Tag: Bill Clinton

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Opinion

Liars, Heroes, and Whistle-Blowers

James B. Stewart

  • James B. Stewart

If you’re looking for something heavier than mysteries and self-improvement for summer reading, check out James B. Stewart’s new book “Tangled Webs; How False Statements Are Undermining America, from Martha Stewart to Bernie Madoff.”

I think it’s one of the most important books of the year and one that should resonate with Memphians.

The subject is lying by the rich and powerful and their minions and the difficulty of rooting it out and prosecuting it. Change “America” to “Memphis” and substitute John Ford, Roscoe Dixon, O. C. Smith, Dana Kirk, Logan Young, and Allen Stanford and see if you can make some connections. As a reporter who has covered the federal beat for 25 years, from the Ford trials to Tennessee Waltz and Main Street Sweeper, it sure spoke to me. If you followed those stories, I think you’ll like Stewart’s book, which includes extensive treatments and fresh reporting on Martha Stewart, Madoff, Barry Bonds, track star Marion Jones, Scooter Libby, and Karl Rove among others.

It should be required reading for journalists, lawyers, and law students.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Words Heard Differently

George Bernard Shaw said England and America were two countries separated by a common language. I say that white and black Americans are in a similar fix. Statements that one side considers innocuous, the other can consider offensive. Things have gotten to the point where Bill Clinton, a president once adored by African Americans, is being accused of making racially insensitive statements. Shaw would understand. It’s not necessarily what was said, it’s the way it was heard.

To my (racially) tin ear, little that either Bill or Hillary Clinton has said this election season sounded ugly. These included the remarks that seemed to have started it all: Hillary Clinton’s banal observation that for all that Martin Luther King Jr. did, it took Lyndon Johnson’s presidency to enact a monumental civil rights law. The context was clearly her contention that despite Barack Obama’s soaring rhetoric, it takes good old experience (like hers) to get the job done. Who could possibly object to that?

Lots of people, it turned out, many of them African-American. Obama himself called the remark “unfortunate.” My own ears heard nothing untoward, and when I mentioned that to an African-American colleague, he said, to my utter surprise, that he initially took the remark as a swipe at King. I was flabbergasted. Who would take a swipe at King? A Democratic presidential candidate would have to be criminally insane to do such a thing.

It hardly seemed possible, but things went downhill from there. Bill Clinton suggested that Obama’s victory in South Carolina was akin to Jesse Jackson’s, lo these many years ago. Kapow! — as they used to say in the comic books. Again, allegations of insensitivity or racial provocation. I confess I heard something different, but this time I appreciated the complaint — an alleged attempt to racially pigeonhole Obama. The former president may have meant no such thing, but in Obamaland, Bill Clinton is widely believed to always know precisely what he is saying — too cunning a politician not to always know the impact of his words. Maybe so, but his recent record of bloopers, errors, and rhetorical pratfalls suggests otherwise.

The grievance concerning Bill Clinton was enunciated last week by Representative James Clyburn (D-S.C.), a senior African-American legislator not known for extremist statements. He called Clinton’s remarks “bizarre” and said that even back in January, he “thought the president was saying things that would anger black voters and he should chill out.”

What Clyburn might be suggesting is not that Clinton himself had picked up some racist bug but that, like some sort of political Typhoid Mary, he was spreading a disease to which he himself is immune.

This is what is believed by adherents of the Clintons-will-do-anything-to-win school of thought. I have some doubts. The Clintons will do almost anything but not something that will stain their immortal political soul. They have to know that running a racially tinged campaign would give both of them a historical asterisk that would dog them into posterity. Years ago, Georgetown University linguist Deborah Tannen wrote a bestseller, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. Its thesis was that men and women employ the same language but, somehow, hear it differently.

What is true for men and women is just as true for blacks and whites and, probably, minorities of all kinds. (Recall the Woody Allen character in Annie Hall who mishears the word “Jew” when a passerby is saying, “Did you?”) The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s former pastor, seemed to make precisely that point in his speech to the NAACP in Detroit. “The black religious tradition is different,” he said. “We do it a different way.” That “way,” as he now knows, made for an awful sound bite.

Barring some unforeseen event, Barack Obama will be the nominee of the Democratic Party. That being the case — and also as long as the nomination fight continues — race will be an issue, stated or not, in the presidential campaign. For that reason, it’s incumbent on Clinton, Obama, and, of course, John McCain to not only watch their language but — maybe more important — to watch their reaction to the language of others. We could be on the verge of a great moment of racial acceptance. It sometimes seems that only our common language stands in the way.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Privileged Information

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

PITTSBURGH — Campaigning for wife Hillary Clinton on Monday, the eve of this week’s crucial Pennsylvania primary, former president Bill Clinton left little doubt about his own positive read of her controversial ABC debate last week with rival Barack Obama. This was an affair that numerous critics blasted as little more than an orgy of “gotcha” questions — directed by co-hosts George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson to Obama, for the most part.

The former president, however, boasted to a large crowd gathered in Pittsburgh’s Market Square downtown about “that one great debate where Hillary showed us she was ready to be president of the United States.”

Warming up the audience for the candidate herself, whose campaign plane had been delayed, prospective first husband Clinton recalled daughter Chelsea Clinton‘s recent affirmative answer to a questioner who asked whether she thought her mother would make a better president than her father had.

“I took a world of kidding,” Clinton said. “At first, I tried to make light of it, saying, ‘Did you ever see a family where the women didn’t stick together?’ … Then I gave a serious answer. I agreed with my daughter. I think she is the best candidate I have ever come across.” Had she not been yoked in service to his own political career for so long, “she’d have been here earlier,” the former president insisted.

Later, after candidate Clinton had arrived and addressed the crowd, the two of them worked opposite sections of the semicircular rope line.

The former president headed our way. Asked about his wife’s prospects in what was for her a must-win primary, he said, “I think she’s in pretty good shape out there. They like her here. They know she’s their girl.” But he declined to make predictions about numbers.

“I don’t know,” he said. “She’s been outspent 3 to 1. And, you know, they were dancing on her grave in Texas. She won anyway. And they never thought, after they outspent her 2 to 1 in Ohio, she could still win by 10 points. So we’ll see. She’s got a lot of good supporters here. It depends on a lot of things. It depends on how the undecided break. I literally don’t know. … That’s not my job. My job is to get her as many votes as I can.”

I asked Clinton about the weekend endorsement of his wife for this week’s primary by Richard Mellon Scaife, the conservative owner and publisher of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and the principal architect and paymaster (to the tune of several million dollars) of what Hillary Clinton once famously called a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to embarrass and bring down her husband.

“I’m surprised,” the former president answered, “but I take him at their word. I think they were impressed that she had the guts to go see ’em. And, you know, I generally find this, that people who demonize you, once they get to know you, they’re surprised you’re different than they imagined. And they like her. She made a lot of sense, and I take them at their word.”

He declined to speculate on whether his wife could expect an endorsement in the general election against Republican John McCain.

The Clintons’ visit was followed by one later Monday by Obama, who drew a massive crowd at an evening rally at the University of Pittsburgh, where the candidate was accompanied by his wife Michelle Obama, by Pennsylvania senator Bob Casey, who has endorsed Obama, and by Teresa Heinz Kerry, the widow of former Pennsylvania senator John Heinz who is currently married to Massachusetts senator, former presidential candidate, and Obama supporter John Kerry.

• Perhaps doing duty to the “equal time” concept, ABC’s Stephanopoulos followed up the Democratic debate by roughing up GOP candidate McCain during a Sunday interview on This Week.

Citing an article in that day’s Washington Post which depicted McCain as irascible and recounted several incidents of feuds with Senate colleagues, Stephanopoulos forced the Arizona senator on the defensive about his temperament.

For what it’s worth, one of McCain’s Republican colleagues in the Senate, Tennessee’s own Lamar Alexander, was asked, on the occasion of his recent visit to the Flyer, if he had ever been on the receiving end of one of McCain’s outbursts.

“Yes, I have,” the senator nodded gravely, going on to say, “There are very few of us who haven’t.”

Jackson Baker