So which is it, Lou? Are you a fearless friend of the middle class--or a fawning hobnobber with the upper class? Or do you wish to have it both ways. Those seem to be the questions on the mind of Eric Deggans, the versatile critic/blogger for The St. Petersburg Times, who filed an honest but not-very-flattering look at Dobbs.
Dobbs was doing a "town meeting" in Tampa, and so Deggans had the job of interviewing him. So Deggan asked an obvious question, based on a profile of Dobbs that appeared in The New Yorker a while back:
"It seems our problems during the interview surfaced after a question I asked about that profile -- specifically, how he felt about Auletta drawing a marked contrast between his high-flying lifestyle (lunch at the Four Seasons, friendships with powerful moguls such as former Miramax head Harvey Weinstein) and his current aggressive advocacy of middle class issues.
"Insisting he loved the story and it implications were obvious, Dobbs gave me a hard time for bringing up what he felt was such an obvious question. It was an odd situation -- critics' rap on Dobbs is that he presents complex issues such as illegal immigration in black and white terms, treating those who disagree with him as either idiots or charlatans.
"Now, I was on the receiving end of that intimidating process. And it was not fun."
