Even the Times Likes Bush; Mobtown Rebellion; Is Caroline Miller a New Yorker?; Tucker Carlson, Cut Your Losses; Beatles Musings
When The New York Times doles out guarded praise for President Bush, editorializing that his White House is displaying "a mature insistence on order" and that, unlike Mr. I'll-Take-Manhattan-for-a-Ride, Bush "takes the presidency seriously," there's not much I can add. Why spoil the party? The Times' Feb. 11 editorial, "Between Two Eras," was remarkable for its condemnation of Bill Clinton, leaving the obvious question of why the paper's editors were dead-drunk asleep these past eight years.
The edit continued: "All that said, we think Mr. Bush's desire to simply close the door on the last days of Clintonism may not be possible. We sense a national need to come to grips with the wreckage, both civic and legal, left by former President Clinton. It may not be enough simply to observe that the pardon of Marc Rich is an act so baffling that virtually no responsible member of Mr. Clinton's own party will defend it. As Republican Representative Dan Burton, a man for whom this page has had scant praise, said in Thursday's pardon hearings, 'We think the American people would like to know how it happened.'"
Had the Times called for Clinton's resignation in the fall of 1998, after he admitted to perjury, it's certain Al Gore would be in the Oval Office today. Think about that. No pardons; no pilfering the White House's furnishings; no Florida recount; no cavalier bombing of Iraq to change the news cycle; no President Bush; and no John Ashcroft. Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. must chew his kidneys wondering why the political world turned upside down and just how he and his wealthy class warriors at the paper contributed to a most disconcerting (in their view) GOP victory.
Bush has created his own "honeymoon," and for every Barney Frank, who all but says the new President is an asshole, there are moderate Democrats who are at least willing to give the current administration a chance. And why wouldn't they? The Democrats are splintered: the left-wing fringe is still deciphering disfigured ballots in Florida; Minority Leader Tom Daschle is making a fool of himself by holding up mufflers at press conferences; the Democratic National Committee installed soft-money king Terry McAuliffe as its chairman, giving him a soapbox from which to sputter about police roadblocks and slander Jeb Bush and James Baker; Al Gore gives an "off-the-record" lecture at Columbia Journalism School; and Maxine Waters and fellow simpletons refuse to wish a happy 90th birthday to Ronald Reagan, an American icon who's in failing health.
New Jersey's Robert Torricelli is looking at a nasty campaign finance violation that could conceivably cost the Democrats a Senate seat (which would neutralize the effects of South Carolina's Strom Thurmond possibly not making it till 2002); Michigan's Rep. David Bonior, a straight-to-hell demagogue, is considering leaving the House to run for governor; and Sen. Hillary Clinton can't even hold a press conference without facing questions about her sundry misdeeds. To top it off, Sen. Arlen Specter is contemplating impeaching Clinton again!
Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley Chairman Philip J. Purcell issued an apology to the company's clients for hiring Clinton to give a $100,000 speech in Boca Raton on Feb. 5. Purcell's e-mail read, in part: "We clearly made a mistake... We should have been far more sensitive to the strong feelings of our clients over Mr. Clinton's personal behavior as president... [It] was particularly unfortunate in light of Mr. Clinton's actions in leaving the White House."
Sure, John McCain is acting like Teddy Kennedy, still trying to even a score with Bush, but with McAuliffe in charge of the DNC, and openly embraced by Dick Gephardt, it's easy to imagine that Wisconsin's Russ Feingold isn't getting much sleep these days. The delusional McCain (who may be seriously ill) is intent on legacy-building, but you can see a big fat veto by Bush on campaign finance reform from the World Trade Center to the Hay-Adams Hotel.
My biggest beef with GWB so far is that he hasn't adjusted his campaign pledge on tax cuts to reflect the current economic climate. This back-loading is for the birds: the tax cut, contrary to the public's perception, is quite modest. Marginal rates ought to be dropped immediately, rather than phased in; capital gains taxes should be slashed; the alternative minimum tax needs to be eliminated; and the estate tax's repeal cannot be brokered away. The President has a short window during which to use this unprecedented political topsy-turvy to get more aggressive and return more money to taxpayers. When a Democratic dog is down, kick it and then kick it again.
It's inevitable that a foreign or domestic policy crisis will crop up, which may or may not leave Bush with the same strength with which to ram through this legislation. In addition, once the Beltway media stops fixating on Clinton and the Florida vote from last November, the President can expect a daily avalanche of mean-spirited criticism.
Mobtown Rebellion
Mama mink muskrats, I smell something cooking down in Baltimore! There was a creepy piece about the Middle-Atlantic city in The New York Times on Jan. 27, by Clyde Haberman, a fastidious fellow whose sense of delicacy is jarred when he sees too many "garish" newspaper dispensers or billboards on the streets of Manhattan. Haberman's "NYC" column appeared the day before the Baltimore Ravens crushed the New York Giants in a big football game, an event that gave him license to ridicule an historic metropolis that's alternately dubbed "Charm City" or "The City That Breeds," depending on your point of view.
At issue was Haberman's opinion that Baltimoreans are so bereft of cultural icons that its citizens claim Edgar Allan Poe as one of their own, a reasonable enough contention since that's where the poet is buried and there's an institution called the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. Haberman cites Kenneth Silverman of New York University, who told the irritating pundit that "By blood, Poe's a Baltimorean, but by literary reputation, he's really a New Yorker." Russell Baker, the former Times reporter and columnist, who grew up in Baltimore, offered this surprising opinion: "Somehow, Poe fits Baltimore. He was a loser."
Baker's bitter snub took me aback, since he, a Johns Hopkins alumnus like myself, began his newspaper career at the Hopkins News-Letter and then worked at The Baltimore Sun before moving up north. I took the occasion to reread his 1982 memoir Growing Up, expecting to find a passage or two of sentimental goo about his hometown, but came up bone-dry. Baker's was, as they say, a hardscrabble youth, punctuated by the Great Depression, brutal racism and World War II.
He writes about Hopkins: "There wasn't much glory in college life. I still rode the trolley to school and carried lunch in a brown paper bag. Most of my friends did, too. The people I gravitated to were town boys, different from the tweedy fraternity-house crowd who wore saddle shoes and cared about lacrosse games and campus dances. We were a raffish bunch of over-grown streetwise kids sprawled in the cafeteria, chomping homemade sandwiches, arguing noisily about politics, literature, history, and economics, seething with intellectual contempt for the smooth fraternity crowd and filled with secret envy for the fraternity boys' social polish and devil-may-care ways with women."
Still, after he had a brilliant career in journalism, learning his craft (and relishing the long, graveyard shifts at the scenes of murders, arsons and burglaries; happily manning the rewrite desk) at the Sun, I'd have thought Baker, who continues to show up at Hopkins functions, might've been more generous about Baltimore than to call it a city of "losers." But Haberman might've caught the notoriously cranky Baker, no doubt still pissed at being pushed out of the Times empire by the paper's boomer New Guard, in a crummy mood. I have a feeling that might be his natural state of mind anyway.
Haberman continues: "As much as we love to champion New York, Baltimore has our heart this time. Baltimoreans are obviously serious about their heroes... Their connection to an important American writer matters to them."
Spare me. I lived in Baltimore for 14 years, and while there's a chip-on-the-shoulder mentality that colors the hunkered-down intelligentsia there, the grating condescension of Haberman?and it's not peculiar to this one particular hack; other Times and Washington Post reporters visit Baltimore and report back to their readers as if they've been on a safari?would be better suited if he employed it judging his own colleagues on 43rd St. Yes, there's a provincialism that permeates Baltimore, but at least it's pretty honest. I happen to prefer New York?which makes sense, my having grown up on Long Island?but I've never witnessed anywhere else the likes of the crass professional incest that permeates Manhattan's cultural elites.
Besides, there's reason for cheer in Maryland at this moment. Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, once considered a shoo-in for the state's governorship in 2002, made a Super Bowl gaffe last month that makes Al Gore seem like John Barth's twin. The Sun's Thomas Waldron reported on Jan. 30: "Asked what her favorite play had been, the lieutenant governor from the family that nearly made touch football the national pastime, cheerily replied: 'I loved it when we made that football. The Giants had just made a football, and we came right back.'"
Talking to political observers down in Maryland, the feeling is that Townsend, touted as the "pure Kennedy" without scandal, is a lightweight, maybe a notch above her cousin Patrick in the brainpower department.
Meanwhile, Martin O'Malley, the immensely popular 37-year-old mayor of Baltimore, has emerged as a red-hot threat to Townsend's expected coronation. Since his smashing victory in '99, O'Malley, a white man who won 53 percent of the vote in a predominantly black city, has adopted a modified-Giuliani zero tolerance approach to crime in the drugs-and-homicide city, and has seen appreciable results. And the guy has spunk. In a well-publicized tirade aimed at Baltimore's state's attorney, Patricia Jessamy, who'd dropped charges against a cop accused of perjury, O'Malley gave a Jan. 25 interview to the Sun that must've heightened Townsend's bladder activity. He said: "She doesn't even have the goddamn guts to get off her ass and go in and try this case, and I'm tired of it. If she doesn't have respect for the police, if she doesn't have respect for the people of this city, maybe she should get the hell out and let somebody else in who's not afraid to do the goddamn job."
Obviously, O'Malley had to publicly apologize for the obscenities, but he didn't back off on his opinion of Jessamy's incompetence. It's a high-wire act: Jessamy is black, and civic leaders gave an obligatory tut-tut over the "goddamns," but I think it'll pay off. Remember, when George Bush called the Times' odious Adam Clymer an asshole, his campaign almost immediately recovered from Al Gore's successfully staged kiss at the Democratic convention. A recent statewide poll measured O'Malley's favorable ratings at 51 percent, compared to Townsend's 66 percent; his unfavorability came in at 3 percent, while his possible competitor was at 19 percent.
As Frank DeFilippo wrote in the Baltimore Business Journal: "To run and win and to defeat a Kennedy, yet, is the emblem of a young man on the move and one who is audacious and fanciful enough to even have visions of the U.S. Senate or maybe the White House."
Here's the irony: had Gore tapped Townsend instead of Joe Lieberman as his runningmate last summer, he'd probably be president today, drinking champagne with Terry McAuliffe and shredding all those populist speeches. The Kennedy family and their acolytes would've campaigned like an army?the prospect of the country's first woman president in 2008 and a restoration of Scamelot would be powerful incentives to get off their lazy and aged butts. They'd have been able to achieve what the exiled Bill Clinton wasn't allowed to achieve. Is there any doubt that New Hampshire, which Bush won narrowly, would've ended up as a Blue state on Tim Russert's map? And West Virginia, where residents still have portraits of JFK in their living rooms, wouldn't have fallen to the GOP either. And there's the election, Florida be damned.
Is Caroline Miller a New Yorker?
Sometimes I wonder if New York is edited by men and women who live in New Rochelle. In the Feb. 5 issue, Morgan Goldberg wrote an absurd brief in the "Real Estate" section about whiny uptowners who moved to Tribeca and then skedaddled just as fast. Goldberg quotes an anonymous broker: "I have people who had to be downtown, fur-coat people, wealthy kids with family money. I said, You're not going to like it here. They said, No, you're old, you don't know?they wanted twelve-foot ceilings. They hated it?the lack of services, shoe repair, gyms, movie theaters, things they were used to having a block away. Within two years they were out."
A 28-year-old marketing executive complained: "There are only two bank machines within a twenty-block radius?I've counted. The grocery store is too far away to carry your purchases home, and none of the restaurants deliver."
Are we in a time warp? Tribeca Pioneers?the sanctimonious artists who moved to the neighborhood 25 years ago and resent the ongoing gentrification?would have been accurate in making those claims. But today it's simply not true. Here are the facts: walk from Chambers to Franklin Sts.?five minutes?and you'll find three full-service banks, and a number of $100-limit ATMs at delis. There's an excellent shoe repair store on W. Broadway, just below Chambers. You can choose from a number of competing dry cleaners. The Food Emporium delivers. There's a new 16-screen cinema complex just north of Battery Park City, not to mention the Screening Room at Varick and Laight. Restaurants don't deliver? How about Bouley Bakery, Roc, Gigino, Gloria's, Riverrun, Il Mattone, Franklin Station, GingerTy and Au Mandarin, just for starters? I have little familiarity with gyms, but my friend Peter DuBois goes to the New York Sports Club on Reade St. almost every day.
Goldberg, who apparently has zero familiarity with Tribeca, continues: "A Duane Street transplant complains, 'The streets are dreary and desolate; if it weren't for my doorman, I would feel completely isolated. The spirit of New York is gone down here: I miss the pretzel man, the Mr. Softee truck. It practically feels like any other city.' Albeit one that's half under construction and doesn't have any parks."
Correction: Washington Market Park, on Greenwich St., bustles with activity in warm weather, and an ice cream truck is parked right outside the gates. In the fall and spring, Little League soccer and baseball teams take over the Stuyvesant High School playing fields for the better part of Saturday mornings and afternoons. Desolate? Usually, you hear complaints about all the limos parked outside restaurants like Nobu and Danube. And Odeon, Le Zinc, Spartina, El Teddy's and Tribeca Grill are constantly packed.
If the moneyed kids from uptown miss the moldy pretzels, the tourist buses clogging up 5th Ave. and the Temple of Zabar's?certainly the most overrated destination in Manhattan?good riddance.
Watch Out for that Lethal Carrot Stick
There are so many hangovers from the poison of?to borrow the lexicon of a distant era?Klinton Kulture, that the following Associated Press story from Jan. 31 didn't get much attention in the mainstream press. In Jonesboro, AR, where four students and a teacher were killed in 1998 in a senseless middle school shootout, a first-grader was recently suspended for three days after pointing a breaded chicken finger at a teacher and saying, "Pow, pow, pow."
I don't mean to belittle the sensitivity Jonesboro's school system has to random violence, but the punishment of this eight-year-old boy is so silly that it defies imagination. Or would have, I suppose, until the tv networks, especially CNN, turned the Columbine massacre into a macabre ratings bonanza, probably contributing to copycat tragedies. The principal of South Elementary School, Dan Sullivan, was steadfast in insisting that the boy, Christopher Kissinger, had violated the community's zero tolerance rules. According to the AP, Sullivan said that discipline "depends on the tone, the demeanor, and in some manner you judge the intent. It's not the object in the hand, it's the thought in his mind. Is a plastic fork worse than a metal fork? Is a pencil a weapon?"
A breaded chicken finger is not a weapon.
It's bad enough that all across the country, classic American novels have been banned from schools?Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, for example, is now being phased out in favor of multicultural books. But now we've got grade school principals playing psychologist in determining the "thought in a [student's] mind"? No kid ought to get sassy with his or her teacher, but an afternoon of detention, emptying garbage pails or something equally disagreeable, seems more than adequate punishment for young Kissinger's infraction.
Tangled Up in...a Bow Tie?
It's time for Tucker Carlson to cut his losses.
An excellent political reporter?although his pieces at The Weekly Standard are more and more infrequent?Carlson a few years ago made a splash on the talk show circuit, eventually inking a deal at CNN. It made sense: he's young, photogenic, quick-witted and conservative?a rarity at that, today, beleaguered station. He nabbed George W. Bush in a now-legendary '99 piece for Talk, in which the candidate, not yet prepped for the national media, was a little too forthcoming. He auditioned for the "from the right" slot on CNN's Crossfire, and was a brilliant inquisitor, but was inexplicably passed over for the drab Mary Matalin. Carlson now, in addition to squaring off with Time's ultralib Margaret Carlson (no relation) on Inside Politics, is marooned on CNN's late-night Spin Room with Bill Press, a show that's the butt of insider-tv jokes.
Last week, in Newsweek, Carlson gave Evan Thomas, who was profiling Fox News' rising star Bill O'Reilly, what I think was an ill-considered comment. He said: "Only masochists would go on his show?or watch it. I hate to say it because it sounds snobby, but I don't know anyone who's read his book."
It was "snobby," and played right into the self-consciously working-class O'Reilly's hands. After all, the book has sold about a million copies, and his Fox talk show is swamping competitors in the ratings. O'Reilly's bestseller, The O'Reilly Factor, isn't highbrow stuff?he's not a natural writer and it's sort of a collection of his rants, not dissimilar to Howard Stern's two monstrously successful efforts in publishing. But O'Reilly, reliably annoying, can be a dogged host, and is currently performing a valuable public service in relentlessly investigating Jesse Jackson's shady financial accounting with his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition shell organization. On Feb. 2, O'Reilly pummeled a former IRS commissioner, Sheldon Cohen, about why Jackson's empire hasn't been audited in 12 years.
Cohen, who feebly claimed the IRS isn't properly funded, and doesn't have the manpower to conduct the audits it should?a very shaky premise given Jackson's prominence?was no match for O'Reilly. It was a slam dunk for the egotistical host: with Bill Clinton in office, it's no wonder the IRS didn't go after Jackson, who famously consoled and prayed with the ex-president in his years of need.
O'Reilly concluded his short interview with Cohen by saying, "Mr. Cohen, this is why the bandits are getting away with it. They know you guys don't care. They know that you're not going to do anything about it." After Cohen replied, "Believe me, the people at the IRS care," O'Reilly dropped the A-bomb. He said: "I don't believe you for a second, Mr. Cohen, and I don't think anybody watching this broadcast or our investigation for the last year believes you either. But we appreciate your time. And you may be right. I may be way out of line. But I think this is a disgrace, and I think the IRS is a disgrace."
That's not only good television, but it's also newsworthy. Jackson has been given a free ride for years because corporations and politicians don't dare incur his wrath, fearful that the word "Selma" will be attached to them. Now that Jackson's essentially through as a public figure?his finances are under scrutiny by several news organizations, notably the Chicago Sun-Times and the New York Post, in addition to O'Reilly?he'll have to slink back to Chicago and keep hope alive that he's not prosecuted.
Back to Carlson, one of the few Beltway journalists I both admire and personally like. The backlash began with the disastrous Spin Room, but intensified when New York's Michael Wolff, a see-no-evil liberal, dubbed him in a Jan. 15 column, "[T]he first star of the new Bush administration..." and wrote that his "preppy-good-guy-I-can-make-a-joke conservatism is obviously meant to complement Bush's. The way, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Michael Beschloss offered a braininess in the early nineties that suggested a new sort of Clinton generation.
"Tucker is a programmer's high concept?a conservative who does humor and affability instead of Bill Bennett's disapproval or Ann Coulter's rage. It's confidence rather than resentment."
Wolff is poison. His self-serving portrait of Carlson might've played well with the Michael Moore set, but it misrepresented his subject. Carlson is dead serious in his conservative views, but because he's also got a sense of humor, Wolff uses him as a foil to denigrate other right-of-center pundits such as Brit Hume, Fred Barnes, Ben Stein, Tony Snow, Tony Blankley and Bill Bennett.
A letter to the editor in New York's Feb. 12 issue, from Chris Patou, of North Bergen, NJ, proves the point: "To call Tucker Carlson a conservative is to be out of touch with reality... His style would be better suited to The Daily Show, where he would at least have better writers. Mr. Carlson: We fans of George Will know George Will, and you, sir, are no George Will."
It was a stupid letter, but Wolff's trap worked. In fact, although Will and Carlson are very different in demeanor?although they share a penchant for bow ties?the younger man has no need for "better writers." Anyone who reads The Weekly Standard?a tiny percentage of New York subscribers, I'm sure?would know that.
It's my hope that Carlson ditches the sinking CNN and signs up at Fox. Maybe then he'll escape the onerous situation of being a liberal's favorite conservative tv commentator.
Smells Like...a McCartney Windfall!
Suits me fine that 1, the 54th compilation of Beatles songs, has shipped 20 million copies. Junior got the CD for Christmas, and when he sings "Help!" or "We Can Work It Out" it's a welcome change-up from that damn Slim Shady. But the commentary from music writers and editors who are pushing 50 about the ultimate "boy band" is difficult to digest. Rolling Stone's March 1 issue has the Fab Four, circa '65, on the cover?considering the precipitous downturn in magazine newsstand sales, probably a smart move?which is pandering, but inoffensive. What does rankle, however, is the intro "Letter from the Editor" by Robert Love.
He writes: "Hearing the Beatles' number-one hits on CD is a joyful, jarring experience, mixing up memory and discovery. There is so much more to hear in these songs than ever came through the car speakers or dorm stereo."
This is cotton-candy bullshit at its worst.
Anyone who grew up during the British Invasion in the mid-60s, with the nonstop Top 10 songs of the Beatles, Stones, Searchers, Hollies, etc., knows that it was a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon, and the hits sounded great on transistor radios, crummy turntables or tv shows like Ed Sullivan or Shindig! The tech-enhanced versions of those Beatles songs today mean nothing to me. Frankly, hearing "She Loves You" once a year these days is more than enough for me. Same for "Satisfaction," "Glad All Over" or "Needles and Pins."
Boomer gush over this Beatles CD makes me ill; it's so antiseptic. Let today's youth revel in the discovery of epochal 60s pop music, much as adults now in their 40s rooted out the early Elvis classics, Frankie Lymon and the Everly Brothers after the Beatles and their peers revitalized rock 'n' roll in 1963.
February 12