "Barry." Her interest in candidates' personalities earned her criticism from some early in her career, such as this: "She focuses too much on the person but not enough on policy." Dowd's columns have also been described as often being
political cartoons that capture a caricatured view of the current political landscape with precision and exaggeration. while referring to the Democratic Party as the "mommy party." she was later told she should have only eaten one-sixteenth—but that this had not been in the instructions on the label. She went on to describe her negative experiences with legal cannabis in a June 3, 2014
New York Times op-ed, following up on this story in another op-ed in September 2014, this time describing a discussion of using consumable cannabis with her "marijuana
Miyagi"
Willie Nelson. On March 4, 2014, Dowd published a column about the dominance of men in the film industry in which she quoted
Amy Pascal, co-chairman of
Sony Pictures Entertainment. According to
BuzzFeed, "leaked emails from Sony" suggested that Dowd had promised to provide the draft column to Pascal's husband,
Bernard Weinraub, prior to the column's publication. BuzzFeed said the column "painted Pascal in such a good light that she engaged in a round of mutual adulation with Dowd over email after its publication." Both Dowd and Weinraub have denied that Weinraub ever received the column. On December 12, 2014,
Times public editor
Margaret Sullivan concluded, "While the tone of the email exchanges is undeniably gushy, I don't think Ms. Dowd did anything unethical here." In August 2014, it was announced that Dowd would become a staff writer for
The New York Times Magazine. Her first article under the new arrangement was published more than a year later.
Controversial portrayals of Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Dowd has been accused of
sexism by
Clark Hoyt, then-public editor of
The New York Times. A 2017 study which examined sexualized shaming of
Monica Lewinsky in mainstream news coverage stated that in Dowd's extensive writings about Lewinsky, she repeatedly "mocked and disparaged her." A 2009 study of sexism towards Hillary Clinton and
Sarah Palin in the 2008 election observed that Dowd had disparaged Palin as a "Barbie" over her pageantry past. Other commentators have criticized Dowd for being obsessed with Bill and especially Hillary Clinton. During the 2008 Democratic primary, Dowd published an article titled "Can Hillary Clinton Cry Herself Back to the White House?", which a 2016 study said "[serves] to reinforce the stereotype that tears and visible emotions are feminine traits and signs of weakness". She also published a column where she likened former Senator Clinton to the "
Terminator", a ruthless cyborg where "unless every circuit is out, she'll regenerate enough to claw her way out of the grave"; in 2013 Jessica Ritchie, a research assistant at the
University of Leicester, argued that portrayals such as these sought to portray Clinton and her presidential bid as improper and unnatural. According to Clark Hoyt, Dowd's columns about Clinton were "loaded with language painting her as a 50-foot woman with a suffocating embrace, a conniving film noir dame and a victim dependent on her husband". During the
2016 presidential election, Dowd penned a
New York Times op-ed, titled "Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk". She argued that
Donald Trump held dovish foreign policy beliefs, citing his purported opposition to the
2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. However, before the publication of the op-ed, it had been reported that Trump did, in fact, support the invasion, and there were no statements on the record opposing it. In 2018,
Daniel W. Drezner, professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, wrote that Trump's foreign policy was clearly hawkish and stated, "Yes, I'm extremely angry. I have no right to ask that anyone who told you in 2016 that Trump was going to be the more dovish president should probably not talk about foreign policy for a good long while. But dear God, it would be nice." During the
2020 presidential election, Dowd wrote a column about
Geraldine Ferraro, which initially—and incorrectly—stated that the last time a man and a woman ran on the Democratic ticket was the
Mondale–Ferraro ticket, which led Clinton to joke that "either
Tim Kaine and [she] had a very vivid shared hallucination four years ago or Maureen had too much pot brownie before writing her column again". The
New York Times later corrected the column to say that 1984 was the last time a male Democratic presidential candidate chose a woman as his running mate. ==Personal life==