Entries by Philip Turner

“Blood Sport”–Reflections on a Key Phrase in Bill Clinton’s DNC Speech

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Bill Clinton’s DNC speech Wednesday night was such a barn-burner that a few things just whizzed by me as he delivered it. Reflecting on them later, this line jumped out at me.

“Democracy does not have to be a blood sport.”

I’ve been thinking about this since, and today I realized why the phrase has stuck in my mind–they are the same words as the title of James Stewart’s 1997 book, Blood Sport: The President and His Adversaries. Published just as Special Prosecutor Ken Starr was jailing Susan McDougal for 18 months on contempt charges* and targeting the Clintons; it was especially critical of Hillary who declined to cooperate with Stewart on his book. It’s significant to me that Bill chose to utter the phrase in this week’s speech, so many years after the Starr investigation and the impeachment by the House of Representatives, which was followed of course by the acquittal in the Senate trial that followed. I surmise he still views that toxic period as the nadir of the politics of personal destruction, and so knowingly used the phrase for the millions listening, to characterize the way President Obama has been demonized by his foes. The two words created an equivalence between the rampaging campaigns of hate toward each man and disdain for the office.

I should add that it was evidently an ad-libbed phrase, since according to the Atlantic‘s Dashiell Bennett, in his analysis of the prepared text vs. the transcript of what Bill Clinton actually said, the two words were not in the former.  It’s also fascinating to juxtapose the prepared text with what was delivered. The word count of the former was 3,136, whereas the latter was 5,895, meaning Bill Clinton extemporized with 2,759 words, or nearly the length again of the prepared text.

The title of Stewart’s book may itself have been inspired by the ripped-up letter found among Vince Foster’s personal effects after his 1993 suicide, in the early days of the Clinton administration,

“I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport.”

I don’t own a copy of Stewart’s book, but when I find a copy I will check to see if Stewart provides the origin of his title anywhere in the book.

At the end on Wednesday night, when President Obama came out and the two men embraced like brothers, I saw a vulnerability in Bill Clinton. As he grasped the binder with the printed text he’d riffed on for 49 minutes, he was still holding on to the words, looking almost unsure of what to do with his hands. It was a very human moment.

* With Carroll & Graf Publishers in 2001, I edited and published Susan McDougal’s book, The Woman Who Wouldn’t Talk: Why I Refused to Testify Against the Clintons and What I Learned in Jail. One of the two times I met President Clinton was at a dinner given in New York City in 2002 by the directors of a documentary, The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, based on the book of the same name by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons. Joe was there and Susan was an honored guest. I was pretty stunned when after the meal, Bill Clinton walked into the private dining room of the hotel restaurant. This was after his heart surgery–he’d lost a great deal of weight and he seemed smaller (I had something to compare with, since I’d also met him in 1992, when he was not yet the Democrats’ nominee for president, an encounter I wrote a few days ago on this blog). He put his arm around Susan, whom he’d pardoned before he left office, a noble pardon, I will add. She introduced me to the president, explaining I had been the editor of her book. He looked me in the eye, and said, “Well, you did a good thing, publishing her book. Thank you.”

 

#FridayReads, Sept. 7–Tony Hillerman’s “The Dark Wind” & Jonathan D. Moreno’s “Mind Wars”

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#FridayReads, Sept. 7–The Dark Wind, one of Tony Hillerman’s early mysteries featuring Jim Chee, the Navaho policeman. I’ve loved these books for many years, and was happy to find this secondhand copy of the 1982 book from a sidewalk seller on Broadway last week. If you love mysteries and haven’t read Hillerman, what are you waiting for?

Also, I’m still reading a book I’d blogged about last week, Mind Wars: Brain Science and the Military in the 21st Century by Jonathan D. Moreno, on the attempts of US defense and intelligence agencies to develop enhanced human capacity for soldiers and agents in the field.  This work, much of at the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where the Internet originated, is shrouded in secrecy. However, Moreno–a medical ethicist whose father was a prominent psychotherapist who at one time worked experimentally with LSD–reveals a great deal of fascinating information. By the way, googling Moreno’s name and “Mind Wars” yields articles like this one from Wired magazine relating this field of scientific research to the Jason Bourne movies

What it Takes*

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Terrific essay by fellow blogger Lance Mannion at his self-named site. It’s called Shake Every Hand, Kiss Every Baby, and it’s a very readable analysis with much humor of the one-on-one people skills that successful politicians employ in connecting with voters.

His post reminded me of when Kyle and I met Bill Clinton in April ’92, prior to the NY primary, weeks before he had wrapped up the Democratic nomination. This was in lower Manhattan, near Wall Street. First Hillary, then Bill spoke standing on the open bed of a pickup truck, and when they were done, climbed down into the crowd. They met and conversed with everyone there, shook every hand, and campaigned like he was trailing in the polls, not leading. Bill’s hands were soft and big–it felt like shaking hands with a pillow. He looked me in the eye and asked for my vote in the upcoming primary. I then volunteered for his fall campaign against President Bush, joining an ad hoc group in Manhattan called Street Corner Speakers for Clinton. That was a great campaign year.

In considering what makes a successful politician, Lance’s references run the gamut from Dickens’ Hard Times to George McGovern’s early days as a hopeful South Dakota pol. I was glad to see that Andrew Sullivan linked to it this morning at The Dish on the Daily Beast in a share of Lance’s post Andrew called The Handshake Factor.

I recommend you read the whole piece. Here’s a taste of it, the same excerpt as on The Dish.

“You get out there and you shake as many hands, kiss as many babies, ring as many doorbells as there are minutes in the day every day.  Ideally, before the campaign’s over you’ll have met every voter and asked them for their vote personally.
“Of course the higher up the ladder, the larger the constituency, and the more that ideal becomes an impossibility. So you’re forced to do a lot of it by proxy.  Instead of meeting voters one at a time, you meet them in crowds. Instead of showing up on their doorsteps, you show up on their TVs and computer screens and mobile devices. You spend more time with big donors than with small business owners. And what used to be a matter of just doing your job, going out to listen to constituents tell you their troubles and ask for your help, becomes a photo op. If you worked your way up the political ladder, and you know what’s good for you, you remember what the point was and you keep in mind who deserves your attention when you’re out on the stump. And when you stop standing in front of the crowd and dive into it instead, all the old skills come back.”

* In borrowing this post’s title from Richard Ben Cramer’s great book of the same name, I say thanks to Mr. Cramer.

Great Content from the Public Domain Review

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I’m enjoying a website I recently discovered, devoted to sharing works of all kinds in the public domain, from the historical, visual, literary, and musical worlds. It’s called the The Public Domain Review. Here’s a screenshot of what their front page looks like today. H/t Shaun Usher of the great site Letters of Note, who brought the Public Domain Review to my attention.

Michelle’s Dress of Many Colors

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Interesting comment by Eric Wilson in the Times on the dress Michelle Obama wore at the DNC last night.

Like the fool he is, Romney surrogate John Sununu is in the media trying to stir up some issue about the cost of the dress, which I’ve tweeted about below. FWIW, Eric Wilson reports that the retail cost of Michelle’s dress is approximately 1/4 of the garment Ann Romney wore the night she spoke at the RNC. Sununu’s accusing the Obama camp of ‘lying,’ when it’s news orgs reporting the cost.

NOIR, a New Magazine

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Now here’s a new magazine I can really get behind. According to Lori Kozlowski in Forbes, it’ll be a tablet-only publication called Noir, devoted to the nether world of mysteries, crime fiction, and tough-guy movies. While they have no issue ready yet, you can ‘like’ their Facebook fan page, which I have done. Co-founder Nancie Clare, an ex-LA Times Magazine editor, says that she and her partner in the venture, Rip Georges, “were. . .obsessed with the mystery genre. In the past, there were a couple of magazines I worked on, and I would always try to figure out a way to do a special issue that would be their Raymond Chandler-driven or their mystery-driven issue. It’s been a recurring theme throughout our careers.”

Adding more specifics, and suggesting they may be publishing original mystery fiction, Clare and Georges continued,

“When we say Noir, there’s definitely a genre of literature you think about. But what’s extraordinary is back from Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe, it has evolved. We will certainly respect the history, but some of the best hard-boiled fiction is being written today. The idea is to be respectful of the past, but focus on where this is going. . . Crime fiction is more passionate, sexier, more hard-boiled, more violent, and more exciting than ever.”

A Kickstarter campaign for the publication is starting soon, and I’ll look to share the link and donate when it’s up. The irresistible detective magazine covers shown below were part of the Forbes story, used by permission of the LA Times.