Memo to Democratic voters: If you missed Tuesday night’s debate on MSNBC — the most explosive event of this endless pre-primary season — troll through YouTube, throw yourself on the mercy of friends with TiVo, stalk the network’s Web site. Do anything to watch the first hour plus the last 10 minutes of this fandango in Philly, this duel at Drexel, this Democratic donnybrook that may well define the race. (Watch the debate here.)
The tag-team questioning of Brian Williams and Tim Russert yielded not only heat (perhaps inevitable as we reach the highly combustible point in the campaign calendar) but also light. Not only crystal-clear interludes (Joe Biden’s epic putdown of Rudy Giuliani: “There are only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11″) but also enlightening moments that illuminated the choices facing Democrats.
Before the debate, the evening was ballyhooed as Barack Obama’s breakout night — the point in the campaign when the fledgling Illinois senator would finally display his mettle by aggressively challenging Hillary Clinton. Obama telegraphed his punches in advance, promising the New York Times in an interview, “Now’s the time for us to make these distinctions clear.”
Instead, Obama could not even muster the gumption to lob a rhetorical coconut cream pie in Clinton’s direction. He set the tone for the evening in the first seconds of the debate when, challenged to repeat his recent critiques of Clinton, he said soothingly, “Well, first of all, I think some of this stuff gets off-hyped” before lapsing into a labored (and obviously rehearsed) Rocky versus Apollo Creed analogy.
Later in the evening, Obama extended this turn-the-other-cheek magnanimity to none other than Mitt Romney, who had referred to him as “Osama” twice in a single day. Rather than charging, as many assume, that Romney’s verbal slips were not accidental, Obama instead claimed, “I don’t pay much attention to what Mitt Romney has to say.” This was his way of setting up a mild joke. “At least what he says this week. It may be different next week.”
This is Obama’s smooth-jazz style, and his supporters should accept that it is not likely to change no matter how much they may crave red-meat rhetoric. Obama’s signature line — delivered after Clinton bobbed and weaved her way through another question without quite answering — was “Let’s broaden the conversation here.”
A stranger to politics who had somehow missed the outbreak of “Obama-mania” — the nearly $80 million he raised, the often rhapsodic press coverage and the huge crowds — might have assumed from watching Tuesday’s debate that the Illinois senator was a minor candidate on the fringes of the action. It seemed as if Clinton’s principal antagonists were John Edwards and — when he was given a chance to speak — Chris Dodd. The two of them, sometimes joined by Biden, took on the traditional political task of bringing the highflying front-runner back to earth.
This may have been Edwards’ best debate, as he displayed the smiling aggressiveness that had eluded him when he was going head-to-head with Dick Cheney as the 2004 vice-presidential nominee. Again and again, Edwards took lines from his stump speech and made them seem fresh as debate responses. Edwards rattled off a litany of Clinton’s zigzag comments on topics ranging from Iraq to Iran to Social Security before concluding harshly, “I think the American people … deserve a president of the United States that they know will tell them the truth.”
As Edwards continued banging away with drumbeats of criticism throughout the evening (saying of Clinton’s Iran position, “Our responsibility as presidential candidate is to be in ‘tell the truth’ mode all the time”), the cameras caught Clinton glaring at Edwards with daggers darting from her eyes before turning on a smile when she was asked to respond.
Dodd, who somehow had shed the generic senatorial mannerisms that had dogged him during earlier debates, crisply challenged Clinton’s claims to be the Democrat most likely to win back the White House. “Whether it’s fair or not fair,” the white-haired Connecticut senator declared, “the fact of the matter is that … there are 50 percent of the American public that say they’re not going to vote for her … I don’t necessarily like it, but those are the facts.”
Clinton, displaying the hard-won poise of a public figure who has been in the crosshairs for 16 years, seemed unflappably resigned to her assigned role as the evening’s piñata. She came out fighting, claiming that the constant GOP attacks are her reward for “standing against the Republicans, George Bush and Dick Cheney.” Even though some of her answers seemed consciously baffling in their imprecision, she stuck to her candidate-speak, poll-tested talking points: “I am not going to balance Social Security on the backs of seniors and hardworking middle-class Americans.”
Only in the last 10 minutes of the debate, long after it seemed as if she had absorbed the worst without losing her stride, did the New York senator suddenly stumble in the homestretch. Asked if she supported New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s plan to permit illegal immigrants to apply for driver’s licenses, Clinton appeared to express home-state solidarity by declaring, “What Gov. Spitzer is trying to do is fill the vacuum left by the failure of this administration to bring about comprehensive immigration reform.” After Dodd, veering right, came out against this proposal, Clinton suddenly interrupted the proceedings to announce, “I just want to add, I did not say that it should be done.”
That was the moment when Edwards pounced with the quickness of a trial lawyer who has realized that an opposing lawyer has just made a fatal error that undermines her case. “Unless I missed something,” Edwards said with ill-disguised glee, “Senator Clinton said two different things in the course of about two minutes … America is looking for a president who will say the same thing, who will be consistent, who will be straight with them. Because what we’ve had for seven years is double talk from Bush and from Cheney.” All that was missing was a Marvel comic-book exclamation like “Pow!” or “Whap!”
Presidential debates bring out the drama critic in everyone who watches — reporters, political partisans and ordinary television viewers. The debates are, after all, a form of performance and it is tempting to grade them for their sheer theatricality. But politics does not work like that — and individual aesthetic judgments by reporters are subjective interpretations rather than surefire predictions of primary victors.
Little more than nine weeks before the Iowa caucuses about all that can be said with certainty is that the Tuesday night debate was enhanced by giving Mike Gravel and his angry-old-man act the well-deserved hook. Dennis Kucinich stepped into the void with some deft one-liners, particularly after he admitted that, yes, he had once seen a UFO. Joking that he was going to move his campaign headquarters to Roswell, N.M., Kucinich added, “More people in this country have seen UFOs than I think approve of George Bush’s presidency.”
Mostly, though, what the debate demonstrated is the volatility of the Democratic race. Clinton’s caution may still prove galling, despite her political artistry. Obama’s blandness could cost him his featured role as the designated giant slayer. Edwards retains the potential to mount a major breakthrough, though his is a high-wire act of smiling and snarling at the same time. Dodd, Biden and even Bill Richardson still have a chance of making this more than a three-candidate contest. And judging from the collective performances Tuesday night, Democratic voters have reason to be uncharacteristically upbeat about their presidential choices — seven candidates who come across as anything but dwarfs.
“Game Change” is a movie about how longtime Republican Party communications hack Nicolle Wallace and longtime Republican Party campaign hack Steve Schmidt actually have souls, and brains, and hence feel quite bad for accidentally being responsible for the creation of Sarah Palin, national monster. (Neither felt any qualms about working to get the most irresponsible warmonger currently serving in the Senate elected president, but Sarah Palin was nuts!)
So Wallace, following a 92nd Street Y panel last night, said this:
“There will be pressure to elevate a woman but there will be an equal amount of pressure to pick someone who is prepared,” Wallace said.
And then she said this:
Wallace flagged one female official in particular who she thinks would be a good choice this year.
“Nikki Haley — she’s great,” she said. “She’s the most effective surrogate Romney has.”
If the Sarah Palin problem was a problem of preparation and vetting, Haley … might present some issues? Specifically an odd and mostly unsubstantiated sex scandal and also these rumors that she might at any moment be indicted on tax charges. The tax thing might be bullshit and the affair story was the product of a self-promoting creep but they’re “out there,” as they say.
More important, Haley has been governor of South Carolina since January of 2011. As in very slightly longer than one year. And slightly less time being a governor than Sarah Palin had in 2008. It’s almost as if Wallace is making a pick not based on the principle of Who Would Be Best For the Nation but on demographics and optics?
Wallace also apparently suggested Carly Fiorina, which, lol. Romney/Ex-CEO who famously received a giant golden parachute when she was forced out of her company 2012, everyone! Just the ticket for the new economy.
HBO’s “Game Change,” airing this Saturday, is not actually an adaption of the book “Game Change,” by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. It is “Sarah Palin Goes Rogue,” the movie, with a couple of anecdotes borrowed from the notoriously gossipy account of the 2008 election as a whole. (Or, arguably, it’s an adaptation of Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe’s “Sarah From Alaska.”)
That is sort of a shame. The Palin thing is the most heavily over-covered story line of the entire 2008 campaign, so focusing on it might be totally logical from a marketing perspective, but it’s unfortunate from an artistic one. The film re-creates various moments of YouTube campaign ephemera very well — remember when that old white lady called Obama an Arab and McCain looked uncomfortable? When it takes us behind closed doors, it’s to witness scenes any moderately close observer of the election and its aftermath could’ve dreamed up him- or herself. It might have been fun to see a TV movie about the Democratic primary fight; the personality clashes of the disastrous Clinton campaign would have made for entertaining television, and Mark Penn is surely a creature crying out for a grotesque Emmy-winning portrayal by, say, Paul Giamatti.
Instead, McCain has won the nomination three-and-a-half minutes into the film. Soon we’re watching Julianne Moore watch Tina Fey on TV. You remember the “SNL” sketches making fun of Palin, right? In case you don’t, “Game Change” airs lengthy chunks from most of them. It also has tons of actual footage from CNN and MSNBC and Fox News, and it re-creates debates and speeches and the Couric interview and the Charlie Gibson interview and a bunch of other things you saw either live or on YouTube when they happened.
Moore’s performance is not just fair but maybe even flattering. (For one thing, she doesn’t hit those flat upper Midwest vowels as gratingly as the real Palin.) Woody Harrelson plays strategist Steve Schmidt — the film’s protagonist — as a grizzled, “too old for this shit” campaign veteran called back to the trail against his better judgment. Jamey Sheridan is given barely anything to do as Mark Salter, McCain’s “conscience.” Salter, the primary author of his “Maverick” mythos, is limited, after the Palin selection, to making a hilariously over-telegraphed face of concern as everyone else in the war room applauds her first speech.
But the film is about Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace because they were pretty clearly Halperin and Heilemann’s primary sources, and we watch them become horrified by the depths of Sarah Palin’s ignorance at exactly the same time as everyone else in America became horrified by her ignorance.
Because it’s Hollywood, there’s very little politics in the film’s depiction of politics. Policies are simply things for Sarah Palin to write on note cards and not memorize. Operatives confidently declare, in faux Sorkin-ese patter, that if this or that meaningless decision is made, it means “we’ll lose by five.”
There is a sheen of faux cynicism (McCain swears like a sailor!) but it masks complete naiveté: Everyone is basically honorable and decent. Nicolle Wallace — a member of the Bush administration communications team — is sincerely alarmed at the prospect of someone as dangerously ignorant as Sarah Palin in the White House. On election night, she breaks down in tears as she admits to Schmidt that … she didn’t vote. They embrace.
The film subscribes to the simplest theory of Sarah Palin: That she is childlike, vain and incredibly ignorant but also an essentially decent person and wonderful mother. The moments that come closest to “unfair” — Sarah Palin doesn’t know that the head of Great Britain’s government is the prime minister, not the queen — are basically plausible. This isn’t Andrew Sullivan’s conniving, dangerous pathological liar. It’s an overwhelmed working mother whose most unhinged moments are explained by a crash diet. Her convention speech is largely stripped of its snarling attack lines, imagining a world in which it appealed to “the base” because of Palin’s heartfelt commitment to special-needs children and not because she was very good at saying mean things about Obama. (The film actually repeats the bullshit story that her teleprompter broke midway through, and she kept going.) Even when the film has her take a major heel turn — “if I am single-handedly carrying this campaign, I am gonna do what I want!” — after “winning” her debate with Joe Biden (played by video footage of Joe Biden), she is still basically an innocent seduced by the adoration of riled-up crowds and national attention. (Todd Palin barely does anything.)
The constant use of actual news footage adds a bit of verisimilitude but also constantly raises the question of why this lightly fictionalized version of the election actually needs to exist. “Game Change” is not really for serious political junkies, who remember all the stuff that did happen and will scoff at the stuff that didn’t. (At one point, John McCain answers his ringing iPhone in the middle of the night. He used a BlackBerry, HBO.) But if casually politically involved people want to see their assumptions about Sarah Palin reinforced, well, there are still those “SNL” sketches.
In the end, the Republican operatives who foisted Sarah Palin on an unprepared nation are rightly horrified that they created a monster, but at no point does anyone act concerned that their actual candidate was himself an angry, warmongering old crank with extremely fungible principles. Sure, Sarah Palin didn’t know what the Fed did. Do we have any proof John McCain knew what it should’ve done? Maybe everyone actually was totally unfair to poor Sarah Palin.
[UPDATED BELOW] Joseph Curl, former White House correspondent for the Washington Times, is bringing me back to the good old days of 2006 in his latest opinion column for the conservative paper. It’s a breathless report that Condoleezza Rice will seek the vice presidency, and it’s a classic of the genre.
Any amateur can speculate that Chris Christie will enter the presidential race, or posit a Mike Bloomberg third-party run, or imagine Hillary Clinton launching a primary challenge against Barack Obama. After all, those three have actually won elections and expressed political ambitions. It takes a real pro to decide to build buzz around someone who not only hasn’t ever run for anything, but who’s never expressed a desire to run for anything.
Rice, the national security advisor in George W. Bush’s first presidential term and secretary of state in his second, is currently a professor at Stanford with the requisite right-wing think tank fellowship. She has not said or done anything “political” in years. But Curl has been hearing things!
America’s first black female secretary of state is quietly positioning herself to be the top choice of the eventual Republican presidential nominee, ready to deliver bona fide foreign-policy credentials lacking among the candidates. The 56-year-old has recently raised her profile, releasing her memoir in November and embarking on a monthlong book tour.
After 2 1/2 years as a professor at Stanford, Miss Rice is reportedly getting “antsy” to get back into the political game. “She’s ready to go,” said one top source.
Oh, a month-long tour in support of her book about her time in the Bush administration! She must be running for vice president, along with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and Scott McClellan and George W. Bush.
There’s more. (And not just the part where Curl calls Rice “a spicy Rice dish” and waxes fetishistic about “her guns” being “a match for those of our first lady Michelle Obama.”)
Plus, her selection would be a giant chess move to counter the expected replacement of Vice President Joseph R. Biden with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Sure, the White House denies and denies, but that should really make any political watcher more suspicious. One White House insider even told me that the position swap was the only reason Mrs. Clinton joined the administration in the first place.
Curl has so many inside scoops packed into this column! I had no idea that our first presidential running mate swap since Ford’s 1976 campaign was basically a foregone conclusion and not just a weird Beltway journalist fantasy! But yes, I can see why the still un-chosen GOP candidate would definitely be looking pretty closely at Rice — who’s been strongly making the case for her selection by not explicitly denying interest in the position — in case Obama replaces Biden with Clinton, which he will surely do.
The column gets worse (“Funny thing is, she is, unlike Barack Obama, an ‘American black’”) but that’s not really important. What’s important is exploring how someone like Condoleezza Rice ends up a perennial name on the fantasy ticket list.
Rice has been a subject of these columns since 2005, when she became Bush’s second secretary of state, and the White House tasked communications operative Jim Wilkinson — previously known best for inventing the false story of Jessica Lynch* — with getting Rice (and her boss) some much-needed positive press. Wilkinson did his job beautifully (remember when Rice’s knee-high boots were a topic of actual serious news coverage for weeks?) and Rice began receiving the “rock star” treatment.
In the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler, author of the 2007 Rice bio “The Confidante,” summarized the exact moment of the birth of the presidential speculation:
In March 2005, before Rice sat for an interview with the Washington Times, Wilkinson slipped a note to the editorial page editor, Tony Blankley, suggesting that she be asked whether she would consider running for president. It was an audacious proposal — she had been secretary for only six weeks — but such speculation would bolster Rice’s image as a leader. (Wilkinson and Blankley said they do not recall the incident, but others present said they saw Wilkinson’s note.)
Oh, the Washington Times.
Shortly thereafter, Dick Morris wrote a book claiming — nay, insisting — that 2008 would be “Condi vs. Hillary.”
As Iraq descended into a violent civil war in 2006, Rice-for-president buzz bizarrely grew. There was enough of a false grass-roots movement for a paint-by-numbers AP trend piece with a silly nickname and everything. Tim Russert asked her point blank. As always, she said no in no uncertain terms.
Then, of course, everyone began to speculate that she’d be McCain’s running mate. Robert Novak claimed as much on Fox. Dan Senor said she was pushing for the pick on some Sunday show. Hendrik Hertzberg wrote a Talk of the Town piece on the subject! McCain and Rice both finally denied “reports” that she was angling for the spot on the ticket.
Now, I guess, it’s time to start up the rumor mill anew.
But before you put pen to paper on that column about how a Gingrich-Rice ticket would surely win moderate women in Ohio, consider this: In addition to the fact that she’s always denied wanting the job, and in addition to the fact that she was an unmitigated failure in the Bush administration, downplaying terrorism as a priority prior to 9/11 and selling the public on the Iraq invasion with untruths, Condi Rice is pro-choice.
*Update: Jon Krakauer recently rescinded his claim that Wilkinson, then a communications aide to General Tommy Franks, was responsible for the initial false Washington Post report on Lynch’s apparent heroics before her capture. Though Wilkinson was obviously involved in the PR campaign surrounding Lynch’s rescue and return to the U.S., he apparently isn’t responsible for falsifying her actions or leaking that false story to the press.
Andrew Breitbart’s loud, dumb BigGovernment site has a loud, dumb story about how Barack Obama “appeared and marched with the New Black Panther Party in 2007.” The occasion was the 42nd anniversary of the march from Selma, Alabama, and in addition to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Al Sharpton were also there, along with dozens of civil rights era luminaries and thousands of other people because it was a massive annual celebration and not actually an Obama campaign event.
The New Black Panther Party is a cartoonish fringe group of a couple guys who play “’60s radical” dress-up and say mean things about whitey for Fox cameras in order to scare old white people. They have been explicitly rejected by the old Black Panther Party. For some reason, various conservatives have dedicated themselves to proving that this weird, marginal group of Nation of Islam cast-offs is somehow supported by or deeply connected to the Democratic Party and the Obama administration in particular, because, you know, Eric Holder and Barack Obama, those are two guys who very obviously share the values of extremist anti-white proponents of racial separation.
So Breitbart “proves” something or other about the essential anti-white racistness of the Obama campaign by noting that members of the inane New Black Panther Party were spotted by cameras near Obama, at various times, and also NBPP head Malik Zulu Shabazz spoke at the event.
(Brietbart goes on to publish two pictures of the event despite the photographer withholding permission, because “The First Amendment allows photographs of such enormous public importance to see the light of day.” Good luck with that argument in court?)
Andrew C. McCarthy gleefully endorses Breitbart’s story in a breathless post at the National Review’s The Corner:
This is a shocking story, and a breathtaking indictment of the mainstream media which went out of its way to avoid vetting Obama as a candidate — and to make sure anyone who tried to do due diligence got no sunshine. A candidate who chose to appeared in the company of, say, the KKK, would have provoked relentlessly hostile media coverage and, in short order, have been marginalized as disqualified to hold responsible elective office.
If only the media had reported that some fringe weirdos also participated in this event that both Democratic candidates and thousands of other people participated in, and then the fringe weirdos sort of followed Obama around for a while. That would’ve opened America’s eyes! (I mean the media besides NPR, which did report that the NBPP was there.)
Here’s the bit of this sad, desperate reach that is the saddest and most desperate: “Andrew further reminds us that, in March 2008, the Obama campaign website posted an endorsement of Obama by the New Black Panther Party.” Whoa, did they really? Shocking if true! It is, of course, not true. It was a user-generated blog post on the Obama campaign site that the campaign removed as soon as they became aware of its existence. Because websites do not “post” things to themselves, generally, McCarthy’s statement can’t even be charitably described as technically accurate. It’s just a lie.
A random stupid incorrect Breitbart smear is worth paying attention to only to the extent that the smear threatens to bubble up to the more reputable conservative press, or Fox, or Republican elected officials. The McCarthy endorsement means keep an eye on this one!
Here, according to the National Enquirer, are the shocking revelations in Joe McGinniss’ new book about Sarah Palin, “The Rogue”:
- She has done drugs.
- She had sex with a basketball player before she married Todd.
- She is mean and petty.
- She is a bad mother.
- She had an affair after she married Todd.
There is also, obviously, some stuff about Trig’s birth, but I have not yet read the book, so I couldn’t tell you how far down the rabbit hole that goes.
Here’s my reaction to those revelations: Sarah Palin is a person! She’s done drugs and pissed people off and slept with people, like 90 percent of American humans. If Sarah Palin was smart she’d dismiss the book with a chuckle, say nobody’s perfect, laugh off the “gossip,” and move on.
Sarah Palin might not be smart.
The Palins always prefer grand self-pitying martyrdom to quiet dignity, of course, which is why picking on them can be so profitable: They will always respond, and always help you drum up more publicity for your Palin-attacking venture. Instead of depriving the book of oxygen, they launched a multimedia attack on Joe McGinniss before he’d finished the first draft, and what they accomplished was … giving him more material and ensuring that even more breathless anticipation awaited the book’s release.
Now that the book’s rollout is underway, the Palins might as well get paid for their marketing efforts. Todd Palin angrily denounced it, again accusing McGinniss of having a “creepy obsession” with Sarah Palin. Oooh, it’s so creeeepy to write an unauthorized biography of a prominent public figure, right?
How bad did the Palins allowed themselves to be trolled? Sarah Palin’s people released a statement on behalf of Brad Hanson, Todd Palin’s former business partner, with whom Sarah Palin is alleged to have carried on an extramarital affair, some years back. The statement is a blanket denial, but what does having the supposed beau directly address the press accomplish, exactly? It just drives more interest in the book’s salacious, shocking revelations about the secret life of Sarah Palin. This guy, of all guys, should be kept out of it.
I am sure that Todd and everyone else is very personally pissed off that McGinniss went to Wasilla, talked to a bunch of people who hate them, and published a book full of stories about how bad and awful they are, but blowing up publicly just sends the message that there’s stuff in the book worth getting worked up about.
Nicolle Wallace (Credit: ABC) 
Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin in HBO's "Game Change" (Credit: HBO Films) 
Condoleezza Rice (Credit: Reuters) 
Members of the New Black Panther Party, including, Divine Allah, left, arrive for funeral services for 13-year-old shooting victim, Tamrah Leonard, at the Friendship Baptist Church in Trenton, N.J., Saturday, June 13, 2009. (Credit: AP/Mike Derer) 
Sarah Palin 
