Larger text
Smaller text
Print
E-mail
A liberal in Dubya country
Ms. Collins, the commander in chief of The New York Times editorial pages, left the security of her liberal bunker in Manhattan early Tuesday and set out for enemy territory.
Alone, without a bodyguard, the diminutive editor flew to Pittsburgh and made her way to Upper St. Clair, a very bright Red township in the South Hills that gave George W. Bush an average of 63.5 percent of its vote in the last two presidential elections and Sen. Rick Santorum 68 percent in 2000.
Maureen Dowd's boss was not coming to convert the conservative, strictly zoned bedroom community to her paper's infamous and often dangerous brand of East Coast liberalism, however.
She was formally invited to speak by the women who run Town Hall South, the lecture series that quietly has been bringing all-star authors, pundits, celebrities and important media folks like George Will, Phil Donahue and Wolf Blitzer to the community for 37 years.
Collins, who wrote the 2003 book "America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines," officially came to talk about the history of women in America. On Tuesday, she spoke to 800 series subscribers for an hour at Upper St. Clair High School, then ate lunch with 200 of them at St. Clair Country Club.
Despite political differences with most of her hosts, Collins -- who donated her modest but undisclosed fee to charity -- couldn't have been more gracious, smart, witty and down-to-earth.
Whether she was signing her books, telling good-natured stories about how horrible women's lives were in the 1840s or revealing how much she secretly enjoys being the first female editorial page editor at The Times, she was just one of the suburban gals. It was as if she herself had been raised in a Red State suburb, which she was -- in Cincinnati.
During the Q&A period after lunch, she talked about her job and admitted, without shame or smugness, what she and her 16-person staff do for a living: "We run editorials which reflect the traditional values of The New York Times, which, anybody in their right mind, I think, would regard as liberal -- although I get yelled at every day for being too conservative by people who are more liberal than we are."
She said she tries hard to balance the letters and op-ed pages with nonliberal outside writers and Times columnists like Pittsburgh native John Tierney, a libertarian she mis-described as a "conservative." She also revealed why there are not more pro-Bush letters to the editor in The Times.
"The terrible fact is," she said, "we don't get many pro-Bush letters to the editor. When we do, we try to publish them."
Acknowledging the obvious -- Times letter-writers "are not a perfect cross-section of the American public" -- she urged her mostly female, mostly senior, mostly Republican audience to help her out next time President Bush gives a State of the Union speech.
"As soon as it's over, go to your e-mail and send us a two-paragraph, pithy letter, saying what a great speech that was. And your chances of being published will be really, really, really good. Our letters editor really looks for those kinds of letters and he doesn't get nearly enough of them."
If Collins' pitch for more conservative input works, it will please lots of Republicans -- including her parents.
