Is Gotham Ready for Mayor Clinton?
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 13, 2003; 8:31 AM
We are bringing you another Clinton rumor this morning.
Not about Hillary. She's gotten enough publicity this week.
Not about sex. We've all had enough of that.
About Bill.
That he just might, maybe, possibly, want to run for office again.
After musing about how that darn 22nd Amendment ought to be changed so young ex-presidents can run again, maybe he will just find a job for which there is no constitutional bar. Such as mayor of New York.
Instead of dealing with Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac, he can grapple with Freddy Ferrer and Al Sharpton. Instead of nuclear missiles, he can deal with parking and potholes. The job doesn't have its own plane, but you do get police escorts and a nice white house, Gracie Mansion.
Clinton in '05? Why not? It beats sitting around waiting for his wife to reclaim his old job in '08. And membership in the Senate spouses club with Bob Dole doesn't sound too exciting.
Okay, there are a few holes in this scenario. Clinton now makes zillions of dollars, including big bucks on the lecture circuit. As mayor he'd have to give speeches for free – and settle for a $195,000 salary.
He'd occasionally have to ride the crowded and sweaty subway, like Mike Bloomberg, just to show he's in touch with da people.
He'd have to wolf down plenty of hot dogs and knishes on the campaign trail (okay, maybe not such a disadvantage).
And what if Mayor Bill demands more federal aid for the Apple and Hillary votes no? Will there be more shouting matches?
The latest buzz – and that's all it is – was started by an item in Washingtonian magazine. New York Times metro columnist Joyce Purnick picked up on it:
"You scoff. Well, of course, you scoff. There is plenty about which to scoff.
"Odds are it will not happen. But on the theory that New York is home of the improbable, that it is a place where a first lady can become a United States senator and a billionaire with political talents in inverse proportion to his wealth can become mayor, let us consider this latest bit of political gossip for a moment.
"It is too enticing to let go, especially since the former president hasn't rejected the idea. A New York Democrat who urged him to run this week reports that while he didn't say yes, he didn't say no. Being polite? Enjoying the attention? 'He's busy running his foundation, not running for office,' his spokesman, James E. Kennedy, said.
"The latest round of Clinton speculation surfaced in the June issue of Washingtonian magazine. The thinking: Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is not popular, no compelling Democrats are lining up to challenge him, Mr. Clinton is in limbo, New York loves him and there is no other job large enough for his talents or ego...
"The mere idea of a Bill Clinton candidate really does fuel the image machine. Thoughts of fun again at City Hall. Of roiling neighborhood meetings where regular folks from Tottenville to Pelham Parkway could confront a former president about their corner traffic light. One would pay admission to watch him anticipate a transit strike or tangle with the State Legislature. If the economic slump continued, a Mayor Clinton would surely perpetuate the Bloomberg policies of keeping taxes high rather than decimating services."
Bloomberg, for his part, is suggesting that Clinton remain in the private sector. Or as the New York Daily News puts it:
"Mayor Moneybags to Bubba: Eat my dust!
"Responding to media speculation that former President Bill Clinton might run for mayor in 2005, Bloomberg declared, 'I will get reelected.'
"'I welcome lots of competition. If President Clinton wants to run for mayor, I can tell him it's a very challenging job. But it's a great job. And I would recommend it to anybody,' Bloomberg said.
"However, the mayor added, 'I sort of recommend that he thinks about it for the next six years, because he'd have a tough time winning before that.'"
But a New York Times poll this morning makes clear why there might be a job opening, with New Yorkers bummed about tax hikes and service cutbacks:
"Those negative feelings appear to have colored New Yorkers' views of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Only 24 percent of those polled said they approved of the job he was doing, the lowest approval rating for a mayor since The Times began taking polls on mayoral performance in 1978."
Dick Morris, continuing to slam Hillary, reminds us on National Review Online that politics is a contact sport:
"Dear Hillary, In your new book, Living History, you correctly note that when you asked me to help you and Bill avert defeat in the congressional election of 1994 I was reluctant to do so. But then you assert, incorrectly, that my reluctance stemmed from difficulties in working with your staff. You even misquote me as telling you: 'I don't like the way I was treated, Hillary. People were so mean to me.'
"As you know, I never said anything of the sort. I had, in fact, no experience in dealing with either your staff or the president's at that point, and had not yet met Leon Panetta or George Stephanopoulos. My prior dealing with Harold Ickes had been twenty five years earlier.
"The real reason I was reluctant was that Bill Clinton had tried to beat me up in May of 1990 as he, you, Gloria Cabe, and I were together in the Arkansas governor's mansion. At the time, Bill was worried that he was falling behind his democratic primary opponent and verbally assaulted me for not giving his campaign the time he felt it deserved. Offended by his harsh tone, I turned and stalked out of the room.
"Bill ran after me, tackled me, threw me to the floor of the kitchen in the mansion and cocked his fist back to punch me. You grabbed his arm and, yelling at him to stop and get control of himself, pulled him off me. Then you walked me around the grounds of the mansion in the minutes after, with your arm around me, saying, 'He only does that to people he loves.'"
Salon's Joe Conason challenges Morris's account.
Slate's Chris Suellentrop finds the non-sex parts of the book a bit of a snooze:
"Even if you turned every page you wouldn't find a thing on Marc Rich, or the 1996 fund-raising scandals, or any indication at all of what kind of 'pain' Bill had caused in their marriage before the Lewinsky scandal. The book is as comprehensive as a hubristic family Christmas letter: 'I headed a panel on health care, and Chelsea and I traveled to India, and Bill went golfing with Greg Norman! Oh, and on a trip to Denver, two guys mooned us!' It's not much more than a timeline encrusted with uninteresting anecdotes.
"In part, it's the book you would expect from Hillary – on-message, with laundry lists of her husband's accomplishments and references to her own importance in the White House, plus tirades against the evil Republicans who plotted to stop them. It's part policy brief, part presidential-campaign biography (her potential future one, that is), and part chronicle of the obstacles that faced a smart, ambitious woman during her climb to the top. In many ways, the descriptions of her life before Bill Clinton are the most interesting, even if, as a child and a young woman, Hillary Rodham was exactly the type of kid you would have imagined her to be: safety monitor in grade school, selected to serve on school committees by her high-school administration, president of her college government. She never wanted to be just a girl.
"But she never got to be one, either. At least, not until she reached the White House. There, she finds that she's expected to embody the feminine ideal during a time when no one's quite sure what that ideal is. She complains about the 'pressures on me to conform' to gender stereotypes while she was first lady of Arkansas, and she approvingly quotes Martha Washington on the difficulties of being America's first lady."
Tom DeLay said it ain't gonna happen, but it happened yesterday, although it could always sink in the congressional bog:
"Bowing to political pressure," the Wall Street Journal reports, "the House approved additional tax breaks for low-income families with children, but strong opposition from conservative Republicans makes the outcome uncertain.
"The House bill, approved 224-201 mostly along party lines, would amend last month's tax-cut legislation so low-income families receive a boost in the child-tax credit to match roughly what families with higher incomes are getting. The $3.5 billion provision was dropped from the original bill by Republican negotiators, spurring a barrage of negative publicity."
But the House measure costs another $82 billion, which could be a way of ensuring it really ain't gonna happen.
The media are in full cry about the likelihood of two upcoming Supreme Court vacancies. But USA Today says one of the jurists looks like he's not going anywhere:
"Chief Justice William Rehnquist, 78, has hired a staff for the court's next annual term, which begins in the fall. He also has accepted speaking engagements into November. ...
"Perhaps most important, Rehnquist's court has scheduled a hearing on a key campaign-finance dispute for Sept. 8. ... Some legal analysts say the court's scheduling of such a sensitive, important case for early September is the clearest indication yet that Rehnquist does not plan to step down this year."
The press continues to chip away at Bush's WMD arguments, as in this Philadelphia Inquirer piece:
"Making his case for war with Iraq, President Bush in his State of the Union address this year accused Saddam Hussein of trying to buy uranium from Africa, even though the CIA had warned White House and other officials that the story did not check out.
"A senior CIA official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the intelligence agency informed the White House on March 9, 2002 – 10 months before Bush's nationally televised speech – that an agency source who had traveled to Niger could not confirm European intelligence reports that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium from the West African country.
"Despite the CIA's misgivings, Bush said in his address: 'The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa.'
"Three senior administration officials said Vice President Cheney and some officials on the National Security Council staff and at the Pentagon ignored the CIA's reservations and argued that the president and others should include the allegation in their case against Hussein. The claim later turned out to be based on crude forgeries that an African diplomat had sold to Italian intelligence officials."
Not pretty.
Andrew Sullivan hurls perhaps the ultimate insult at the GOP over WMD:
"The Republicans are dumb and paranoid to try and stop a full-fledged investigation into the intelligence findings that provided the basis for one of the main arguments for the war against Saddam. It's important that any flaws in intelligence are fully explored; and any hype that might have been added to the data should be fully exposed and examined. If the administration has nothing to hide – and I doubt it has – let the light in. These Republicans are acting like, er, well, the Clintons."
Sullivan links to a New York Observer piece in which Francine Prose wonders about a future memoir from this president:
"'I could hardly breathe. Gulping for air, I started crying and yelling at Donald and Dick and Condoleezza: 'What are you saying? Why did you lie to me? What do you mean, there were no weapons of mass destruction?'"
In Salon, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown blasts the press for its coverage of 43:
"Bush's responses are so programmed it's unbelievable the national media allows him to get away with it. You realize there's no time Bush has to face the people like Tony Blair does regularly? There's no prime minister's hour in this country? Now, in the past, it's been the press who's been the opposition, so to speak, questioning the president – but Bush has been careful not to present himself to the press in that fashion. [After that last scripted press conference] news organizations should have simply stopped covering him on such a programmed basis. But instead, they got programmed into the war – programmed into the tanks, which utterly ruined any objectivity. The press is gone. The free press in America has been compromised. But they loved being out with the generals. It became so apparent that they'd been pimped."
You can tell he's not running for reelection.
Speaking of mayors, you know who's REALLY enjoying the recent travails at the New York Times? Politicians!
"Mayor Richard Daley could barely contain his glee about the plagiarism scandal that touched off the journalistic equivalent of an earthquake," says a Chicago Sun-Times piece.
"For once, the shoe was on the other foot. The spotlight was on deception and fraud by those who cover the news--not on the politicians they love to put on the hot seat.
"Daley was loving it. Like Arizona Diamondback Mark Grace gloating about former teammate Sammy Sosa's corked bat, the mayor couldn't wipe the smile off his face.
"'When you question a politician, people are going to question your credibility in journalism--and they should. Why not? You question me. They should question you. You should not be separate or immune from this,' Daley said.
"'You question religious organizations on a lot of issues. When someone questions you--talk about the [code of silence by] the men in blue. The men and women in your industry just tie up together [saying], "You can't criticize us." You criticize everyone else, but you cannot take the heat. There's credibility in every profession. But when it comes to you, none of you can take the heat.'"
Whew! We're sweating.
American Prospect's Michael Tomasky examines the issue we explored yesterday: Why don't Bush's political problems resonate?
"The question for Democrats now: How to make Americans care?
"We're living in times that I don't even know how to describe. It's pretty hard to understand what's happening in this society when the majority leader of the House of Representatives makes use of a presidential agency for the nakedly political purpose of hunting down some home-state legislators. And when that agency complies with the request. And when it's a little two-day story, not a scandal at all. One doesn't even have to ask, in this case, the hypothetical that liberals are prone to present – to wit, imagine if the Clinton administration had been involved in something similar. No; this would have been a scandal, and properly so, if it involved a federal agency under any administration from Bill Clinton to Dwight Eisenhower. But not now. ... "
Bush "and his servants were out on the hustings selling the American people a story about an imminent threat that did not exist in order to gin up public support for sending young Americans off to risk death. Hey, why lose sleep over that?
"But again: How to make people care? Let's face it: It may be that they never will. For most Americans, the bottom line will be that we won. Even if no weapons of mass destruction are found, Bush will essentially say, as he has already, What the heck, the Iraqi people are free. And most Americans will probably accept that, especially with the media – including a few prominent liberal columnists – urging them to do so."
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