I like this from last night's NewsHour:
MARK SHIELDS: Jim, I talked to a leading national Democrat, close to a household word -- his name today, who's been involved--
JIM LEHRER: You want to guess who that is?
MARK SHIELDS: Every major Democratic campaign since 1972. He said to me this is a disaster. It is truly a disaster of epic proportions. He said the sense of despair and disillusionment all the way through the party and the sense that how are we ever going to get our own message out? There are Democrats basically feel what the president did is indefensible, Democrats as loyal as James Carville who was with Bill Clinton every mile of the long march through New Hampshire and Gennifer Flowers and the draft story and the impeachment and attacking Ken Starr, I mean, he's basically said, you know, he's my friend but I can't defend what he's done. I mean, it is... I cannot calculate, I cannot express just how dispiriting this has been for Democrats.
PAUL GIGOT: Well, they're saying the same things in private, the difference this time is there are also many Democrats say in public -- this has liberated them in a way to say in public what some of them have been thinking in private about this man's lack of discipline, his lack of respect for the office and many of its powers, and a lot of Democrats are speaking out. Jimmy Carter did something extraordinary. This is a former Democratic president, who's known for his own caution and respect for the office, coming out this week and calling those pardons the behavior disgraceful and saying he assumes there was a quid pro quo involved. His former chief of staff, Hampton Jordan said -- wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal calling the Clintons grifters or confidence men.
JIM LEHRER: That was a devastating piece.
After that you can only say that the Dems deserved what they got with Clinton and his legacy is that they're stuck with his image as their face.
Karma baby, karma. |
