Politics Can Be A Good Thing

[SiouxPal]

Livin’ La Vida Loca
Maureen Dowd

Sometimes the people we write about drive us crazy.

During the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, I used to wake up in the middle of the night, trying to separate truth from lies.

The same thing happened during the imbroglio between Sgt. James Crowley and Henry Louis Gates Jr. In the days before the beer summit — (“Beer makes me bloat,” Gates told me) — I woke up in the middle of the night, puzzling over how the policeman and the professor could have such irreconcilable stories.

The Cambridge officer wrote in his report that Gates had yelled at him, “Ya, I’ll speak with your mama outside.” The Harvard professor denied it.

Crowley seems like a good guy, not the type to falsify a police report. And Gates, a man well-satisfied with the salons of Harvard, PBS and Martha’s Vineyard, does not seem like the type to resort to trash-talking from the ’hood.

So how to reconcile it? At 4 a.m., it suddenly hit me. Gates had just gotten back from researching Yo-Yo Ma’s genealogy in China. Maybe he had said something like, “I was outside the country exploring Yo-Yo Ma’s roots,” or even “Yo-Yo Ma’s mama’s roots,” and the policeman misheard him.

Later that morning, I ran it past Gates.

“That’s funny,” he replied. “But no, no. I didn’t mention China to Sgt. Crowley. However, Yo-Yo Ma is a friend, and we do call him ‘Yo Mama’ around Cambridge.”

We never do get to the bottom of some stories.

Of course, more often, it works the other way around. We drive the people we write about crazy.

I was reminded of this reading the new chronicle of the vertiginous 2008 campaign written by The Washington Post’s Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson.

Once more, we are mesmerized, even horrified, as Bill Clinton does his dinner-theater version of “King Lear,” howling at the South Carolina sky as he realizes he no longer has enough juice with African-American voters to derail Barack Obama and make his wife president.

Bill could not bear to see the press transfer the crown to Obama as the best politician of our age. He thought he’d retain the title at least for his lifetime.

It drove him temporarily mad. It was Bill who changed the strategy for the primary in South Carolina, where the Clintons had originally planned to campaign minimally and lose, but not so badly that it would scuttle Hillary’s campaign.

“Bill Clinton decided, by God, we were going to do better with African-Americans,” a senior Clinton adviser told the authors.

Ego can be dangerous. Bill “believed that Obama had gotten a free ride from the media, and he wanted to force a conversation about that,” Balz and Johnson wrote in their book, “The Battle for America 2008.” They added, “His once certain political touch and instincts eluded him.”

It’s also interesting to read the chapter on “Palinmania” and remember how serene Sarah Palin was before she became unhinged by fame and her fixation with her reviews, especially from conspiratorial and gossipy bloggers.

The same McCain advisers who later turned against Palin were impressed with her at first, when she earned adjectives like unruffled, self-confident, tough-minded and self-assured.

From Bill Ayers to Reverend Wright, “Sarahcuda” was ready to bite, telling rallies, “The heels are on, the gloves are off.”

But by the end, after Tina Fey, Katie Couric and the shopping spree, Palin had lost confidence. She became erratic.

“During a campaign trip in October to New Hampshire, she balked at sharing the stage with former congressman Jeb Bradley because they differed on abortion and drilling in the Arctic wilderness,” the authors wrote. “That same day, she was reluctant to join Bradley and Senator John Sununu for conversation aboard her campaign bus and had to be coaxed out of the back of the bus to talk to them, according to a McCain adviser.”

Palin is still obsessed with the blogosphere, which recently lit up with a rumor started by a fellow mavericky Alaskan, who also no longer has his job — that she and Todd were Splitsville. She sarcastically told Mike Allen of Politico that she loved finding out “what’s goin’ on in my life from the news.”

She deserted her post as governor to write her book about the “pioneering spirit,” as she told Allen. The contradiction seems lost on her.

And, as Talking Points Memo reported on Friday, she put up a demented, fact-free Facebook rant trashing the president’s health care plan: “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

Do we sometimes drive ’em downright crazy? You betcha!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/opinion/09dowd.html?ref=opinion