Fox TV in my experience tends anyhow more toward the tabloid, a traditionally populist style, which is why Fox was so reliable a destination in the days following Anna Nicole Smith's shocking death. And when any scandal breaks, I head straight for Greta Van Susteren -- how comforted one is that the agile, articulate Greta, with her keen legal mind and rugged, strong-jawed persistence, will be on the scene to unearth every lie!
Fox News has its share of solid political features. For example, a week ago, I saw Sen. Dianne Feinstein being interviewed at length on Fox about foreign policy. Though I've never resided in California, I'm a longtime admirer of Feinstein and have sent small sums to her campaigns. Watching her field tough questions about North Korea, I was impressed anew with her analytic mind and her steadiness of character. She has that rarity among women politicians -- true gravitas.
Dianne Feinstein is far more presidential than Hillary Clinton, who alternates between smugness and defensiveness before pulling out that tiresome middle-aged mom card. Feinstein, even when maneuvering strategically, always seems genuinely focused on the idea at hand, while Hillary isn't really there -- she's just riffling mentally through her team's cue cards. All politicians are actors, but Hillary's a bad one. No audience wants to see with such crystal clarity how it's being massaged.
John Edwards got publicity for the wrong reason two weeks ago when Ann Coulter bizarrely called him a "faggot" at the Conservative Political Action Conference. What could have been a good joke at the expense of p.c. Hollywood misfired badly first because that old chestnut of a schoolyard insult makes no sense whatever when applied to Edwards, whose only peccadillo is a dandy's overinvolvement with his hair (see John Travolta's romancing his hair on the way out to the disco in "Saturday Night Fever"), and second because Coulter had no business turning an event highlighting Republican presidential candidates into a forum for her one-liners. Doesn't she have enough personal gigs for that? It was especially embarrassing for Mitt Romney, who cordially introduced her. Third, satirists who play on gender themes need some whiff of self-knowledge, or they look ridiculous. Is Coulter truly oblivious to her gender weirdness? It's no coincidence that words like "tranny" and "transvestite" clog the anti-Coulter blogs.
Coulter is a smart woman with formidable energy, and whether liberals like it or not, she is a high-profile feminist role model in her appetite for aggressive debate. But Coulter seems to be regressing rather than growing intellectually and sharpening her analytic skills. She evidently leaves no room in her life for study and reflection. I take books seriously (which is why I left the scene for five years to write "Break, Blow, Burn"
In other political news, when Newt Gingrich announced last week that he had had an adulterous affair during the 1998 investigations of Bill Clinton, I burst out laughing -- not simply at Gingrich's hypocrisy, about which I was never in doubt, but at the comic mental picture of Gingrich in erotic extremis. I have never understood conservatives' enduring affection for Gingrich, which is constantly expressed by callers to radio shows.
Aside from his command of the Republican recapture of the House of Representatives in 1994, it is difficult to identify Gingrich's substantive achievements. While he poses as a futurist, he has an unfocused mind that mistakes erratic connections for insight. I literally cannot stand the pattering of that thin, raspy, uninflected, adolescent voice. Why anyone would imagine Gingrich has presidential possibilities is beyond me.
Next page: Cheney and Bush's vampiric pseudo-marriage