Morning Edition, January 30, 2008 · It's Wednesday, the time we usually hear from commentator Frank Deford. This week, though, the ghost of William Shakespeare makes an appearance. The bard was in Glendale, Ariz., the other day as the Super Bowl contenders met the media ... and filed this exclusive play.
The Players: Sideline Wench, a reporter for the Duchy of Fox; Kornheisercranz, herald; Wilbonstern, herald; Brady, a fair-haired boy; Eli, a boy; reporters, bloggers, correspondents, cameramen, soundmen, hangers-on, sycophants, small children throwing rose petals.
Our drama begins as a slovenly mob of sports journalists enters the field at the University of Phoenix Stadium. A fetching reporter, the Sideline Wench of the Duchy of Fox, steps forward.
Sideline Wench: Since none of my sex 'tis allowed
Within the network booth on high,
'Twill be my one sweet distaff voice
Midst these growling sports-page lowlifes
Which will, upon my sideline nunnery,
Dare confront the pretty Brady.
Two heralds, Kornheisercranz and Wilbonstern, wearing hideous matching ESPN doublets, elbow the Sideline Wench aside.
Kornheisercranz: Upon this line-ed greensward set within
A desert the Almighty fixed but for cactus
Will be this, our strange stage for Sabbath's pigskin war,
Waged by mesomorphs come from green Blue States afar.
Wilbonstern: 'Tis stranger still the warrior names affixed,
For they would better be the one, the other.
Think on it: those called Giants are but dwarfs here,
Mere ciphers in the point spread, a goodly dozen down.
Kornheisercranz: Yea, the true giants, these peerless monsters,
Call themselves Patriots, e'en though they give shame
To that sweet address, trafficking more as traitors,
Scoundrels in video deceit, cashing all manner of Belichicks.
Sideline Wench: But, hush all you scribes who bloviate so,
For comes now fair Brady, he who is as super
In his mortal company as e're this game is to sport.
But soft! Let me look upon him as if I filled his embrace.
Oh! A visage that Narcissus would have traded for!
And a manner that knows neither pressure nor fear.
But, alas, 'tis women of fashion that he favors,
For one already has his babe, another his flowers,
And I, only a sideline wench who can but model dreams.
And now Brady enters amid a crowd of admirers. Small children toss rose petals in his path.
Kornheisercranz: Methinks the crunch upon his presence is so great,
And the paparazzi do shine forth such a spangled glare
That the great golden orb above must be dimmed
And the sounds of Niagara itself seem noiseless
Before the din of questions that confront our great Brady.
The Media: Brady, Brady what is afoot with thou?
Brady: Good men of the press box, I come whole to you,
For always the feats I have achieved, were upon my two feet.
And Sunday, I shall play the same no less,
One game at a time, one good foot before the other.
But now, I bid you, let me take my leave to join my mates,
For by rolling alone, there is no way for Moss to gather passes.
Narrator (in hushed tones): And so Brady exits stage left ... and the heralds return.
Wilbonstern: But look now, who approaches from yon other way?
'Tis young Eli, who seems, in his manner, yet a boy,
No match for such a paragon as the dauntless Brady.
Kornheisercranz: 'Tis so, he is yet more Manning than man,
But the football blood that fills that callow vessel
Is as royal as Brady ever bought to his captured throne.
Eli is the seed of the sainted Archie
And thus branch from the same tree as Peyton,
He, who made stallions of Colts but twelvemonth past.
Mayhap the lad can, with a pigskin, find the same mark
Little David did when bookies of yore favored huge Goliath.
Sideline Wench: So, withal, is the grandeur of Brady match for the legacy of Eli?
Forsooth,
With that I take to silence and send it back up to the big boys in the booth.
And so the curtain falls on our Super Bowl drama ... with apologies to Shakespeare and thanks to our weekly sports bard, commentator Frank Deford, who played the part of Kornheisercranz. Thanks also to Sylvia Poggioli, who played the Sideline Wench, Neal Conan as Wilbonstern, Ari Shapiro as Brady and Steve Inskeep as the Narrator.
Link to Audio: Here
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
the emperor of ice-cream
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
by
Wallace Stevens
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal.
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
by
Wallace Stevens
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal.
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Monday, January 28, 2008
Love on a Dark Street
"The night is the time for calls across the ocean. Alone in the hours past midnight in a foreign city, a man’s thoughts center on another continent, he remembers loved voices far away, he calculates differences in time zones (It is eight o’clock in New York, the taxis are bumper to bumper, all the lights are lit), he promises himself that there will be a general savings on such things as cigarettes, liquor and restaurants to make up for the sweet extravagance of several moments of conversation across the three thousand miles of space."
Tip of the cap to Irwin Shaw, a master of the short story.
/////
What lovely prose. Irwin Shaw was a great writer and really isn't given the respect he deserves.
It's crazy now to many folks I'm sure, that "several moments of conversation across three thousand miles of space" would have ever been considered extravagant, but it was to me as a young man in the late eighties. Things are a lot different today. Pretty much any phone call is cheap.
In exquisite remembrance of those precious conversations that I once enjoyed, over three thousand miles of space.
Tip of the cap to Irwin Shaw, a master of the short story.
/////
What lovely prose. Irwin Shaw was a great writer and really isn't given the respect he deserves.
It's crazy now to many folks I'm sure, that "several moments of conversation across three thousand miles of space" would have ever been considered extravagant, but it was to me as a young man in the late eighties. Things are a lot different today. Pretty much any phone call is cheap.
In exquisite remembrance of those precious conversations that I once enjoyed, over three thousand miles of space.
Friday, January 25, 2008
Furthermore.....
DECLARATIONS
Breaking Up Is Hard to Do
By PEGGY NOONAN
January 25, 2008
We begin, as one always must now, again, with Bill Clinton. The past week he has traveled South Carolina, leaving discord in his wake. Barack Obama, that "fairytale," is low, sneaky. "He put out a hit job on me." The press is cruelly carrying Mr. Obama's counter-jabs. "You live for it."
In Dillon, S.C., according to the Associated Press, on Thursday Mr. Clinton "predicted that many voters will be guided mainly by gender and race loyalties" and suggested he wife may lose Saturday's primary because black voters will side with Mr. Obama. Who is raising race as an issue? Bill Clinton knows. It's the press, and Mr. Obama. "Shame on you," Mr. Clinton said to a CNN reporter. The same day the Web site believed to be the back door of the Clinton war room unveiled a new name for the senator from Illinois: "Sticky Fingers Obama."
Bill Clinton, with his trembly, red faced rage, makes John McCain look young. His divisive and destructive daily comportment—this is a former president of the United States—is a civic embarrassment. It is also an education, and there is something heartening in this.
There are many serious and thoughtful liberals and Democrats who support Mr. Obama and John Edwards, and who are seeing Mr. Clinton in a new way and saying so. Here is William Greider in The Nation, the venerable left-liberal magazine. The Clintons are "high minded" on the surface but "smarmily duplicitous underneath, meanwhile jabbing hard at the groin area. They are a slippery pair and come as a package. The nation is at fair risk of getting them back in the White House for four years."
That, again, is from one of the premier liberal journals in the United States. It is exactly what conservatives have been saying for a decade. This may mark a certain coming together of the thoughtful on both sides. The Clintons, uniters at last.
Mr. Obama takes the pummeling and preaches the high road. It's all windup with him, like a great pitcher more comfortable preparing to throw than throwing. Something in him resists aggression. He tends to be indirect in his language, feinting, only suggestive. I used to think he was being careful not to tear the party apart, and endanger his own future.
But the Clintons are tearing the party apart. It will not be the same after this. It will not be the same after its most famous leader, and probable ultimate victor, treated a proud and accomplished black man who is a U.S. senator as if he were nothing, a mere impediment to their plans. And to do it in a way that signals, to his supporters, How dare you have the temerity, the ingratitude, after all we've done for you?
Watch for the GOP to attempt swoop in after the November elections and make profit of the wreckage.
* * *
As for the Republicans, their slow civil war continues. The primary race itself is winnowing down and clarifying: It is John McCain versus Mitt Romney, period. At the same time the conservative journalistic world is convulsed by recrimination and attack. They're throwing each other out of the party. Republicans have become very good at that. David Brooks damns Rush Limbaugh who knocks Bill Kristol who anathematizes whoever is to be anathematized this week. This Web site opposes that magazine.
[elephant]
The rage is due to many things. A world is ending, the old world of conservative meaning, and ascendancy. Loss leads to resentment. (See Clinton, Bill.) Different pundits back different candidates. Some opportunistically discover new virtues in candidates who appear at the moment to be winning. Some feel they cannot be fully frank about causes and effects.
More on that in a moment.
I saw Mr. McCain this Tuesday in New York, at a fund-raiser at which a breathless aide shared, "We just made a million dollars." What a difference a few wins makes. There were a hundred people outside chanting, "Mac is Back!" and perhaps a thousand people inside, crammed into a three-chandelier ballroom at the St Regis. When I attended a fundraiser in October there was none of this; perhaps 200 came, and people were directed to crowd around the candidate as if to show he had support. Now you had to fight your way through a three-ring cluster. (When I attended a Giuliani fund-raiser this summer I saw something I wish I'd noted: The audience was big but wasn't listening. They were all on their BlackBerrys. That should have told me something about his support.)
Mr. McCain is in the middle of a shift. Previous strategy: I'm John McCain and you know me, we've traveled through history together. New strategy: I'm the old vet who fought on the front lines of the Reagan-era front, and I am about to take on the mantle of the essentials of conservatism—lower spending, smaller government, strong in the world. He is going to strike the great Reagan gong, not in a way that is new but in a way that is new for him.
In this he is repositioning himself back to where he started 30 years ago: as a Southwestern American conservative veteran of the armed forces. That is, inherently if not showily, anti-establishment. That is, I am the best of the past.
Mr. Romney, on the other hand, is running as I Am Today. I am new and fresh, in fact I'm tomorrow, I know all about the international flow of money and the flatness of the world, I know what China is, I can see you through the turbulence just as I saw Bain to success.
It will all come down to: Whom do Republicans believe? Mr. Romney in spite of his past and now-disavowed liberal positions? Or Mr. McCain in spite of his forays, the past 10 years, into a kind of establishment mindset that has suggested that The Establishment Knows Best?
Do conservatives take inspiration from Mr. Romney's newness? Or do they take comfort and security from Mr. McCain's rugged ability to endure, and to remind?
It is along those lines the big decision will be made.
* * *
On the pundit civil wars, Rush Limbaugh declared on the radio this week, "I'm here to tell you, if either of these two guys [Mr. McCain or Mike Huckabee] get the nomination, it's going to destroy the Republican Party. It's going to change it forever, be the end of it!"
This is absurd. George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues.
Were there other causes? Yes, of course. But there was an immediate and essential cause.
And this needs saying, because if you don't know what broke the elephant you can't put it together again. The party cannot re-find itself if it can't trace back the moment at which it became lost. It cannot heal an illness whose origin is kept obscure.
I believe that some of the ferocity of the pundit wars is due to a certain amount of self-censorship. It's not in human nature to enjoy self-censorship. The truth will out, like steam from a kettle. It hurts to say something you supported didn't work. I would know. But I would say of these men (why, in the continuing age of Bill Clinton, does the emoting come from the men?) who are fighting one another as they resist naming the cause for the fight: Sack up, get serious, define. That's the way to help.
Breaking Up Is Hard to Do
By PEGGY NOONAN
January 25, 2008
We begin, as one always must now, again, with Bill Clinton. The past week he has traveled South Carolina, leaving discord in his wake. Barack Obama, that "fairytale," is low, sneaky. "He put out a hit job on me." The press is cruelly carrying Mr. Obama's counter-jabs. "You live for it."
In Dillon, S.C., according to the Associated Press, on Thursday Mr. Clinton "predicted that many voters will be guided mainly by gender and race loyalties" and suggested he wife may lose Saturday's primary because black voters will side with Mr. Obama. Who is raising race as an issue? Bill Clinton knows. It's the press, and Mr. Obama. "Shame on you," Mr. Clinton said to a CNN reporter. The same day the Web site believed to be the back door of the Clinton war room unveiled a new name for the senator from Illinois: "Sticky Fingers Obama."
Bill Clinton, with his trembly, red faced rage, makes John McCain look young. His divisive and destructive daily comportment—this is a former president of the United States—is a civic embarrassment. It is also an education, and there is something heartening in this.
There are many serious and thoughtful liberals and Democrats who support Mr. Obama and John Edwards, and who are seeing Mr. Clinton in a new way and saying so. Here is William Greider in The Nation, the venerable left-liberal magazine. The Clintons are "high minded" on the surface but "smarmily duplicitous underneath, meanwhile jabbing hard at the groin area. They are a slippery pair and come as a package. The nation is at fair risk of getting them back in the White House for four years."
That, again, is from one of the premier liberal journals in the United States. It is exactly what conservatives have been saying for a decade. This may mark a certain coming together of the thoughtful on both sides. The Clintons, uniters at last.
Mr. Obama takes the pummeling and preaches the high road. It's all windup with him, like a great pitcher more comfortable preparing to throw than throwing. Something in him resists aggression. He tends to be indirect in his language, feinting, only suggestive. I used to think he was being careful not to tear the party apart, and endanger his own future.
But the Clintons are tearing the party apart. It will not be the same after this. It will not be the same after its most famous leader, and probable ultimate victor, treated a proud and accomplished black man who is a U.S. senator as if he were nothing, a mere impediment to their plans. And to do it in a way that signals, to his supporters, How dare you have the temerity, the ingratitude, after all we've done for you?
Watch for the GOP to attempt swoop in after the November elections and make profit of the wreckage.
* * *
As for the Republicans, their slow civil war continues. The primary race itself is winnowing down and clarifying: It is John McCain versus Mitt Romney, period. At the same time the conservative journalistic world is convulsed by recrimination and attack. They're throwing each other out of the party. Republicans have become very good at that. David Brooks damns Rush Limbaugh who knocks Bill Kristol who anathematizes whoever is to be anathematized this week. This Web site opposes that magazine.
[elephant]
The rage is due to many things. A world is ending, the old world of conservative meaning, and ascendancy. Loss leads to resentment. (See Clinton, Bill.) Different pundits back different candidates. Some opportunistically discover new virtues in candidates who appear at the moment to be winning. Some feel they cannot be fully frank about causes and effects.
More on that in a moment.
I saw Mr. McCain this Tuesday in New York, at a fund-raiser at which a breathless aide shared, "We just made a million dollars." What a difference a few wins makes. There were a hundred people outside chanting, "Mac is Back!" and perhaps a thousand people inside, crammed into a three-chandelier ballroom at the St Regis. When I attended a fundraiser in October there was none of this; perhaps 200 came, and people were directed to crowd around the candidate as if to show he had support. Now you had to fight your way through a three-ring cluster. (When I attended a Giuliani fund-raiser this summer I saw something I wish I'd noted: The audience was big but wasn't listening. They were all on their BlackBerrys. That should have told me something about his support.)
Mr. McCain is in the middle of a shift. Previous strategy: I'm John McCain and you know me, we've traveled through history together. New strategy: I'm the old vet who fought on the front lines of the Reagan-era front, and I am about to take on the mantle of the essentials of conservatism—lower spending, smaller government, strong in the world. He is going to strike the great Reagan gong, not in a way that is new but in a way that is new for him.
In this he is repositioning himself back to where he started 30 years ago: as a Southwestern American conservative veteran of the armed forces. That is, inherently if not showily, anti-establishment. That is, I am the best of the past.
Mr. Romney, on the other hand, is running as I Am Today. I am new and fresh, in fact I'm tomorrow, I know all about the international flow of money and the flatness of the world, I know what China is, I can see you through the turbulence just as I saw Bain to success.
It will all come down to: Whom do Republicans believe? Mr. Romney in spite of his past and now-disavowed liberal positions? Or Mr. McCain in spite of his forays, the past 10 years, into a kind of establishment mindset that has suggested that The Establishment Knows Best?
Do conservatives take inspiration from Mr. Romney's newness? Or do they take comfort and security from Mr. McCain's rugged ability to endure, and to remind?
It is along those lines the big decision will be made.
* * *
On the pundit civil wars, Rush Limbaugh declared on the radio this week, "I'm here to tell you, if either of these two guys [Mr. McCain or Mike Huckabee] get the nomination, it's going to destroy the Republican Party. It's going to change it forever, be the end of it!"
This is absurd. George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues.
Were there other causes? Yes, of course. But there was an immediate and essential cause.
And this needs saying, because if you don't know what broke the elephant you can't put it together again. The party cannot re-find itself if it can't trace back the moment at which it became lost. It cannot heal an illness whose origin is kept obscure.
I believe that some of the ferocity of the pundit wars is due to a certain amount of self-censorship. It's not in human nature to enjoy self-censorship. The truth will out, like steam from a kettle. It hurts to say something you supported didn't work. I would know. But I would say of these men (why, in the continuing age of Bill Clinton, does the emoting come from the men?) who are fighting one another as they resist naming the cause for the fight: Sack up, get serious, define. That's the way to help.
It's looking more and more like McCain...
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy
January 25, 2008; Page A14
The Democratic epiphany about the political tactics of Bill and Hillary Clinton continues, with scales falling from eyes on a daily basis. "I think it's not Presidential," said former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, about Mr. Clinton's steady barrage against Barack Obama. "It's not in keeping with the image of a former President, and I'm frankly surprised that he is taking this approach." Mr. Daschle supports Mr. Obama, but how he could be surprised is another matter.
"This is beneath the dignity of a former President. He is not helping anyone, and certainly not helping the Democratic Party," added Vermont Senator Pat Leahy. On the point of "helping" the party, Mr. Leahy seems to have forgotten that the Clinton Presidency was an era of more or less persistent Democratic losses -- except for the Clintons.
Then there's former South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian, who once backed Bill Clinton but this week called his political attacks "reprehensible" and described one of Mrs. Clinton's TV ads about Mr. Obama as "a lie." As Mrs. Clinton likes to say, she's had "16 years" of experience in dealing with this "Republican attack machine."
//////
McCain Gets Edge for Electability
As Primary Moves Along,
Republican Voters Face
Question of Who Can Win
By ALEX FRANGOS and ELIZABETH HOLMES
January 25, 2008; Page A4
The leading Republican presidential candidates all claim to be the best-suited to overcome the Democratic tide expected in the general election. But opinion polls clearly favor Arizona Sen. John McCain in that regard.
In the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, 37% of respondents said Mr. McCain has the best chance to win in November against the Democrats. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was far back in second, with 16%, followed closely by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani at 15% and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee at 12%. Those results are mirrored in other polls.
Mr. McCain also did the best in hypothetical matchups with the two leading Democrats. The poll shows him beating New York Sen. Hillary Clinton by 46% to 44% and tying against Illinois Sen. Barack Obama with 42% support. Messrs. Romney, Giuliani and Huckabee all lose handily in polling matchups with Sens. Clinton and Obama. Statistically, the results are about the same -- a dead heat -- whether Mr. McCain's opponent is Sen. Clinton or Sen. Obama because the poll has a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.
Many Republican primary voters face a quandary this year: Whether to choose the candidate they like best or the one they think has the best shot against a formidable Democratic opponent in November.
"We have got to figure out who's the most electable. That's the hard part," said Ron Dahlstrom, a 67-year-old retiree living in Naples, Fla., who says he hasn't decided on a candidate. The self-described religious conservative likes Mr. Huckabee, but says the Baptist preacher is too religious to get elected. That leaves him undecided between Messrs. Romney and McCain. "Anybody but Hillary," he said Tuesday.
The electabilty quotient is a growing concern for voters as the campaign heats up in Florida. That represents a change for the Republican Party. In recent elections, Republicans have either had an incumbent or an anointed front-runner who gained momentum early, such as George W. Bush in 2000 or Bob Dole in 1996. This year, Republicans are the underdogs, with an unpopular sitting president and facing a possible economic recession.
"A lot of Republicans are looking for who can win," Mr. McCain said yesterday after an event in West Palm Beach, Fla.
Mr. McCain released an Internet advertisement yesterday that will appear on the Web sites of Florida newspapers. It's called "Democrats' Worst Nightmare." The ad says Democrats "fear John McCain most because he's the one candidate who can rally the conservative Reagan Coalition while appealing to independent voters to win in November."
That type of message resonates with McCain supporter Bob Freid of Boynton Beach, Fla. The retired dentist, 67, said yesterday that Mr. McCain is "the candidate that can beat the illustrious Democrats."
"He can work with anybody," Mr. Freid said, explaining Mr. McCain's appeal to independents.
Eric Fehrnstrom, a Romney spokesman, didn't address his candidate's performance in head-to-head polling with Democrats. "The Republican who beats the Democrat in November will be the candidate who can most effectively make the case that he will bring change to Washington and provide leadership on the economy," Mr. Fehrnstrom said.
Mr. Romney's electability pitch is based on his status as a Washington outsider. Earlier this month in New Hampshire, he decried sending the "same faces" back to Washington in "different chairs."
Mr. Romney also says his two wins in Michigan and Nevada are harbingers for wins in those swing states in November. "If you can win those two states, Michigan and Nevada, it means you put together quite the coalition and have been able to make the kind of inroads you have to make to take the White House," he said Saturday in Florida.
[Electable]
Mr. Giuliani, who needs to do well in Florida to lift his flagging status nationally, also has his supporters concerned about November. Don Jaffin, a 77-year-old living in Florida, is leaning toward Mr. Giuliani because he will "get down in the dirt with Hillary, which would be the dirtiest campaign in American history," he said after a Romney event Tuesday at the Republican Jewish Coalition of Florida. "I'll tell you who I'm for. I'm for whoever can beat Hillary."
Charlie Black, one of Mr. McCain's top advisers, doesn't think most voters are overly strategic. "Very few people vote on electability," he said yesterday. Exit polls in South Carolina, for instance, showed only 6% ranked the ability to win in November above three other choices: values, shared beliefs, and experience.
That fact doesn't prevent Mr. Black from taking Mr. Romney's electability pitch down a notch. "Romney has a poor case to make on that," he said, noting that Mr. Romney tends to have higher negative ratings than Mr. McCain and does worse in head-to-head matchups against Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. "If I were him, I'd change the subject."
Write to Alex Frangos at alex.frangos@wsj.com and Elizabeth Holmes at elizabeth.holmes@wsj.com
Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy
January 25, 2008; Page A14
The Democratic epiphany about the political tactics of Bill and Hillary Clinton continues, with scales falling from eyes on a daily basis. "I think it's not Presidential," said former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, about Mr. Clinton's steady barrage against Barack Obama. "It's not in keeping with the image of a former President, and I'm frankly surprised that he is taking this approach." Mr. Daschle supports Mr. Obama, but how he could be surprised is another matter.
"This is beneath the dignity of a former President. He is not helping anyone, and certainly not helping the Democratic Party," added Vermont Senator Pat Leahy. On the point of "helping" the party, Mr. Leahy seems to have forgotten that the Clinton Presidency was an era of more or less persistent Democratic losses -- except for the Clintons.
Then there's former South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian, who once backed Bill Clinton but this week called his political attacks "reprehensible" and described one of Mrs. Clinton's TV ads about Mr. Obama as "a lie." As Mrs. Clinton likes to say, she's had "16 years" of experience in dealing with this "Republican attack machine."
//////
McCain Gets Edge for Electability
As Primary Moves Along,
Republican Voters Face
Question of Who Can Win
By ALEX FRANGOS and ELIZABETH HOLMES
January 25, 2008; Page A4
The leading Republican presidential candidates all claim to be the best-suited to overcome the Democratic tide expected in the general election. But opinion polls clearly favor Arizona Sen. John McCain in that regard.
In the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, 37% of respondents said Mr. McCain has the best chance to win in November against the Democrats. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was far back in second, with 16%, followed closely by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani at 15% and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee at 12%. Those results are mirrored in other polls.
Mr. McCain also did the best in hypothetical matchups with the two leading Democrats. The poll shows him beating New York Sen. Hillary Clinton by 46% to 44% and tying against Illinois Sen. Barack Obama with 42% support. Messrs. Romney, Giuliani and Huckabee all lose handily in polling matchups with Sens. Clinton and Obama. Statistically, the results are about the same -- a dead heat -- whether Mr. McCain's opponent is Sen. Clinton or Sen. Obama because the poll has a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.
Many Republican primary voters face a quandary this year: Whether to choose the candidate they like best or the one they think has the best shot against a formidable Democratic opponent in November.
"We have got to figure out who's the most electable. That's the hard part," said Ron Dahlstrom, a 67-year-old retiree living in Naples, Fla., who says he hasn't decided on a candidate. The self-described religious conservative likes Mr. Huckabee, but says the Baptist preacher is too religious to get elected. That leaves him undecided between Messrs. Romney and McCain. "Anybody but Hillary," he said Tuesday.
The electabilty quotient is a growing concern for voters as the campaign heats up in Florida. That represents a change for the Republican Party. In recent elections, Republicans have either had an incumbent or an anointed front-runner who gained momentum early, such as George W. Bush in 2000 or Bob Dole in 1996. This year, Republicans are the underdogs, with an unpopular sitting president and facing a possible economic recession.
"A lot of Republicans are looking for who can win," Mr. McCain said yesterday after an event in West Palm Beach, Fla.
Mr. McCain released an Internet advertisement yesterday that will appear on the Web sites of Florida newspapers. It's called "Democrats' Worst Nightmare." The ad says Democrats "fear John McCain most because he's the one candidate who can rally the conservative Reagan Coalition while appealing to independent voters to win in November."
That type of message resonates with McCain supporter Bob Freid of Boynton Beach, Fla. The retired dentist, 67, said yesterday that Mr. McCain is "the candidate that can beat the illustrious Democrats."
"He can work with anybody," Mr. Freid said, explaining Mr. McCain's appeal to independents.
Eric Fehrnstrom, a Romney spokesman, didn't address his candidate's performance in head-to-head polling with Democrats. "The Republican who beats the Democrat in November will be the candidate who can most effectively make the case that he will bring change to Washington and provide leadership on the economy," Mr. Fehrnstrom said.
Mr. Romney's electability pitch is based on his status as a Washington outsider. Earlier this month in New Hampshire, he decried sending the "same faces" back to Washington in "different chairs."
Mr. Romney also says his two wins in Michigan and Nevada are harbingers for wins in those swing states in November. "If you can win those two states, Michigan and Nevada, it means you put together quite the coalition and have been able to make the kind of inroads you have to make to take the White House," he said Saturday in Florida.
[Electable]
Mr. Giuliani, who needs to do well in Florida to lift his flagging status nationally, also has his supporters concerned about November. Don Jaffin, a 77-year-old living in Florida, is leaning toward Mr. Giuliani because he will "get down in the dirt with Hillary, which would be the dirtiest campaign in American history," he said after a Romney event Tuesday at the Republican Jewish Coalition of Florida. "I'll tell you who I'm for. I'm for whoever can beat Hillary."
Charlie Black, one of Mr. McCain's top advisers, doesn't think most voters are overly strategic. "Very few people vote on electability," he said yesterday. Exit polls in South Carolina, for instance, showed only 6% ranked the ability to win in November above three other choices: values, shared beliefs, and experience.
That fact doesn't prevent Mr. Black from taking Mr. Romney's electability pitch down a notch. "Romney has a poor case to make on that," he said, noting that Mr. Romney tends to have higher negative ratings than Mr. McCain and does worse in head-to-head matchups against Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. "If I were him, I'd change the subject."
Write to Alex Frangos at alex.frangos@wsj.com and Elizabeth Holmes at elizabeth.holmes@wsj.com
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Strange, but delicious...
HOW'S YOUR DRINK?
Strange but Delicious
By ERIC FELTEN
January 19, 2008; Page W5
Thursday, Aug. 19, 1926, Rudolph Valentino lay in a New York hospital bed under the misapprehension that he was going to live. His emergency surgery for appendicitis and gastric ulcers had been a close-run thing. But resting comfortably before the peritonitis set in, Valentino took questions from the press. Asked his "favorite screen character among the parts you played," the actor did not name the Sheik. "The part I like best was my role in 'Blood and Sand,' " he said. "If I had died, I would have liked to be remembered as an actor by that role -- I think it my greatest." The poor fellow did die a few days later and, alas, is now remembered as the Sheik, not as the bullfighter of "Blood and Sand." Not only has that role been largely forgotten, but so has the strange but delicious cocktail the film inspired.
The movie was based on a book by Spanish novelist Vicento Blasco Ibáñez, who in the years just after World War I was a best-selling author in America. His novels translated well to the screen, and before Valentino took his turn in "Blood and Sand," he starred in an adaption of Ibáñez's "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse." But "Blood and Sand" was a particularly durable work. It was remade in Technicolor with Tyrone Power in 1941. Beyond that, the book provided the template for the bullfighting tales that would crowd fiction shelves for decades. In 1958, newspaper columnist and novelist Robert Ruark summed up the essentials of the genre: "Poor boy makes good as matador, gets spoiled by success, drinks too much and/or takes up with ruinous women, loses his courage, and catches himself on a horn."
The "drinks too much" part of the story makes "Blood and Sand" an odd inspiration for a cocktail. I doubt Ibáñez would have been pleased. Indeed, one of his later novels, "La Bodega," was devoted to denouncing wine for enslaving Spain's poor.
"Blood and Sand" not only inspired a cocktail but provided the moniker for a football Hall-of-Famer. A little over 80 years ago, a couple of college players eager to pick up some beer-and-pretzel money playing pro ball -- but loath to give up their last year of college eligibility -- decided to adopt aliases. Passing a marquee for the Valentino pic, John McNally turned to his friend and said: "That's it. You be Sand. I'll be Blood." Johnny Blood never did return to play college football, but after a few years in the pros he ended up playing for Curly Lambeau's Green Bay Packers. As the team's star halfback, Blood helped lead the Packers to four championships. Cheeseheads looking for their team to channel some of the legendary Johnny Blood bravado could do worse than to toast their team this weekend with Blood and Sands.
How do you make them? There's an old gag about a screenwriter who gets hooked on the cocktails at a Hollywood bar. He begs the bartender for the recipe but is rebuffed. Finally the writer offers him $100. "You wanna know what's in a Blood and Sand, Mac?" asks the bartender, pocketing the money. "Blood and sand." It seems this joke was once considered funny.
What really goes into the drink? The ingredients -- Scotch, orange juice, cherry-flavored brandy and sweet vermouth -- can hardly be described as intuitive. Dale DeGroff, in his book "The Craft of the Cocktail," says the drink would appear at first glance to be "a godawful mix." But plenty of serious cocktail guides from the '30s and '40s included the drink, so he gave it a try: "The taste convinced me never to judge a drink again without tasting it." A sound principle.
The right ingredients are crucial. For starters, be sure to use a cherry-flavored brandy or liqueur, such as Cherry Heering, and not the cherry eau-de-vie known as kirsch. Cherry Heering is widely available and worth having, as it turns up in a number of old cocktail recipes and even a few new ones. For his recent book "Imbibe," David Wondrich solicited new cocktails from more than a dozen prominent mixers. One of the best came from Julie Reiner, who runs the Flatiron Lounge in New York. Her Cherry Smash is made with cognac, orange curaçao, lemon juice and Cherry Heering, and it would be good enough reason alone to buy a bottle of the cherry liqueur.
What about the OJ? The temptation is to pour a bit out of the carton. But presqueezed juice, even if not from concentrate, does not taste like the fresh article. In particular, orange juice that sits tends to lose a bit of its acidic sharpness, resolving itself into a bland sweetness. A drink that has sweet vermouth, sweet cherry liqueur and sweet orange juice needs the tang that fresh OJ provides. Better yet, try squeezing blood oranges. Not only is the name of the fruit apt for the cocktail, but the slightly grapefruit-bitter taste of blood-orange juice works wonders in the Blood and Sand.
The proportions also matter. The drink was originally constructed of equal parts of all four ingredients. But ganged up on like that, the Scotch is overwhelmed by the sweeter components. Doubling the proportion of Scotch does the trick, creating a drink on which one can be bullish.
• Email me at eric.felten@wsj.com.
BLOOD AND SAND
1½ oz Scotch
¾ oz Cherry Heering
¾ oz sweet vermouth
¾ oz fresh blood-orange juice
Shake with ice and strain into a stemmed cocktail glass. Garnish with a cherry, or orange peel, or both.
CHERRY SMASH
1½ oz cognac
¾ oz orange curaçao
¾ oz fresh lemon juice
½ oz Cherry Heering
Shake with ice and strain into a stemmed cocktail glass. Garnish with a cherry.
This Guiliani fellow is a piece of work!
Actually, "piece of work" is inappropriately mild. "Vindictive SOB" is more like it if the following article from NYT is only halfway accurate. I'm talking about a pretty serious mean streak
////
January 22, 2008
The Long Run
In Matters Big and Small, Crossing Giuliani Had Price
By MICHAEL POWELL and RUSS BUETTNER
Rudolph W. Giuliani likens himself to a boxer who never takes a punch without swinging back. As mayor, he made the vengeful roundhouse an instrument of government, clipping anyone who crossed him.
In August 1997, James Schillaci, a rough-hewn chauffeur from the Bronx, dialed Mayor Giuliani’s radio program on WABC-AM to complain about a red-light sting run by the police near the Bronx Zoo. When the call yielded no results, Mr. Schillaci turned to The Daily News, which then ran a photo of the red light and this front page headline: “GOTCHA!”
That morning, police officers appeared on Mr. Schillaci’s doorstep. What are you going to do, Mr. Schillaci asked, arrest me? He was joking, but the officers were not.
They slapped on handcuffs and took him to court on a 13-year-old traffic warrant. A judge threw out the charge. A police spokeswoman later read Mr. Schillaci’s decades-old criminal rap sheet to a reporter for The Daily News, a move of questionable legality because the state restricts how such information is released. She said, falsely, that he had been convicted of sodomy.
Then Mr. Giuliani took up the cudgel.
“Mr. Schillaci was posing as an altruistic whistle-blower,” the mayor told reporters at the time. “Maybe he’s dishonest enough to lie about police officers.”
Mr. Schillaci suffered an emotional breakdown, was briefly hospitalized and later received a $290,000 legal settlement from the city. “It really damaged me,” said Mr. Schillaci, now 60, massaging his face with thick hands. “I thought I was doing something good for once, my civic duty and all. Then he steps on me.”
Mr. Giuliani was a pugilist in a city of political brawlers. But far more than his predecessors, historians and politicians say, his toughness edged toward ruthlessnessand became a defining aspect of his mayoralty. One result: New York City spent at least $7 million in settling civil rights lawsuits and paying retaliatory damages during the Giuliani years.
After AIDS activists with Housing Works loudly challenged the mayor, city officials sabotaged the group’s application for a federal housing grant. A caseworker who spoke of missteps in the death of a child was fired. After unidentified city workers complained of pressure to hand contracts to Giuliani-favored organizations, investigators examined not the charges but the identity of the leakers.
“There were constant loyalty tests: ‘Will you shoot your brother?’ ” said Marilyn Gelber, who served as environmental commissioner under Mr. Giuliani. “People were marked for destruction for disloyal jokes.”
Mr. Giuliani paid careful attention to the art of political payback. When former Mayors Edward I. Koch and David N. Dinkins spoke publicly of Mr. Giuliani’s foibles, mayoral aides removed their official portraits from the ceremonial Blue Room at City Hall. Mr. Koch, who wrote a book titled “Giuliani: Nasty Man,” shrugs.
“David Dinkins and I are lucky that Rudy didn’t cast our portraits onto a bonfire along with the First Amendment, which he enjoyed violating daily,” Mr. Koch said in a recent interview.
Mr. Giuliani retails his stories of childhood toughness, in standing up to bullies who mocked his love of opera and bridled at his Yankee loyalties. Years after leaving Manhattan College, he held a grudge against a man who beat him in a class election. He urged his commissioners to walk out of City Council hearings when questions turned hostile. But in his 2002 book “Leadership,” he said his instructions owed nothing to his temper.
“It wasn’t my sensitivities I was worried about, but the tone of civility I strived to establish throughout the city,” he wrote. Mr. Giuliani declined requests to be interviewed for this article.
His admirers, not least former Deputy Mayor Randy M. Mastro, said it was unfair to characterize the mayor as vengeful, particularly given the “Herculean task” he faced when he entered office in 1994. Mr. Giuliani’s admirers claimed that the depredations of crack, AIDS, homicide and recession had brought the city to its knees, and that he faced a sclerotic liberal establishment. He wielded intimidation as his mace and wrested cost-savings and savings from powerful unions and politicians.
“The notion that the city needed broad-based change frightened a lot of entrenched groups,” said Fred Siegel, a historian and author of “The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life.” “He didn’t want to be politic with them.”
He cowed many into silence. Silence ensured the flow of city money.
Andy Humm, a gay activist, worked for the Hetrick-Martin Institute, which pushed condom giveaways in public schools. When Mr. Giuliani supported a parental opt-out, the institute’s director counseled silence to avoid losing city funds. “He said, ‘We’re going to say it’s not good, but we’re not going to mention him,’ ” Mr. Humm said.
“We were muzzled, and it was a disgrace.”
Picking His Fights
Mr. Giuliani says he prefers to brawl with imposing opponents. His father, he wrote in “Leadership,” would “always emphasize: never pick on someone smaller than you. Never be a bully.”
As mayor, he picked fights with a notable lack of discrimination, challenging the city and state comptrollers, a few corporations and the odd council member. But the mayor’s fist also fell on the less powerful. In mid-May 1994, newspapers revealed that Mr. Giuliani’s youth commissioner, the Rev. John E. Brandon, suffered tax problems; more troubling revelations seemed in the offing.
At 7 p.m. on May 17, Mr. Giuliani’s press secretary dialed reporters and served up a hotter story: A former youth commissioner under Mr. Dinkins, Richard L. Murphy, had ladled millions of dollars to supporters of the former mayor. And someone had destroyed Department of Youth Services records and hard drives and stolen computers in an apparent effort to obscure what had happened to that money.
“My immediate goal is to get rid of the stealing, to get rid of the corruption,” Mr. Giuliani told The Daily News.
None of it was true. In 1995, the Department of Investigation found no politically motivated contracts and no theft by senior officials. But Mr. Murphy’s professional life was wrecked.
“I was soiled merchandise — the taint just lingers,” Mr. Murphy said in a recent interview.
Not long after, a major foundation recruited Mr. Murphy to work on the West Coast. The group wanted him to replicate his much-honored concept of opening schools at night as community centers. A senior Giuliani official called the foundation — a move a former mayoral official confirmed on the condition of anonymity for fear of embarrassing the organization — and the prospective job disappeared.
“He goes to people and makes them complicit in his revenge,” Mr. Murphy said.
This theme repeats. Two private employers in New York City, neither of which wanted to be identified because they feared retaliation should Mr. Giuliani be elected president, said the mayor’s office exerted pressure not to hire former Dinkins officials. When Mr. Giuliani battled schools Chancellor Ramon C. Cortines, he demanded that Mr. Cortines prove his loyalty by firing the press spokesman, John Beckman.
Mr. Beckman’s offense? He had worked in the Dinkins administration. “I found it,” Mr. Beckman said in an interview, “a really unfortunate example of how to govern.”
Joel Berger worked as a senior litigator in the city corporation counsel’s office until 1996. Afterward, he represented victims of police brutality and taught a class at the New York University School of Law, and his students served apprenticeships with the corporation counsel.
In late August 1997, Mr. Berger wrote a column in The New York Times criticizing Mr. Giuliani’s record on police brutality. A week later, a city official called the director of the N.Y.U. law school’s clinical programs and demanded that Mr. Berger be removed from the course. Otherwise, the official said, we will suspend the corporation counsel apprenticeship, according to Mr. Berger and an N.Y.U. official.
“It was ridiculously petty,” Mr. Berger said.
N.Y.U. declined to replace Mr. Berger and instead suspended the class after that semester.
‘Culture of Retaliation’
The Citizens Budget Commission has driven mayors of various ideological stripes to distraction since it was founded in 1932. The business-backed group bird-dogs the city’s fiscal management with an unsparing eye. But its analysts are fonts of creative thinking, and Mr. Giuliani asked Raymond Horton, the group’s president, to serve on his transition committee in 1993.
That comity was long gone by the autumn of 1997, when Mr. Giuliani faced re-election. Ruth Messinger, the mayor’s Democratic opponent, cited the commission’s work, and the mayor denounced the group, which had issued critical reports on welfare reform, police inefficiency and the city budget.
So far, so typical for mayors and their relationship with the commission. Mr. Koch once banned his officials from attending the group’s annual retreat. Another time, he attended and gave a speech excoriating the commission.
But one of Mr. Giuliani’s deputy mayors, Joseph Lhota, took an unprecedented step. He called major securities firms that underwrite city bonds and discouraged them from buying seats at the commission’s annual fund-raising dinner. Because Mr. Lhota played a key role in selecting the investment firms that underwrote the bonds, his calls raised an ethical tempest.
Apologizing struck Mr. Giuliani as silly.
“We are sending exactly the right message,” he said. “Their reports are pretty useless; they are a dilettante organization.”
Still, that dinner was a rousing success. “All mayors have thin skins, but Rudy has the thinnest skin of all,” Mr. Horton said.
Mr. Giuliani’s war with the nonprofit group Housing Works was more operatic. Housing Works runs nationally respected programs for the homeless, the mentally ill and people who are infected with H.I.V. But it weds that service to a 1960s straight-from-the-rice-paddies guerrilla ethos.
The group’s members marched on City Hall, staged sit-ins, and delighted in singling out city officials for opprobrium. Mr. Giuliani, who considered doing away with the Division of AIDS Services, became their favorite mayor in effigy.
Mr. Giuliani responded in kind. His police commanders stationed snipers atop City Hall and sent helicopters whirling overhead when 100 or so unarmed Housing Works protesters marched nearby in 1998. A year earlier, his officials systematically killed $6 million worth of contracts with the group, saying it had mismanaged funds.
Housing Works sued the city and discovered that officials had rescored a federal evaluation form to ensure that the group lost a grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Martin Oesterreich, the city’s homeless commissioner, denied wrongdoing but acknowledged that his job might have been forfeited if Housing Works had obtained that contract.
“That possibility could have happened,” Mr. Oesterreich told a federal judge.
The mayor’s fingerprints could not be found on every decision. But his enemies were widely known.
“The culture of retaliation was really quite remarkable,” said Matthew D. Brinckerhoff, the lawyer who represented Housing Works. “Up and down the food chain, everyone knew what this guy demanded.”
The Charter Fight
The mayor’s wartime style of governance reached an exhaustion point in the late 1990s. His poll numbers dipped, and the courts routinely ruled against the city, upholding the New York Civil Liberties Union in 23 of its 27 free-speech challenges during Mr. Giuliani’s mayoralty. After he left office, the city agreed to pay $327,000 to a black police officer who was fired because he had testified before the City Council about police brutality toward blacks. The city also agreed to rescind the firing of the caseworker who talked about a child’s death.
In 1999, Mr. Giuliani explored a run for the United States Senate. If he won that seat, he would leave the mayor’s office a year early. The City Charter dictated that Mark Green, the public advocate, would succeed him.
That prospect was intolerable to Mr. Giuliani. Few politicians crawled under the mayor’s skin as skillfully as Mr. Green. “Idiotic” and “inane” were some of the kinder words that Mr. Giuliani sent winging toward the public advocate, who delighted in verbally tweaking the mayor.
So Mr. Giuliani announced in June 1999 that a Charter Revision Commission, stocked with his loyalists, would explore changing the line of mayoral succession. Mr. Giuliani told The New York Times Magazine that he might not have initiated the charter review campaign if Mr. Green were not the public advocate. Three former mayors declared themselves appalled; Mr. Koch fired the loudest cannonade. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Mr. Mayor,” he said during a news conference.
Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr., chairman of a Charter Revision Commission a decade earlier, wrote a letter to Mr. Giuliani warning that “targeting a particular person” would “smack of personal politics and predilections.
“All this is not worthy of you, or our city,” Mr. Schwarz wrote.
Mr. Mastro, who had left the administration, agreed to serve as the commission chairman. He eventually announced that a proposal requiring a special election within 60 days of a mayor’s early departure would not take effect until 2002, after both Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Green had left office. A civic group estimated that the commission spent more than a million dollars of taxpayer money on commercials before a citywide referendum on the proposal that was held in November 1999.
Voters defeated the measure, 76 percent to 24 percent. (In 2002, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg advocated a similar charter revision that passed with little controversy.)
Mr. Green had warned the mayor that rejection loomed.
“It was simple,” Mr. Green said. “It was the mayor vindictively going after an institutional critic for doing his job.”
None of this left the mayor chastened. In March 2000, an undercover officer killed Patrick Dorismond, a security guard, during a fight when the police mistook him for a drug dealer. The outcry infuriated the mayor, who released Mr. Dorismond’s juvenile record, a document that legally was supposed to remain sealed.
The victim, Mr. Giuliani opined, was no “altar boy.” Actually, he was. (Mr. Giuliani later expressed regret without precisely apologizing.)
James Schillaci, the Bronx whistle-blower, recalled reading those comments and shuddering at the memory. “The mayor tarred me up; you know what that feels like?” he said. “I still have nightmares.”
////
January 22, 2008
The Long Run
In Matters Big and Small, Crossing Giuliani Had Price
By MICHAEL POWELL and RUSS BUETTNER
Rudolph W. Giuliani likens himself to a boxer who never takes a punch without swinging back. As mayor, he made the vengeful roundhouse an instrument of government, clipping anyone who crossed him.
In August 1997, James Schillaci, a rough-hewn chauffeur from the Bronx, dialed Mayor Giuliani’s radio program on WABC-AM to complain about a red-light sting run by the police near the Bronx Zoo. When the call yielded no results, Mr. Schillaci turned to The Daily News, which then ran a photo of the red light and this front page headline: “GOTCHA!”
That morning, police officers appeared on Mr. Schillaci’s doorstep. What are you going to do, Mr. Schillaci asked, arrest me? He was joking, but the officers were not.
They slapped on handcuffs and took him to court on a 13-year-old traffic warrant. A judge threw out the charge. A police spokeswoman later read Mr. Schillaci’s decades-old criminal rap sheet to a reporter for The Daily News, a move of questionable legality because the state restricts how such information is released. She said, falsely, that he had been convicted of sodomy.
Then Mr. Giuliani took up the cudgel.
“Mr. Schillaci was posing as an altruistic whistle-blower,” the mayor told reporters at the time. “Maybe he’s dishonest enough to lie about police officers.”
Mr. Schillaci suffered an emotional breakdown, was briefly hospitalized and later received a $290,000 legal settlement from the city. “It really damaged me,” said Mr. Schillaci, now 60, massaging his face with thick hands. “I thought I was doing something good for once, my civic duty and all. Then he steps on me.”
Mr. Giuliani was a pugilist in a city of political brawlers. But far more than his predecessors, historians and politicians say, his toughness edged toward ruthlessnessand became a defining aspect of his mayoralty. One result: New York City spent at least $7 million in settling civil rights lawsuits and paying retaliatory damages during the Giuliani years.
After AIDS activists with Housing Works loudly challenged the mayor, city officials sabotaged the group’s application for a federal housing grant. A caseworker who spoke of missteps in the death of a child was fired. After unidentified city workers complained of pressure to hand contracts to Giuliani-favored organizations, investigators examined not the charges but the identity of the leakers.
“There were constant loyalty tests: ‘Will you shoot your brother?’ ” said Marilyn Gelber, who served as environmental commissioner under Mr. Giuliani. “People were marked for destruction for disloyal jokes.”
Mr. Giuliani paid careful attention to the art of political payback. When former Mayors Edward I. Koch and David N. Dinkins spoke publicly of Mr. Giuliani’s foibles, mayoral aides removed their official portraits from the ceremonial Blue Room at City Hall. Mr. Koch, who wrote a book titled “Giuliani: Nasty Man,” shrugs.
“David Dinkins and I are lucky that Rudy didn’t cast our portraits onto a bonfire along with the First Amendment, which he enjoyed violating daily,” Mr. Koch said in a recent interview.
Mr. Giuliani retails his stories of childhood toughness, in standing up to bullies who mocked his love of opera and bridled at his Yankee loyalties. Years after leaving Manhattan College, he held a grudge against a man who beat him in a class election. He urged his commissioners to walk out of City Council hearings when questions turned hostile. But in his 2002 book “Leadership,” he said his instructions owed nothing to his temper.
“It wasn’t my sensitivities I was worried about, but the tone of civility I strived to establish throughout the city,” he wrote. Mr. Giuliani declined requests to be interviewed for this article.
His admirers, not least former Deputy Mayor Randy M. Mastro, said it was unfair to characterize the mayor as vengeful, particularly given the “Herculean task” he faced when he entered office in 1994. Mr. Giuliani’s admirers claimed that the depredations of crack, AIDS, homicide and recession had brought the city to its knees, and that he faced a sclerotic liberal establishment. He wielded intimidation as his mace and wrested cost-savings and savings from powerful unions and politicians.
“The notion that the city needed broad-based change frightened a lot of entrenched groups,” said Fred Siegel, a historian and author of “The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life.” “He didn’t want to be politic with them.”
He cowed many into silence. Silence ensured the flow of city money.
Andy Humm, a gay activist, worked for the Hetrick-Martin Institute, which pushed condom giveaways in public schools. When Mr. Giuliani supported a parental opt-out, the institute’s director counseled silence to avoid losing city funds. “He said, ‘We’re going to say it’s not good, but we’re not going to mention him,’ ” Mr. Humm said.
“We were muzzled, and it was a disgrace.”
Picking His Fights
Mr. Giuliani says he prefers to brawl with imposing opponents. His father, he wrote in “Leadership,” would “always emphasize: never pick on someone smaller than you. Never be a bully.”
As mayor, he picked fights with a notable lack of discrimination, challenging the city and state comptrollers, a few corporations and the odd council member. But the mayor’s fist also fell on the less powerful. In mid-May 1994, newspapers revealed that Mr. Giuliani’s youth commissioner, the Rev. John E. Brandon, suffered tax problems; more troubling revelations seemed in the offing.
At 7 p.m. on May 17, Mr. Giuliani’s press secretary dialed reporters and served up a hotter story: A former youth commissioner under Mr. Dinkins, Richard L. Murphy, had ladled millions of dollars to supporters of the former mayor. And someone had destroyed Department of Youth Services records and hard drives and stolen computers in an apparent effort to obscure what had happened to that money.
“My immediate goal is to get rid of the stealing, to get rid of the corruption,” Mr. Giuliani told The Daily News.
None of it was true. In 1995, the Department of Investigation found no politically motivated contracts and no theft by senior officials. But Mr. Murphy’s professional life was wrecked.
“I was soiled merchandise — the taint just lingers,” Mr. Murphy said in a recent interview.
Not long after, a major foundation recruited Mr. Murphy to work on the West Coast. The group wanted him to replicate his much-honored concept of opening schools at night as community centers. A senior Giuliani official called the foundation — a move a former mayoral official confirmed on the condition of anonymity for fear of embarrassing the organization — and the prospective job disappeared.
“He goes to people and makes them complicit in his revenge,” Mr. Murphy said.
This theme repeats. Two private employers in New York City, neither of which wanted to be identified because they feared retaliation should Mr. Giuliani be elected president, said the mayor’s office exerted pressure not to hire former Dinkins officials. When Mr. Giuliani battled schools Chancellor Ramon C. Cortines, he demanded that Mr. Cortines prove his loyalty by firing the press spokesman, John Beckman.
Mr. Beckman’s offense? He had worked in the Dinkins administration. “I found it,” Mr. Beckman said in an interview, “a really unfortunate example of how to govern.”
Joel Berger worked as a senior litigator in the city corporation counsel’s office until 1996. Afterward, he represented victims of police brutality and taught a class at the New York University School of Law, and his students served apprenticeships with the corporation counsel.
In late August 1997, Mr. Berger wrote a column in The New York Times criticizing Mr. Giuliani’s record on police brutality. A week later, a city official called the director of the N.Y.U. law school’s clinical programs and demanded that Mr. Berger be removed from the course. Otherwise, the official said, we will suspend the corporation counsel apprenticeship, according to Mr. Berger and an N.Y.U. official.
“It was ridiculously petty,” Mr. Berger said.
N.Y.U. declined to replace Mr. Berger and instead suspended the class after that semester.
‘Culture of Retaliation’
The Citizens Budget Commission has driven mayors of various ideological stripes to distraction since it was founded in 1932. The business-backed group bird-dogs the city’s fiscal management with an unsparing eye. But its analysts are fonts of creative thinking, and Mr. Giuliani asked Raymond Horton, the group’s president, to serve on his transition committee in 1993.
That comity was long gone by the autumn of 1997, when Mr. Giuliani faced re-election. Ruth Messinger, the mayor’s Democratic opponent, cited the commission’s work, and the mayor denounced the group, which had issued critical reports on welfare reform, police inefficiency and the city budget.
So far, so typical for mayors and their relationship with the commission. Mr. Koch once banned his officials from attending the group’s annual retreat. Another time, he attended and gave a speech excoriating the commission.
But one of Mr. Giuliani’s deputy mayors, Joseph Lhota, took an unprecedented step. He called major securities firms that underwrite city bonds and discouraged them from buying seats at the commission’s annual fund-raising dinner. Because Mr. Lhota played a key role in selecting the investment firms that underwrote the bonds, his calls raised an ethical tempest.
Apologizing struck Mr. Giuliani as silly.
“We are sending exactly the right message,” he said. “Their reports are pretty useless; they are a dilettante organization.”
Still, that dinner was a rousing success. “All mayors have thin skins, but Rudy has the thinnest skin of all,” Mr. Horton said.
Mr. Giuliani’s war with the nonprofit group Housing Works was more operatic. Housing Works runs nationally respected programs for the homeless, the mentally ill and people who are infected with H.I.V. But it weds that service to a 1960s straight-from-the-rice-paddies guerrilla ethos.
The group’s members marched on City Hall, staged sit-ins, and delighted in singling out city officials for opprobrium. Mr. Giuliani, who considered doing away with the Division of AIDS Services, became their favorite mayor in effigy.
Mr. Giuliani responded in kind. His police commanders stationed snipers atop City Hall and sent helicopters whirling overhead when 100 or so unarmed Housing Works protesters marched nearby in 1998. A year earlier, his officials systematically killed $6 million worth of contracts with the group, saying it had mismanaged funds.
Housing Works sued the city and discovered that officials had rescored a federal evaluation form to ensure that the group lost a grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Martin Oesterreich, the city’s homeless commissioner, denied wrongdoing but acknowledged that his job might have been forfeited if Housing Works had obtained that contract.
“That possibility could have happened,” Mr. Oesterreich told a federal judge.
The mayor’s fingerprints could not be found on every decision. But his enemies were widely known.
“The culture of retaliation was really quite remarkable,” said Matthew D. Brinckerhoff, the lawyer who represented Housing Works. “Up and down the food chain, everyone knew what this guy demanded.”
The Charter Fight
The mayor’s wartime style of governance reached an exhaustion point in the late 1990s. His poll numbers dipped, and the courts routinely ruled against the city, upholding the New York Civil Liberties Union in 23 of its 27 free-speech challenges during Mr. Giuliani’s mayoralty. After he left office, the city agreed to pay $327,000 to a black police officer who was fired because he had testified before the City Council about police brutality toward blacks. The city also agreed to rescind the firing of the caseworker who talked about a child’s death.
In 1999, Mr. Giuliani explored a run for the United States Senate. If he won that seat, he would leave the mayor’s office a year early. The City Charter dictated that Mark Green, the public advocate, would succeed him.
That prospect was intolerable to Mr. Giuliani. Few politicians crawled under the mayor’s skin as skillfully as Mr. Green. “Idiotic” and “inane” were some of the kinder words that Mr. Giuliani sent winging toward the public advocate, who delighted in verbally tweaking the mayor.
So Mr. Giuliani announced in June 1999 that a Charter Revision Commission, stocked with his loyalists, would explore changing the line of mayoral succession. Mr. Giuliani told The New York Times Magazine that he might not have initiated the charter review campaign if Mr. Green were not the public advocate. Three former mayors declared themselves appalled; Mr. Koch fired the loudest cannonade. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Mr. Mayor,” he said during a news conference.
Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr., chairman of a Charter Revision Commission a decade earlier, wrote a letter to Mr. Giuliani warning that “targeting a particular person” would “smack of personal politics and predilections.
“All this is not worthy of you, or our city,” Mr. Schwarz wrote.
Mr. Mastro, who had left the administration, agreed to serve as the commission chairman. He eventually announced that a proposal requiring a special election within 60 days of a mayor’s early departure would not take effect until 2002, after both Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Green had left office. A civic group estimated that the commission spent more than a million dollars of taxpayer money on commercials before a citywide referendum on the proposal that was held in November 1999.
Voters defeated the measure, 76 percent to 24 percent. (In 2002, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg advocated a similar charter revision that passed with little controversy.)
Mr. Green had warned the mayor that rejection loomed.
“It was simple,” Mr. Green said. “It was the mayor vindictively going after an institutional critic for doing his job.”
None of this left the mayor chastened. In March 2000, an undercover officer killed Patrick Dorismond, a security guard, during a fight when the police mistook him for a drug dealer. The outcry infuriated the mayor, who released Mr. Dorismond’s juvenile record, a document that legally was supposed to remain sealed.
The victim, Mr. Giuliani opined, was no “altar boy.” Actually, he was. (Mr. Giuliani later expressed regret without precisely apologizing.)
James Schillaci, the Bronx whistle-blower, recalled reading those comments and shuddering at the memory. “The mayor tarred me up; you know what that feels like?” he said. “I still have nightmares.”
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Cubicle Culture
Any of this sound familiar?
/////////////////
The Wall Street Journal
CUBICLE CULTURE
By JARED SANDBERG
Why Learn and Grow
On the Job? It's Easier
To Feign Infallibility
January 22, 2008; Page B1
At work, some people just won't admit to making a mistake. They have a gripping fear that it will indict their character, attract more work and invite future blame -- not to mention ruin a perfect record of never having admitted to one before.
To excel at never admitting mistakes, you have to take care to burnish your unaccountability and sorrylessness. It helps, for example, to have a fall guy, someone who has responsibility for a project who is less known to your boss than you are. Also, any mistake made under time pressure can be blamed on a lack of time. Soon enough, you'll combine elements, blaming the lack of time you had because of the sluggishness of the fall guy.
These are the tactics Robert Wert, a former lawyer and current management consultant, gleaned from one of his former colleagues who actually "planned the blame-shifting in advance, evaluated the lay of the land minute by minute and acted accordingly," he says.
DISCUSSION
[Go to forum]
How often do you own up to your mistakes at work? Share your thoughts.
This co-worker got so good that he had a hierarchy of blame-takers. It began with outsiders: co-counsel, clients' in-house counsel, a court ruling, or clients' insane expectations. Short of those, he made sure to work with perfectionist colleagues. "If something went wrong, they would find ways to blame themselves," says Mr. Wert.
As for the stainless attorney: "I never saw him take responsibility for any error," Mr. Wert added.
Flub artists sometimes get their just desserts. But in too many companies, nothing ever catches up with them. In fact, they seem to thrive, not in spite of their ability to avoid accountability but because of it.
Colleagues fantasize about some day witnessing a tearful mea culpa. But that's like waiting for a love letter that was never written.
Meanwhile, the mistake goes unrepaired. "Nobody fixes problems they deny they have," says Marshall Goldsmith, a management consultant who devotes much effort trying to convince executives to apologize. "We get focused so much on winning that when we do something wrong, we don't even think it's wrong."
This type of delusion is explored by Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, in her book "Mindset: The Psychology of Success." In the business world and elsewhere, people either have a healthy belief in growth, whereby they expect to evolve their talents over time, or they possess a fixed mindset, whereby they believe their talents are innate traits that will carry them to the top.
The fixed folk "believe mistakes reflect on their deepest abilities and call them into question," says Prof. Dweck.
When she tested students on a difficult intelligence test and gave them a chance to look at the results of people who had done better and those who had done worse, the people in a fixed mindset wanted only to look at those who did worse. They didn't learn anything or confront their deficiencies.
But they felt great.
If you're a fixed mindset person, "you want to wallow in your success and disown your failures rather than rectify them," which is what the growth-mindset people did. Another study showed we can adopt a company's "fixed mindset" culture faster than you can say, "Sheep."
Some offices, such as Colin Johnston's former company, reward not apologizing. One of his colleagues created a floating-rate loan that failed to recognize that a sharp rise in short-term rates could adversely affect the borrower's ability to pay it back. He dismissed the warnings, and borrowers defaulted.
The nonadmitter simply pronounced it all "an aberration." The dodge worked.
"He was promoted to a department head," says Mr. Johnston.
Arguably, the biggest mistake committed isn't by people who never admit them, but by their bosses who allow it. These managers see their denier as talented enough to be worth more than the cost that results from feigned infallibility.
Bob Becker once worked with a head engineer who made mistakes on avionics devices but would never admit his errors when confronted. He'd say things like, "I don't know what you're talking about."
"He was able to get away with this because he had an immediate manager who believed in him wholeheartedly," says Mr. Becker.
"What damage are you inflicting on the others?" asks Mr. Becker, who spouted all the work that had to be done cleaning up the engineer's mess.
An executive at Robert Gately's former company was never wrong -- even when he was provably wrong and the mistake was minor. That includes the time he -- an American -- spelled the word defense, as in Department of Defense, with a "c."
So when he made bigger mistakes, such as implementing decisions regarding pay cuts and overhead pricing that reduced revenue instead of expanding it, it was pointless to expect that justice would prevail. "You'll get justice," says Mr. Gately of that culture, "after you're dead."
• Email me at jared.sandberg@wsj.com. For a discussion on today's column, go to WSJ.com/Forums. To see past columns, please go to CareerJournal.com.
/////////////////
The Wall Street Journal
CUBICLE CULTURE
By JARED SANDBERG
Why Learn and Grow
On the Job? It's Easier
To Feign Infallibility
January 22, 2008; Page B1
At work, some people just won't admit to making a mistake. They have a gripping fear that it will indict their character, attract more work and invite future blame -- not to mention ruin a perfect record of never having admitted to one before.
To excel at never admitting mistakes, you have to take care to burnish your unaccountability and sorrylessness. It helps, for example, to have a fall guy, someone who has responsibility for a project who is less known to your boss than you are. Also, any mistake made under time pressure can be blamed on a lack of time. Soon enough, you'll combine elements, blaming the lack of time you had because of the sluggishness of the fall guy.
These are the tactics Robert Wert, a former lawyer and current management consultant, gleaned from one of his former colleagues who actually "planned the blame-shifting in advance, evaluated the lay of the land minute by minute and acted accordingly," he says.
DISCUSSION
[Go to forum]
How often do you own up to your mistakes at work? Share your thoughts.
This co-worker got so good that he had a hierarchy of blame-takers. It began with outsiders: co-counsel, clients' in-house counsel, a court ruling, or clients' insane expectations. Short of those, he made sure to work with perfectionist colleagues. "If something went wrong, they would find ways to blame themselves," says Mr. Wert.
As for the stainless attorney: "I never saw him take responsibility for any error," Mr. Wert added.
Flub artists sometimes get their just desserts. But in too many companies, nothing ever catches up with them. In fact, they seem to thrive, not in spite of their ability to avoid accountability but because of it.
Colleagues fantasize about some day witnessing a tearful mea culpa. But that's like waiting for a love letter that was never written.
Meanwhile, the mistake goes unrepaired. "Nobody fixes problems they deny they have," says Marshall Goldsmith, a management consultant who devotes much effort trying to convince executives to apologize. "We get focused so much on winning that when we do something wrong, we don't even think it's wrong."
This type of delusion is explored by Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, in her book "Mindset: The Psychology of Success." In the business world and elsewhere, people either have a healthy belief in growth, whereby they expect to evolve their talents over time, or they possess a fixed mindset, whereby they believe their talents are innate traits that will carry them to the top.
The fixed folk "believe mistakes reflect on their deepest abilities and call them into question," says Prof. Dweck.
When she tested students on a difficult intelligence test and gave them a chance to look at the results of people who had done better and those who had done worse, the people in a fixed mindset wanted only to look at those who did worse. They didn't learn anything or confront their deficiencies.
But they felt great.
If you're a fixed mindset person, "you want to wallow in your success and disown your failures rather than rectify them," which is what the growth-mindset people did. Another study showed we can adopt a company's "fixed mindset" culture faster than you can say, "Sheep."
Some offices, such as Colin Johnston's former company, reward not apologizing. One of his colleagues created a floating-rate loan that failed to recognize that a sharp rise in short-term rates could adversely affect the borrower's ability to pay it back. He dismissed the warnings, and borrowers defaulted.
The nonadmitter simply pronounced it all "an aberration." The dodge worked.
"He was promoted to a department head," says Mr. Johnston.
Arguably, the biggest mistake committed isn't by people who never admit them, but by their bosses who allow it. These managers see their denier as talented enough to be worth more than the cost that results from feigned infallibility.
Bob Becker once worked with a head engineer who made mistakes on avionics devices but would never admit his errors when confronted. He'd say things like, "I don't know what you're talking about."
"He was able to get away with this because he had an immediate manager who believed in him wholeheartedly," says Mr. Becker.
"What damage are you inflicting on the others?" asks Mr. Becker, who spouted all the work that had to be done cleaning up the engineer's mess.
An executive at Robert Gately's former company was never wrong -- even when he was provably wrong and the mistake was minor. That includes the time he -- an American -- spelled the word defense, as in Department of Defense, with a "c."
So when he made bigger mistakes, such as implementing decisions regarding pay cuts and overhead pricing that reduced revenue instead of expanding it, it was pointless to expect that justice would prevail. "You'll get justice," says Mr. Gately of that culture, "after you're dead."
• Email me at jared.sandberg@wsj.com. For a discussion on today's column, go to WSJ.com/Forums. To see past columns, please go to CareerJournal.com.
Monday, January 21, 2008
An exceptionally disturbing episode of "The Wire" last night
The episode Sunday night left me pondering why I enjoy such evil stuff.
When I woke up this morning, I was listening to Susan Stamberg's piece on Morning Edition. One particular line in her essay spoke to me.
//////////////////
In Character
Eve Harrington: The Bad Girl, Hollywood Style
by Susan Stamberg
Morning Edition, January 21, 2008 · Said the real-life actress Celeste Holm, once upon a time, about the fictional actress Eve Harrington: "She had the manners of an ambassador and the morals of a pirate."
Critic Bosley Crowther went even further: "Eve would make a black widow spider look like a ladybug."
Eve — proximate cause of one of the most famous lines in movies: "Fasten your seatbelts — it's going to be a bumpy night."
Sweet, mousy, worshipful Eve — the ever-so-helpful assistant to Broadway star Margo Channing in the fasten-your-seatbelts movie classic All About Eve — turns out to be duplicitous, deceitful, two-faced. She wants everything Margo has: her career, her lover, her place on the marquee. Eve Harrington will do anything to get what she wants. And, says movie writer Sam Staggs, she "damn well near succeeds."
In his book All About 'All About Eve', Staggs reports that the film was based on a story called "The Wisdom of Eve," published in Cosmopolitan in 1946.
In the magazine version, Eve Harrington never gets punished; she spies on a star, steals a husband, and gets away with it. In the movie, Eve gets the stardom, the awards — but it's clear her heart is hollow, her life empty. And she has her own Eve waiting in the wings.
Why the difference? Staggs says Hollywood was Censorship Central in those days.
"Not only were sex scenes censored, and scenes of violence," Staggs says. "There was a censorship for morality; people who did bad things had to be punished at the end of the picture."
Staggs sees All About Eve as an indictment, a suggestion from writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz that show business survives on bloodsuckers like Eve.
'A Hunger for Recognition'
Actress Stockard Channing disagrees. A few years ago, she played Margo in a benefit reading of the screenplay. (Calista Flockhart was the Eve.) Channing thinks that in any world, on or off the stage, a sinner like Eve would be punished for her treachery. It's the "hidden aspect" of Eve's scheming, "the fact that she would simper and hide things," that makes her so repulsive, in Channing's view.
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Donald Margulies, who teaches drama at Yale University, says he's seen his share of real-life Eves.
"I've seen glimmers of incredible ambition — yes, I have seen that," Margulies says. "A kind of voraciousness, and a hunger for recognition."
And in his 1998 play Collected Stories, Margulies created an Eve-like character — a young graduate student working with a venerated author. Over the years, Lisa Morrison (the student) and Ruth Steiner (the writer) become close friends. Ruth pours her heart out to Lisa — who then uses Ruth's most private experiences to create a highly successful first novel.
"It's my life," roars Ruth in a passionate confrontation after the novel is published. "You appropriated my life."
Love, Fear and Other Basic Instincts
The story of Ruth and Lisa, Margo and Eve is the story of star and disciple, mentor and apprentice — even parent and child. Of age superseded and, yes, threatened by youth. Wanting to be kind, to teach, to give — but not everything. Not all of it.
Such a complicated relationship, riddled with love, desire, fear. And ego. And when the younger person, the Eve Harrington, is an unbridled rhymes-with-witch — but cloaks it in sugar — you end up with a classic Bad Girl.
Why do Bad Girls fascinate us so?
"I think," says writer Sam Staggs, "because bad girls — and bad boys — act out our basest instincts, [which] we try to suppress. That our superegos work overtime to suppress."
In 16th-century Germany, Lucas Cranach painted Adam and Eve — the twin panels hang now at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif. Adam faces forward, large apple-leaf strategically placed, scratching his head.
Eve, on the other hand, thrusts out one hip, writhing an arm above her head toward the apples, looking right at us through slightly lowered lids — the picture of seduction. She's Eve as in evil, Eve the corrupting femme fatale.
No accident, then, that Miss Harrington, the ambitious heroine of that 1950 Best Picture, shares the Biblical first woman's first name.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18236792
When I woke up this morning, I was listening to Susan Stamberg's piece on Morning Edition. One particular line in her essay spoke to me.
//////////////////
In Character
Eve Harrington: The Bad Girl, Hollywood Style
by Susan Stamberg
Morning Edition, January 21, 2008 · Said the real-life actress Celeste Holm, once upon a time, about the fictional actress Eve Harrington: "She had the manners of an ambassador and the morals of a pirate."
Critic Bosley Crowther went even further: "Eve would make a black widow spider look like a ladybug."
Eve — proximate cause of one of the most famous lines in movies: "Fasten your seatbelts — it's going to be a bumpy night."
Sweet, mousy, worshipful Eve — the ever-so-helpful assistant to Broadway star Margo Channing in the fasten-your-seatbelts movie classic All About Eve — turns out to be duplicitous, deceitful, two-faced. She wants everything Margo has: her career, her lover, her place on the marquee. Eve Harrington will do anything to get what she wants. And, says movie writer Sam Staggs, she "damn well near succeeds."
In his book All About 'All About Eve', Staggs reports that the film was based on a story called "The Wisdom of Eve," published in Cosmopolitan in 1946.
In the magazine version, Eve Harrington never gets punished; she spies on a star, steals a husband, and gets away with it. In the movie, Eve gets the stardom, the awards — but it's clear her heart is hollow, her life empty. And she has her own Eve waiting in the wings.
Why the difference? Staggs says Hollywood was Censorship Central in those days.
"Not only were sex scenes censored, and scenes of violence," Staggs says. "There was a censorship for morality; people who did bad things had to be punished at the end of the picture."
Staggs sees All About Eve as an indictment, a suggestion from writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz that show business survives on bloodsuckers like Eve.
'A Hunger for Recognition'
Actress Stockard Channing disagrees. A few years ago, she played Margo in a benefit reading of the screenplay. (Calista Flockhart was the Eve.) Channing thinks that in any world, on or off the stage, a sinner like Eve would be punished for her treachery. It's the "hidden aspect" of Eve's scheming, "the fact that she would simper and hide things," that makes her so repulsive, in Channing's view.
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Donald Margulies, who teaches drama at Yale University, says he's seen his share of real-life Eves.
"I've seen glimmers of incredible ambition — yes, I have seen that," Margulies says. "A kind of voraciousness, and a hunger for recognition."
And in his 1998 play Collected Stories, Margulies created an Eve-like character — a young graduate student working with a venerated author. Over the years, Lisa Morrison (the student) and Ruth Steiner (the writer) become close friends. Ruth pours her heart out to Lisa — who then uses Ruth's most private experiences to create a highly successful first novel.
"It's my life," roars Ruth in a passionate confrontation after the novel is published. "You appropriated my life."
Love, Fear and Other Basic Instincts
The story of Ruth and Lisa, Margo and Eve is the story of star and disciple, mentor and apprentice — even parent and child. Of age superseded and, yes, threatened by youth. Wanting to be kind, to teach, to give — but not everything. Not all of it.
Such a complicated relationship, riddled with love, desire, fear. And ego. And when the younger person, the Eve Harrington, is an unbridled rhymes-with-witch — but cloaks it in sugar — you end up with a classic Bad Girl.
Why do Bad Girls fascinate us so?
"I think," says writer Sam Staggs, "because bad girls — and bad boys — act out our basest instincts, [which] we try to suppress. That our superegos work overtime to suppress."
In 16th-century Germany, Lucas Cranach painted Adam and Eve — the twin panels hang now at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif. Adam faces forward, large apple-leaf strategically placed, scratching his head.
Eve, on the other hand, thrusts out one hip, writhing an arm above her head toward the apples, looking right at us through slightly lowered lids — the picture of seduction. She's Eve as in evil, Eve the corrupting femme fatale.
No accident, then, that Miss Harrington, the ambitious heroine of that 1950 Best Picture, shares the Biblical first woman's first name.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18236792
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Interesting Obesrvations re: Hillary & MLK
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Hillary and MLK
By JOHN MCWHORTER
January 16, 2008
January 16, 2008
There are many people in our great land aggrieved over the idea that Hillary Clinton thinks Martin Luther King Jr. was not the hero of the civil rights movement.
This idea seems so illogical that the only way to understand it is to approach it as a puzzle. After all, why would a white person running for president in 2008 dismiss the legacy of King near his birthday, which is celebrated as a national holiday, and right before a primary in a state with a large black vote?
To do such a thing would suggest inability to tie one's shoes. Let's imagine that in private Sen. Clinton thought little of King, which is vastly unlikely for someone of her background. Still, the puzzle remains: Why would she, an intelligent person, say it in public?
Yet there she was on "Meet the Press" Sunday, having to defend herself for simply saying that while King laid the groundwork (which she acknowledged), another part of the civil rights revolution was Lyndon B. Johnson's masterful stewardship of the relevant legislation through Congress. She was arguing that she is more experienced in getting laws passed in Washington than is Barack Obama -- which is true.
Why do people like op-ed columnist Bob Herbert, South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn and countless black bloggers hear a grievous insult in her simple observation? The outcry is so disproportionate to the stimulus that one can barely help suspecting something outright irregular.
I think of a study published last year in the Journal of Black Psychology. It documented that the extent to which black Americans perceive their lives to be affected by racism correlates with symptoms of general paranoia disconnected from racial issues.
To be able to hold in one's mind the notion that Mrs. Clinton would attack King suggests a bone-deep hypersensitivity that overrides sequential reasoning. "We have to be very, very careful how we speak about that era," Rep. Clyburn explains.
But why so very, very careful? What effect does it have on anyone's life if that era is occasionally discussed in less than perfectly genuflective phraseology? Is the Klan waiting behind a hill? Will a black man working at an insurance company in Cleveland have a breakdown because someone didn't give King precisely enough credit in a quick statement?
There is a willful frailty, a lack of self-confidence, in this kind of thinking. It suggests someone almost searching for things to claim injury about, donning the mantle of the noble victim in order to assuage a bruised ego.
Of course, there is a less depressing interpretation of the current uproar: Mrs. Clinton's critics are playing political hardball. You know, let's get blacks to vote for Mr. Obama by playing the race card to pretend Mrs. Clinton is dumping on King. John Edwards, for example, is obviously not mouthing agreement with these people out of insecurity about his blackness.
Well, politics is rarely pretty, but in this case the price is too high. For one, misinterpretation of statements in this vein makes black people look disinclined to process detail and context -- in other words, dim. It only gives that much more fodder to views on black intelligence like those uttered by James Watson.
Think, for example, how utterly unreal the notion is that Bill Clinton, our "first black president," would call Mr. Obama's whole candidacy a "fairytale" rather than referring, specifically, to perceptions of his record on the Iraq war. It's as if the outraged crowd is only capable of processing seven words at a time.
In an election that is supposed to focus on larger issues such as America's role in a violent world, playing the race card in this fashion distracts us from real problems. When most new AIDS cases are black and the murder rate among young black males is sky high, what kind of black representative throws tantrums over extremely unlikely implications of something someone said?
In the name of speaking for Mr. Obama, the people throwing these tantrums are presenting a parochial, cynical face, rather than the thoughtful, cosmopolitan one that the candidate himself is trying to show.
Overall, Mr. Obama has not run a "black" campaign. The past few days suggest that if he did, many would consider it a favor to him to churn up 10 more months of dustups over phrases carefully lifted out of context and held up as evidence of racism. Hopefully Mr. Obama is too smart, and too much a man of the world, to succumb to this twisted rendition of black identity.
Mr. McWhorter is a weekly columnist for the New York Sun and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Sad Commentary from Gene Owens
A culture in which it's dangerous to be a child
By Gene Owens
A child's first fear, I'm told, is the fear of falling. It's the fear one has coming fresh from the womb, before the outside world has showcased all its other instruments of terror.
On Jan. 7, a vehicle stopped at the peak of the Dauphin Island Bridge, which spans the waters between the Mississippi Sound and Mobile Bay. It connects the Alabama mainland with Dauphin Island, a narrow strip of populated sand that lies between those bodies of water and the Gulf of Mexico.
At that point the bridge was 80 feet above the water -- the height of an 8-story building.
Three children, their ages ranging from 4 months to three years, were taken from the vehicle. They were tossed like refuse over the bridge rail. It was daylight, so they saw what was happening.
If I remember my high-school physics lessons, a free-falling body accelerates at the rate of 32 feet per second per second. If I did my math correctly, these bodies were in free fall for around two seconds. They struck the water at a speed of around 45 miles per hour. Let us hope the ordeal was no more than 2 seconds; that they were not subjected to 57-degree water enveloping them, entering their lungs, causing them to die in terror and pain.
The national news media gave the event perfunctory treatment. The children were neither celebrities nor offspring of celebrities. They were not teen-agers from an affluent family on a school-sponsored lark to an exotic locale where they made unwise choices as to conduct and associates. They were not coal miners trapped in a collapsed shaft or a Midwestern child who had fallen down a well.
Their names were mixtures of American and Southeast Asian: Danny Luong, 4 months; Ryan Phan, 3; Hannah Luong, 2; and Lindsey Luong, 3.
Their disappearance triggered a dogged search by Mobile County deputies and by people who lived along the waterways. Lam Luong, the children's father, confessed to investigators that he had thrown them over the bridge as an act of revenge against his 23-year-old wife, Kieu Ngoc Phan. Later, he changed his story and said he had given the children to some unknown women who said they knew the mother and would take them back home. The Gulf Coast community waited, hoping the children would still be alive.
Five days later, a duck hunter spotted the body of little Danny washed into some marshes on a peninsula jutting into Mississippi Sound. An autopsy showed that he died from drowning and from blunt-force trauma, probably a result of the fall. The next day, some three miles to the west, two men wading in search of oysters found Ryan's body. The search went on for the missing sisters.
The three children had lived in a three-bedroom house with 15 other members of their family. They were part of a Vietnamese-Cambodian community made up mostly of shrimpers who had left their Southeast Asia homeland after the Vietnam War and practiced their traditional vocation along the American Gulf Coast. Their father had picked up an American addiction: crack cocaine. One of the casualties in a crack addict is the conscience. If his story is true, his conscience went up in smoke.
But where were the national media while this tragedy was being acted out? Is this tragedy less poignant because it happened among "people whose eyes are oddly made; of people whose skin is a different shade"?
Or is it because, in our 21st century culture, killing children has become commonplace? About the time those children were dying, a 6-month-old baby in my town died after its mother stepped on it. But that type of horror is no longer unusual. Children die in drive-by shootings; they die at the hands of Mommy's boyfriends who shake them to death to silence their crying; they die in suicide bombings in the Middle East; they die in military attacks in which bombs are not yet smart enough to distinguish between combatants and innocent bystanders. They died in Lam Luong's native land when planes dropped napalm to wrap them in sheets of fire.
In ancient Canaan, they sacrificed their children to idols. The stone idol would be heated red hot, and the infants would be tossed into their arms amid loud music and chants, which drowned out their cries. Parents were expected not to weep.
The four little Gulf Coast victims died without the pagan pageantry to drown out their screams, but it didn't matter. Nobody who cared was within hearing distance. They were sacrificed to a cocaine god and to a modern culture battling a pandemic of evil.
(Readers may write Gene Owens at 317 Braeburn Drive, Anderson SC or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@aol.com)
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Lexington
The Republican crack-up
Jan 10th 2008
From The Economist print edition
The Republican Party is in a mess. The answer is surprisingly simple
Illustration by Kevin Kallaugher
BACK in July 2007, John Heilemann, a writer for New York magazine and an alumnus of this newspaper, argued that it was possible to imagine John McCain winning the Republican nomination—but only if you had been fortified by “half a bottle of Maker's Mark, followed by a nitrous-oxide chaser”. Mr McCain is now back. But a bigger question remains. Do you need to partake of Mr Heilemann's chemical cocktail to believe that the Republican nomination is worth having?
The Republicans look like dead men walking. Almost two-thirds of Americans regard the Iraq war as a mistake. A similar proportion think that the country is on the wrong track. Americans regard the Democrats as more competent than Republicans by a margin of five to three and more ethical by a margin of two to one. They prefer Democratic policies on everything from health care to taxes.
These figures have come to life in Iowa and New Hampshire. Twice as many Democrats turned out to caucus in Iowa as Republicans. The Democrats are fired up with Bush-hatred and ready to take the White House. The Republicans are despondent and defensive. “I'd rather vote for a dead dog than a Democrat”, one New Hampshirite told this columnist. “But the way things are going it might have to be the dead dog.”The party has flailed around for a champion without success. Rudy Giuliani led the national polls for months only to implode. Fred Thompson sped to the front for a while only to fall asleep at the wheel. The party is divided into warring factions. Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee have as much in common as their respective alma maters—Harvard Business School and Ouachita Baptist University. The party is also in danger of going off the deep end. Mr Huckabee denies that man is descended from the apes. Everyone except Mr McCain seems to think that it's a good plan to send 12m illegal immigrants back home.
The party's travails are producing a fierce argument on the right. Are the Republicans' problems just part of the normal political cycle? Or do they portend the end of an era? The pragmatists argue that the problems are just a matter of competence and happenstance. The war in Iraq was badly managed until Bob Gates and General David Petraeus took over. The White House's response to Hurricane Katrina was dismal. The Republican majority in Congress fell victim to the normal foibles of greed and lust. Voters always grow tired of incumbents.
The fundamentalists think that there is something much deeper going on. Ed Rollins, a former Reagan aide who is now Mr Huckabee's campaign chairman, argues that the machine that Ronald Reagan built is now finished. The coalition of social conservatives, defence conservatives and anti-tax conservatives “doesn't mean a whole lot to people anymore”. Mr Huckabee is openly critical of George Bush's foreign policy.
The truth is more nuanced. There is more than happenstance at work, but less than the break-up of the Republican coalition. Mr Bush's people pursued a self-defeating political strategy. They fired up the Republican base, ignoring the centre and rewarding their loyalists with government largesse. But Mr Bush's serial incompetence destroyed his narrow majority. And his addiction to government spending alienated fiscal conservatives.
Mr Bush's Republicans also made serious policy errors. They stuck their head in the sand over global warming. They ignored rising anxiety about stagnating middle-class incomes. They turned the war on terrorism into a defining issue and then messed it up. Mr Reagan had a lasting influence not just because he forged a coalition but also because he was right on the biggest issues of his time—the importance of shrinking government and facing down communism. The Republicans are now in danger of being either wrong or half wrong on two of the defining issues of our time—global warming and radical Islam.
This suggests that the Republicans need to engage in some vigorous rethinking, and fast. But it does not add up to a case for taking a jack-hammer to the Reagan coalition. The coalition has served the Republicans handsomely in the past—they will have held the White House for 20 of the past 28 years and controlled the House for 12 years from 1995. Jackhammering the coalition would almost certainly be a disaster. Do the Republicans really want to abandon a chunk of their core voters when they are already behind in the polls? And do they want to engage in a civil war in the middle of a tight election?
The value of values
Business conservatives can never win a majority without the support of “values voters” (there just are not enough people around who look like Mr Romney). “Values voters” can never produce a viable governing coalition without the help of the business elite. The Republicans have seen revolts against their ruling coalition before—remember Pat Buchanan's pitchfork rebellion against George Bush senior—and they have always succeeded in putting it back together again. They need to do the same now. Enough Republicans believe enough of the Reagan mantra—less government, traditional values and strong defence—to make it a workable philosophy.
The doomsters draw the wrong lesson from the Bush years. The lesson of the Bush presidency is not that the Republican coalition is exhausted but that it has been badly managed. Mr Bush has failed to keep the coalition in balance—he tilted too far towards his party's moralistic southern wing and too far away from its libertarian western wing. He has allowed public spending to balloon and pork-barrel politicians to run wild. And he has ignored big changes in public opinion about climate change. The Republican Party certainly needs to update its agenda to deal with problems Reagan never grappled with. But this is no time to go breaking the mould and starting again.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Peggy Noonan's Take on Why Hillary Won
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Who's Crying Now?By PEGGY NOONAN January 11, 2008; Page W14 One way to see what happened Tuesday is that it was an anti-coronation backlash. Iowa said: We are not here to crown Queen Hillary. New Hampshire said: We're not here to crown King Barack. The polls said they would. People don't like to be told what they're going to do. Other ways to see it: Women saved her. The working-class sisterhood beat the white-collar snots of the mainstream media. Middle-aged women body-slammed young professionals who were carrying on as if history had never happened before because it had never happened to them. Students were still on Christmas vacation. Hillary had been bruised in Iowa, and people are more inclined to give a second chance to a bully who's been hurt. The Democrats of New Hampshire resented the media pile-on, in which national reporters and editors, liberated by what they thought her impending demise, rushed to get on record as never having liked her. In this understanding of events it was the mainstream media that, in effect, showed up at Mrs. Clinton's last rallies to chant "Iron my shirt." But the smartest thought came from a Democratic woman who watched from New York with experienced eyes. She saw it this way. When she was a young woman, she learned to drive on an old Buick. She drove it for seven years. Then she made some money and got to look at other cars. Showrooms, convertibles, long gleaming fins. But she'd come back from a test drive, get back into the Buick, and think: This old leather seat fits me, it feels good. Why complicate life? Why not stick with what's comfortable? And she did. She left Mr. Obama on the showroom floor. I would say: All of the above. And more. While everyone beats the hell out of the media, which is never wholly a bad idea, one should point out what everyone in politics and journalism knows: Hillary Clinton's own people knew she was going to lose. Major supporters and fund-raisers thought so and said so, for weeks, off the record. And they were not heartbroken about it. I saw no tears. They were shocked, not saddened; shaken, not stirred. One told me the problem was the campaign had been so obsessed from day one with showing she was a commander in chief that they never thought to urge her to be a woman among women. She used her sex--the boys are picking on me!--but she never assumed her sex. Then, tired and with nothing to lose, she allowed her eyes to well. It was an arresting sight because it suggested the presence of a soul in the machine. Let's look at the tears before they harden like resin into cliché. Quickly. She was taking questions in a diner, a woman asked how she does it each day, she started talking about how hard it is, and she got misty-eyed, her voice soft for once--conversational, not hectoring. Exactly 100% of the people who saw it on the news and on YouTube had one reaction. It was to ask a question: Is that real or artifice? With the Clintons you always have to ask, which is the great Clinton problem. In the end, Democratic women seem to have felt sympathy. I suspect the sympathy was connected to one great universal moment between men and women, the one in which in the middle of the fight she gets teary eyed and he, in terror and resentment, says, "Don't go crying now!" as if her tears were a strategy and not . . . honest tears. In any case, Democratic women showed no interest in parsing the exact level of narcissism betrayed by Mrs. Clinton's choked tale of woe. They understood the moment, thought no less of her, and maybe more. * * *But I think the crying moment, as it is called, though she didn't cry, gained extra force because it occurred just as Mr. Obama, as a personality, was settling in as rather a chilly fellow. Sleek and elegant, yes, but cold, or at least cool at the core. Barack Obama is up against a lot of tropes, a lot of assumptions and understandings about what it is to be young, gifted, black and a major political figure. He's not Jesse Jackson, he's not Dr. King, he's not Andrew Young. He's trying to break a mold, make it new, be who he is, anticipate expectations, upend clichés, startle you into seeing him clear. He plays down emotionalism in terms of his visage (not his words), keeps his guard up, wears dignity like a cloak. When he appeared with Oprah in Des Moines, she vibrated at the podium like a puppy. He came on cool and loping, always using his hands in the frame in a slow and deliberative manner, to show he never gets a tremor, doesn't break a sweat. He's cool. Is that a universally beloved attribute in a national candidate? Is it a plus that carries a minus? Was what is called sexism part of the story? I suppose, and in a number of ways. When George Bush senior cries in public, it's considered moving. Ditto his moist-eyed son. But in fairness, they have tended to appear moved about things apart from themselves, apart from their own predicaments. Mrs. Clinton was weeping about Mrs. Clinton. If a man had uttered Mrs. Clinton's aria--if Mr. Obama had said, "And you know, this is very personal for me . . . as tired as I am . . . against the odds," and gotten choked--they would have laughed him out of town. * * *The night Mrs. Clinton won, she referred to the crying moment by saying she had now, with the help of New Hampshire, found her voice. After 60 years. "High five, fraudbot" was the reaction of the dizzy children at Wonkette, who had it about right. I suspect Mrs. Clinton was attempting to echo Eleanor Roosevelt, of whom it was famously said that she found her voice late in life, in the coal mines of West Virginia and in her husband's White House. But one must ask of Mrs. Clinton what one would never ask of Mrs. Roosevelt: Will the new voice have a new accent? She's going down to South Carolina soon. This could get painful. And if we are to believe the new voice will be a softer, more conciliatory and more engaging one, how to square that with what is going on at HillaryIs44.com1, a Web site that is for all intents and purposes a back door to her war room? There you will see that federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will soon "destroy" Barack Obama in a "scandal" involving an "indicted slumlord" who is Mr. Obama's "friend of 17 years" and with whom Mr. Obama has been involved in "shady deals." This isn't a new voice, it is the old one, the one we know too well. The item was posted on Thursday, two days after Mrs. Clinton announced her new approach. Between sobs she is going to try to destroy Mr. Obama. She is going to try to end him. She will pay a price for it--no one likes to see the end of a dream, no one likes a dream killer. But she will pay that price to win, and try to clean up the mess later. | |||||||
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Interesting commentary re: Hillary, by Karl Rove. Published in the Wall Street Journal
Why Hillary Won
By KARL ROVE
January 10, 2008; Page A15
January 10, 2008; Page A15
What would Shakespeare's Jack Cade say after the New Hampshire Democratic primary? Maybe the demagogue in "Henry VI" would call for the pollsters to be killed first, not the lawyers.
![[Opinion]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ED-AG928_rove_20080109174043.jpg)
The opinion researchers find themselves in a difficult place after most predicted a big Obama sweep. It's not their fault. The dirty secret is it is hard to accurately poll a primary. The unpredictability of who will turn out and what the mix of voters will be makes polling a primary election like reading chicken entrails -- ugly, smelly and not very enlightening. Our media culture endows polls -- especially exit polls -- with scientific precision they simply don't have.
But more interesting than dissecting the pollsters is dissecting the election returns, precinct by precinct. Sen. Hillary Clinton won working-class neighborhoods and less-affluent rural areas. Sen. Barack Obama won the college towns and the gentrified neighborhoods of more affluent communities. Put another way, Mrs. Clinton won the beer drinkers, Mr. Obama the white wine crowd. And there are more beer drinkers than wine swillers in the Democratic Party.
Mrs. Clinton won a narrow victory in New Hampshire for four reasons. First, her campaign made a smart decision at its start to target women Democrats, especially single women. It has been made part of the warp and woof of her campaign everywhere. This focus didn't pay off in Iowa, but it did in New Hampshire.
Second, she had two powerful personal moments. The first came in the ABC debate on Saturday, when WMUR TV's Scott Spradling asked why voters were "hesitating on the likeability issue, where they seem to like Barack Obama more." Mrs. Clinton's self-deprecating response -- "Well, that hurts my feelings" -- was followed by a playful "But I'll try to go on."
You couldn't help but smile. It reminded Democrats what they occasionally like about her. Then Mr. Obama followed with a needless and dismissive, "You're likable enough, Hillary."
Her remarks helped wash away the memory of her angry replies to attacks at the debate's start. His trash talking was an unattractive carryover from his days playing pickup basketball at Harvard, and capped a mediocre night.
The other personal moment came on Monday, when a woman in Portsmouth asked her "how do you do it?" Mrs. Clinton's emotional reply was powerful and warm. Voters rarely see her in such a spontaneous moment. It was humanizing and appealing. And unlike her often contrived and calculated attempts to appear down-to-earth, this was real.
Third, the Clintons began -- at first not very artfully -- to raise questions about the fitness for the Oval Office of a first-term senator with no real accomplishments or experience.
Former President Bill Clinton hit a nerve by drawing attention to Mr. Obama's conflicting statements on Iraq. There's more -- and more powerful -- material available. Mr. Obama has failed to rise to leadership on a single major issue in the Senate. In the Illinois legislature, he had a habit of ducking major issues, voting "present" on bills important to many Democratic interest groups, like abortion-rights and gun-control advocates. He is often lazy, given to misstatements and exaggerations and, when he doesn't know the answer, too ready to try to bluff his way through.
For someone who talks about a new, positive style of politics and pledges to be true to his word, Mr. Obama too often practices the old style of politics, saying one thing and doing another. He won't escape criticism on all this easily. But the messenger and the message need to be better before the Clintons can get all this across. Hitting Mr. Obama on his elementary school essays won't cut it.
The fourth and biggest reason why Mrs. Clinton won two nights ago is that, while Mr. Obama can draw on the deep doubts of many Democrats about Mrs. Clinton, he can't close out the argument. Mr. Obama is an inspiring figure playing a historical role, but that's not enough to push aside the former First Lady and senator from New York. She's an historic figure, too. When it comes to making the case against Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama comes across as a vitamin-starved Adlai Stevenson. His rhetoric, while eloquent and moving at times, has been too often light as air.
Mr. Obama began to find his voice at the Iowa Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner, when he took four deliberate swipes at the Clintons. He called for Democrats to tackle problems "that had festered long before" President Bush, "problems that we've talked about year after year after year after year."
He dismissed the Clinton style of campaigning and governing, saying "Triangulating and poll-driven positions . . . just won't do." He attacked Mrs. Clinton on Iraq, torture and her opposition to direct presidential talks with Syria and Iran. Then he rejected a new Clinton era by saying, "I don't want to spend the next year or the next four years re-fighting the same fights that we had in the 1990s." It deftly, if often indirectly, played on the deep concerns of Democrats who look at the Clinton era as a time of decline for their party and unfulfilled potential for their cause.
But rather than sharpen and build on this message of contrast and change, Mr. Obama chose soaring rhetoric and inspirational rallies. While his speeches galvanized true believers at his events, his words were neither filling nor sustaining for New Hampshire Democrats concerned about the Clintons and looking for a substantive alternative.
And Mr. Obama, in his own way, is often as calculating as Mrs. Clinton. For example, he was the only candidate, Democratic or Republican, to use a teleprompter to deliver his Iowa and New Hampshire election-night speeches. It gave his speeches a quality and clarity that other candidates, speaking from notes or the heart, failed to achieve. But what he gained in polish, he lost in connection.
The Democratic candidates left New Hampshire not liking each other. Mrs. Clinton, in particular, lets her feelings show. In her victory speech, as she listed her competitors, she put Mr. Obama at the tail end, behind Dennis Kucinich. Ouch!
Now the Democratic contest will go on through at least "Super Tuesday" -- Feb. 5. Mrs. Clinton is likely to win the Democratic beauty contest in Michigan on Jan. 15. But with no delegates at stake, it will have little impact.
Despite Sen. Harry Reid's son serving as her Nevada chairman, she's likely to lose that state's caucuses on Jan. 19. Then comes South Carolina on Jan. 26, where half the Democratic voters are likely to be African-American and Mr. Obama the probable victor. That means Florida on the 29th looms very large. The outcome of the contest in the Sunshine State is likely to have a disproportionate impact on the 23 contests on Super Tuesday.
With so many states voting on Super Tuesday, no candidate will have enough money, time or energy to cover all the contests. Burning in a single television ad in every Super Tuesday state will cost nearly $16 million.
Instead, candidates will pick states where they have a better chance to win and, by doing so, lock down more delegates. They will spend their time in cities with local TV and print coverage that reaches the biggest number of targeted voters possible. And they will spend their limited dollars on TV stations that deliver the largest number of likely supporters at the least cost. Memphis, for example, may be a smart buy, with its stations reaching western Tennessee and eastern Arkansas, both Feb. 5 states. Fargo, which reaches North Dakota and Minnesota, may be another effective buy.
At the end of Super Tuesday, it won't be just who won the most states, but who has the most delegates. In both parties, party elders and voters in later contests across the country will want to start consolidating behind a candidate.
Mr. Rove is a former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
Another great poem
I became familiar with this poem after reading "Go to the Widow-Maker" by James Jones. Jones got his book title from the Rudyrd Kipling poem below. The poem is in the preface to the novel.
If you're not familiar with James Jones, you should be. Check him out. In fact, "some came running."
I believe I may have bought my used copy of this book in Sonny Brewer's bookstore which is called "Over the Transom" and is located in Fairhope, AL.
What a great lines...
She has no strong white arms to fold you,
But the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you---
Out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you.
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Harp Song of the Dane Women
What is a woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?
She has no house to lay a guest in---
But one chill bed for all to rest in,
That the pale suns and the stray bergs nest in.
She has no strong white arms to fold you,
But the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you---
Out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you.
Yet, when the signs of summer thicken,
And the ice breaks, and the birch-buds quicken,
Yearly you turn from our side, and sicken---
Sicken again for the shouts and the slaughters.
You steal away to the lapping waters,
And look at your ship in her winter-quarters.
You forget our mirth, and talk at the tables,
The kine in the shed and the horse in the stables---
To pitch her sides and go over her cables.
Then you drive out where the storm-clouds swallow,
And the sound of your oar-blades, falling hollow,
Is all we have left through the months to follow.
Ah, what is Woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker ?
-- Rudyard Kipling
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