Who Is This Article About?
By Mark Finkelstein | September 5, 2007 - 16:31 ET
Check out these opening paragraphs, and guess who's being described.
"Looking into [his] eyes is like falling into a swimming pool.
His eyes are deep and blue and comforting and, as person after person will tell you, when his eyes lock onto yours, you feel like you are the only other person in the world.
Margarida Perreira, 48 . . . can stand it no longer.
"Can I give you a kiss?" she asks him.
"Sure you can," he says.
She hugs him fiercely.
He smiles and thanks her and moves on, his hands in the pockets of his white jeans, his dark ostrich skin boots scuffing along the dirt paths . . .
So, what's your guess? Brad Pitt? Matt Damon? Robert Redford, perhaps? Or might it be fiction -- something from a dime-store bodice-ripper?
Alright, you NewsBusters readers are a smart lot. You've probably deduced that if the answer were a Hollywood star, we wouldn't be writing about it here. OK, then: the answer is Bill Clinton, and the author is the apparently star-struck Roger Simon at Politico.com. The notion behind The long campaign of Bill Clinton is that the former prez just loves campaigning and, um, human contact, and is incredibly good at the art of retail politics. In fairness, there's no doubt that Clinton is a schmoozer supreme. Even so, can anyone imagine a Republican receiving this kind of a fawning profile?
There's one classically Clintonian moment that Simon describes.
"I love your boots!" a woman shouts to him.
He walks over to her. "Ostrich skin," he says. "I have ostrich skin and crocodile. I have a pair that is both ostrich skin and crocodile. There is this place in Australia that makes boots out of crocodiles and ostriches, but only when they die naturally."
Smoked the ostrich, but didn't inhale it.
—Mark Finkelstein is a NewsBusters contributing editor and host of Right Angle. Contact him at mark@gunhill.net.
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