Politico's Todd Purdum goes on an inane rant against a statement that was apparently never made...

... but which would have been so terrible if it had. 

Purdum — referencing the TV show "The West Wing" — informs us that "the White House is a pretty awesome place." So it would really be immensely nervy if someone were to say something contemptuous to the President of the United States in the White House.

[T]he alleged dis words are so personal, so passionate, so disaffected-high-school-sweetheart in tone — “I cannot even stand to look at you” — that it’s hard to imagine any grown man saying them to another — much less to the president. 

Know what's true of many things that are hard to imagine? The way they don't happen.

"Caribou Barbie is one nutty puppy," says Maureen Dowd, who wants to be sure you know that Sarah Palin is crazy.

Yes, yes, Palin is crazy. I'm hearing it and hearing it, and naturally, my working theory is that Palin's opponents are taking advantage of the opportunity to paint a vivid picture in the public mind. Crazy, crazy, cah-ray-zeeeee.

Dowd does the diagnosis, plucking a term out of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or rather plucking a term out of Todd Purdum's Vanity Fair hit-piece:

And so it was, Todd Purdum learned, as he traveled Alaska reporting on Palin for Vanity Fair, that the governor’s erratic and egoistic behavior has been a source of concern for people there.

“Several told me, independently of one another,” Purdum writes, “that they had consulted the definition of ‘narcissistic personality disorder’ in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — ‘a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy’ — and thought it fit her perfectly.”

Oh! Lord help us! There were people there! There were several. Oh, my lord. Several! Several told Purdum that they were the sort of jackasses that go flipping through the DSM to leverage their displeasure with a powerful person in their vicinity.

Memo to Purdum, Dowd, and the several people there in Alaska: Everybody who runs for high office will have a lot of check marks on the DSM list of symptoms of "narcissistic personality disorder."

I mean, maybe Fred Thompson didn't, but you see, it's a problem if you don't have these things. Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, etc. etc. — who among them lacks a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, blah blah blah? Oh, but they have empathy, you burble. Bullshit! Watch all the Democrats try to claim the empathy loophole to the narcissistic personality disorder diagnosis. Ha! Bullshit! They all have it. And don't throw your money at a prospective candidate who doesn't. He'll poop out, like Fred.

Memo to the good folks who construct the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual: Consider constructing an official disorder definition that will perfectly fit the kind of people who try to understand human individuals in their vicinity by consulting DSM checklists.

***

The link goes, of course, to the NYT, so there's no link to the Vanity Fair article upon which Dowd relies so heavily. Link withholding — a symptom on what DSM disorder checklist?

"At Off the Bus, because they're not part of the professional gaggle, they can come up with their own views of what's happening..."

About that blogger who got Bill Clinton to call Todd Purdum a "scumbag"... and 2,500 other blogger-reporters boosted by Huffington Post.

Mayhill Fowler says she never planned to ask Bill Clinton the question that unleashed a decidedly unpresidential tirade....

Fowler had her tape recorder going when [Barack Obama] made his ill-fated remarks about frustrated small-town residents turning to guns, God or anti-immigrant sentiments....

Mary Katherine Ham, a conservative blogger, says that while she would insist on identifying herself, "politicians need to learn that anyone can break news, and citizens who run into you -- even if you're not writing for the Huffington Post -- can post it anywhere."

In an e-mail, Fowler says she has come to realize that her presence "flummoxes some longtime journalists -- because suddenly here I am, unpaid but as a consequence with much more freedom to find out what's going on out there, and writing for a new and encroaching media that is a Wild Wild West of lawlessness."

A Wild Wild West of lawlessness — otherwise know as a marketplace of ideas.

"Giuliani and Race."

The NYT provides access to its archive of articles on Giuliani and race, beginning with Todd S. Purdum's "Giuliani Has Taunt for Dinkins: He's a 'Jesse Jackson Democrat'" (from September 26, 1989, when Giuliani first ran for mayor of NYC).

Responding to his opponent's repeated taunt that he is a ''Ronald Reagan Republican,'' Rudolph W. Giuliani said after an appearance at an Orthodox Jewish private school yesterday that he could just as easily call David N. Dinkins a ''Jesse Jackson Democrat.''

So Dinkins tried to portray Giuliani as too conservative for NYC and Giuliani shot back with a parallel epithet.

Purdum again in 1993: "Rudolph Giuliani and the Color of Politics in New York":

But is Giuliani the right man to save [the city]? Can a hopscotch candidate, a purebred product of the tidy world of St. Joseph's, win and govern a hip-hop city?

Though he is just 49 years old, Giuliani often seems a striking throwback in New York City's anything-goes atmosphere. It's as if his cultural and psychic sensibilites froze about 1961, the year he left the tutelage of the Christian Brothers at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in Brooklyn. This is a man so square that he started an opera club in high school and still refers to his old high-school classmates as "other youngsters"; so corny that he proposed to his current wife at Disney World; so accepting of authority that he says the nuns and brothers who taught him were right to smack him around, because he often deserved it. He says that he simply "missed" the convulsions of the 60's, that the dilemmas of long hair or inhaling "never came up." Pictures of Abraham Lincoln and Babe Ruth hang on his office wall; David Dinkins displays photographs of Nelson Mandela and Jennifer Capriati.

Giuliani can be so awkward in public -- with hunched shoulders and a tremulous voice -- that his best friends fret constantly that New Yorkers will never know Rudy like they know Rudy. That Giuliani is the warm father who can't imagine spanking his 7-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter, the man who lives in the same Upper East Side building as his elderly mother and who on New Year's Eve dances alone with his wife to Frank Sinatra records in their apartment.

Giuliani's Wonder Bread image carries risks in a polyglot city where no single racial or ethnic group predominates, and no topic will be trickier for him than race.

In sum, he was the squarest guy in the world back then, and that was connected to race.

THE TWIST IN GIULIANI'S nostalgic pitch is that he is making it just as New York stands poised for a new political order, made inevitable by demographic shifts in a city where non-Hispanic whites are no longer a majority. In a profound sense, this son of the 50's is running against history. Even if he wins, he may be the last white man for years to lead his city.

"I've got to get this city to stop thinking in categories, to stop thinking in terms of black and white and Hispanic, and gay and heterosexual, and get us to start thinking about people," Giuliani told a group of working-class Hispanic parents in Sunset Park this spring, in an almost plaintive declaration he makes often. "I've got to get New York to stop thinking about all this symbolism."

While that may sound disingenuous to some, Giuliani is undoubtedly sincere. Far more than Dinkins, he needs to keep overt references to race out of the campaign. Dinkins's race, which helped elect him in the first place as a nonthreatening healer, remains one of his greatest assets. What Giuliani really means is that he must be free to talk about race and ethnicity on his terms, and to attack the Mayor's record, without being seen as racist.

We see that 15 years ago, the NYT portrayed him as a throwback, but the old article shows its age with the assumption that only the old fashioned think about transcending racial divisions. (Or else Barack Obama is a throwback.)

Here's today's front page article on Giuliani and race, "In a Volatile City, a Stern Line on Race and Politics," by Michael Powers:

Mr. Giuliani, aides say, found a city in the early 1990s where most of the departments affecting the lives of black New Yorkers from schools to welfare to public safety were dysfunctional. Too many citizens expected government to coddle them, and too many black leaders, said Peter Powers, one of Mr. Giuliani’s oldest friends and his first deputy mayor, were afraid to work publicly with a white Republican mayor.

Much more in the article, which details a particular time and place -- NYC in the 1990s.

How do the volatile racial politics of that time relate to the current presidential campaign?

Save for immigration, Mr. Giuliani rarely fields questions about race on the campaign trail. Republican voters, who are overwhelmingly white, have clamored to hear about 9/11 and terror....

Well, it seems that the NYT is keen on bringing race forward in the discussion of the 2008 campaign. I doubt if it helps Giuliani to sort through the painful incidents of the 1990s, though it can't hurt to repeat the amazing statistic that he reduced crime by 60 percent.

"The event was disgraceful, so lame and mediocre that it is beyond parody."

That's Christopher Hitchens on why he walked out of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner:

“It is impossible to decide which is more offensive: the president fawning over the press or the press fawning over the president. It expresses everything that the public means when they talk about inside-the-Beltway and access journalism.”

Mr. Hitchens didn’t storm out of the city. He stormed back to his house, where he co-hosted (along with fellow Vanity Fair contributor Todd Purdum and former Clinton aide Dee Dee Myers) the magazine’s post-dinner party, a much sought-after ticket.

Mr. Hitchens, a one-time pariah for his support of the Iraq invasion and his savaging of Mother Teresa, still serves as something of a social arbiter in Washington. And following the strange-bedfellows theme, Paul Wolfowitz, the embattled World Bank president, was chatting amiably in a roomful of journalists at Mr. Hitchens’ home.

Living like that, how do you stay outraged and sharp enough to know when other people are being lame and mediocre? So he's a "social arbiter," eh? Looking at him on TV, you'd think he was a social pariah. Funny how things are.

Roberts answered "just enough questions to be confirmed"?

Todd S. Purdum writes in the NYT:

On Monday, Mr. Specter, a veteran of such hearings, said it was his experience that nominees generally answered just enough questions to be confirmed, and Judge Roberts proved no exception.

You know, I was surprised at how much he said. He could have said a lot less. It seemed to me that he really did try to respond sincerely, but I'll concede that maybe all of that was a crafty strategy to play the role of a sincere nominee. And Purdum does support his thesis well (or should I say Purdum supports his thesis just enough to be considered a professional journalist?):

[Roberts] assured senators that he believed the Constitution embraced a right to privacy that has produced Supreme Court precedents protecting the right to contraceptives and abortion. But he declined to specify how such a right might apply to future cases on abortion or the right to die.

He agreed that the Supreme Court was right to outlaw public school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education and said there was new historical evidence to suggest that the framers of the 14th Amendment had envisioned just such a result. But he declined to say just what he thought of some more recent - and more controversial - civil rights rulings, on the ground that similar cases might come before him.

Trying to control what the next Justice will have to say.

Todd Purdum has this piece in the NYT about the way Supreme Court Justices have disappointed the Presidents who chose them. The classic quotes of the miffed Presidents are there: "I could carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that," etc.

And here's a quote from Chief Justice Rehnquist:

[T]he court "is an institution far more dominated by centrifugal forces, pushing towards individuality and independence, than it is by centripetal forces pulling for hierarchical ordering and institutional unity."

Funny, since the front page of yesterday's NYT had Linda Greenhouse talking about the way there is a strong centripetal force on the Court (which I agreed with). But Greenhouse's centripetal force metaphor referred to the Justices' tendency to move to the ideological center, while Rehnquist used that metaphor to mean adherence to the ideology the President perceived in the judge at the time of appointment. So there is no real disagreement here. The Justices acting independently -- affected by the Chief's "centrifugal force" -- are breaking away from the ideology they brought to the Court and, if they move to the center, this Rehnquistian "centifugal" move is the Greenhousian "centripetal" move.

Strange how we picture a person's ideology as a thing existing in space and subject to the principles of physics!

Do you ever look critically at the diagram of politics you've got stored in your head that you use all the time without thinking much about? How about that mental picture of the Court? It's pretty simplistic, isn't it?

I wish Presidents would choose judges who are deep and serious thinkers with enough dimension and substance that we wouldn't be able to form such a simple picture. I wish the opinions were written by people whose work I would be interested in reading if it had no grand authoritative power to it.

At the library.

Most interesting paragraph in Todd Purdum's account (in the NYT) of President Bush's remarks at the opening of President Clinton's library:

There was no mention of the sex scandal that led to Clinton's impeachment. Bush recalled that shortly before leaving office, "President Clinton said, 'Christ admonished us that our lives will be judged by how they do unto the least of our neighbors.' Throughout his career, Bill Clinton has done his best to live up to that standard and Americans respect him for it."

He did "his best," and we won't be uncivil and point out that he wasn't always perfect. And note how elegantly Bush implicitly takes a swipe at those who criticize his religiosity: he quotes Clinton beautifully connecting public service to religion (and not just amorphous "ceremonial deism," but Christianity.)

I wrote about the umbrella decisions yesterday, but there's good new detail here:

The wives of the four presidents walked out to the stage, each with an umbrella. Their husbands followed with no umbrellas.

As the men took their places, the women hurried to try to cover them. Bush first took refuge under Chelsea Clinton's umbrella, posing for pictures with his arm around her, then settled on pairing with his wife. Barbara Bush eventually prevailed in convincing her apparently reluctant husband, the elder Bush, to come under her umbrella as well.

So the undersized umbrellas were the women's umbrellas. The manly thing to do is to stride out there with no umbrella at all. (Don't want to be the "man with the umbrella.") But it won't do to look sodden in all the photographs. The hairspray melted out of Clinton's hair, de-pouf-ifying it into a Julius Caesar style. So the women rescued the men. Then, there they were with the undersized women's collapsible umbrellas, emasculated en masse.

UPDATE: A reader sends this link to the Army Officer's Guide:

There is a long-standing taboo against a male officer in uniform carrying an umbrella. However, it is authorized and proper for women in the Army to do so when not in formation.

Three of the four Presidents who went umbrella-less in the rain are, of course, former military officers. They may have a strong sense that carrying an umbrella is inappropriate for a man. Ironically, this left them open to being pestered by the women to hold dinky women's umbrellas after they'd paid the price of manhood and gotten soaked. Interesting that Bush got help from Chelsea before he "settled on pairing with his wife." I'll bet Laura, unlike Barbara Bush, did not prevail upon her husband to take umbrella-shelter, and Chelsea offered the umbrella and the two of them had a nice little relationship. Time to quote this Hollies lyric:

Bus stop, wet day
She's there I say
Please share my umbrella
Bus stop, bus goes, she stays, love grows
Under my umbrella
All that summer we enjoyed it
Wind and rain and shine
That umbrella we employed it
By August she was mine

And what about Condoleezza Rice?

Having just relayed the NYT description of Kerry's lonely lunch, let me pass along the description (by Elisabeth Bumiller) of the Condoleezza Rice lifestyle, which includes lunch:

Her entire life has been instilled with ... discipline, from her training as a concert pianist and competitive ice skater to her service on the first President Bush's National Security Council staff and as provost of Stanford University. Even now, Ms. Rice still packs her lunch many days as a way of avoiding the expense and calories of the White House mess. She rises at 5 a.m. to run on the treadmill ... that she keeps in her sparse Watergate apartment, is in the office before 7 a.m. and is in bed by 10 p.m.

But what does she eat for lunch? Broccoli and green beans? Bumiller needs to get some writing tips from Purdum (see previous post). But Bumiller does have the good fashion details in this nice account of the surprise party Bush gave her:

Ms. Rice, who has never married, celebrated her 50th birthday last weekend with a black-tie surprise party at the British ambassador's residence, attended by Mr. Bush, who put on a tuxedo and spent a rare night out in formal Washington.

Ms. Rice, who arrived in casual clothes en route to what she thought was to be a dinner at a restaurant with relatives, changed into a red gown that the designer Oscar de la Renta had created for her for the occasion.

Wow! Beautiful! And there's good material here too about her preference for Brahms:

"I love Brahms because Brahms is actually structured," she said in the interview a year ago. "And he's passionate without being sentimental. I don't like sentimental music, so I tend not to like Liszt, and I don't actually much care for the Russian romantics Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, where it's all on the sleeve. With Brahms it's restrained, and there's a sense of tension that never resolves."

Bumiller ends the article with that point, and you know she means for you to take that statement about Brahms and to read it as Rice's description of her own personality.

What is Kerry doing these days?

He's back in the Senate, the NYT reports in this nicely written article by Todd S. Purdum:

Mr. Kerry attended the morning caucus in the Old Senate Chamber where his fellow Democrats selected the new minority leadership, in which he has no formal role, and got a warm reception and multiple ovations....

But Mr. Kerry skipped the weekly Democratic caucus lunch of chicken, salmon and salad in a meeting room off the Senate floor in favor of takeout shrimp, broccoli and green beans with a side of rice, ferried from Hunan Dynasty on Pennsylvania Avenue by his trusty assistant, Marvin Nicholson, to his cubbyhole up a winding stairway above the Little Rotunda in the Capitol's Senate wing.

Nicely observed details. Broccoli and green beans, eh? Sounds so sad and grim. New Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said this of the Senator who retreated for a solitary lunch in his cubbyhole:

"Senator Kerry is not a shrinking violet," Mr. Reid said. "We are looking for John Kerry to find what he wants to do.''

The news story continues:

In a parliamentary system, Mr. Kerry himself would loom as a likely leader of the opposition, but Mr. Reid already had that job locked up before Mr. Kerry could even really decide whether he might be interested. Mr. Kerry has won praise from his fellow Democrats for running a strong race, but the Senate is now as full of potential rivals as it is his supporters, especially should he decide to run for president again in four years.

I wonder what the climate in the Senate really is for Kerry right now. Sounds chilly. The Times article doesn't mention it, but Kerry has $45 million left over from his campaign, giving him a big headstart over anyone else who may want to run in 2008. One can imagine Hillary Clinton having an easy time raising a lot of money, but what about everyone else? I would not be surprised if his Senate Democratic colleagues, already struggling to make a show for themselves from the minority position, want to block him from finding a shining new role for himself in the Senate.

UPDATE: The $45 million number is from mid-October. The estimate is that the final number Kerry will report having left over is $15 to 16 million. And note note that he seems to be on the receiving end of a lot of bullying about it:

Democratic Party leaders said Wednesday they want to know why Sen. John Kerry ended his presidential campaign with more than $15 million in the bank, money that could have helped Democratic candidates across the country.

Some said he will be pressured to give the money to Democratic campaign committees rather than save it for a potential White House bid in 2008.

"Democrats are questioning why he sat on so much money that could have helped him defeat George Bush or helped down-ballot races, many of which could have gone our way with a few more million dollars," said Donna Brazile, campaign manager for Al Gore's 2000 presidential race.

"The Year of Passion."

Here's a link to the article on the front page of the NYT Week in Review section, but you won't be able to see the whole illustration unless you get the paper version. You can, however, get a sense of the style of the illustrator, Ward Sutton. The paper NYT bursts with cartoon characters of various sorts, including a blogger, but the NYT perversely deprives us bloggers of the opportunity to link to the picture of the blogger, giving us only the vying veterans, the Texan "W" lady, and the black "Anybody But Bush" guy. Oh well. I'll describe the blogger guy. First, of course, it's a guy. Just to make sure you can tell he's a blogger, on the screen of his laptop are the words "MY BLOG." He's sitting at a little table, and on the table, along with his laptop, are a mug of black coffee and two stacks of magazines. He's wearing a T-shirt and jeans and little rectangular glasses. And he's got a goatee. So I guess he's an anti-Bush blogger. Maybe not. Could be some young libertarian guy.

The article itself? The author, Todd S. Purdum, reminds us that in past years, we complained about too much apathy. I'm a little apathetic about his article though. It's nowhere near as good as Sutton's illustration. He mostly says there's been passion in our politics this time around and that passion has its good and bad points. But I couldn't find a paragraph pithy enough to quote. He gives some respect to the internet:

If the Internet has been the source of vicious blogs and half-baked rumors, it has also often been a worthy watchdog on the mainstream media, a direct route to the candidates' records and official Web sites and a means of instantly checking their half-truths and evasions through nonpartisan outlets like FactCheck.org at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Center.

But no respect for blogs in that! Blogs are, in the conventional wisdom of MSM, "vicious."

UPDATE: I'd also like to link to Lloyd Dangle's cool cartoon on "Page Two" of The Week in Review, but can't find it on line. It's called "Lawyers, Florida Welcomes You" and has six drawings of 1950s style non-chain motels, with names like Sharks Nest Motel and Supreme Motor Court.