There’s a new buzzword to relish: “SUV Democrats,” this courtesy of the American Spectator. “DNC chief Terry McAuliffe is driving around town in a giant Cadillac Escalade that gets about 10 miles to the gallon. House minority leader Dick Gephardt’s Ford SUV gets just a little more mileage out of its tankful of fuel. And Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle? His staff won’t say what he drives at home, preferring to point to a more economical GM luxury car he gets driven around in when in the capital. But after the Democratic leaders learned that Republican operatives were driving around town filming their gas-guzzling cars at the same time that these honchos were saying the Bush energy plan was folly, the DNC is making a move to put the men in more fuel-efficient automobiles,” the magazine notes on its Web site. “Those SUVs are going into the garage and you’ll see them all in more modest wheels before this energy debate gets hot,” says a DNC source, who says that Gephardt already has arranged to have a sedan and driver tool him around town for the next few weeks. Ditto McAuliffe.
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Selective memories
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York Democrat, was quite appalled over the FBI’s slipshod handling of 3,135 documents related to the Timothy McVeigh case. “How could this have happened?” she asked recently, allowing that she backed fellow New York Democrat Sen. Charles E. Shumer’s request for a full White House investigation of such shocking goings-on. “Does she think her future depends on making us forget her past?” counters the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd yesterday. Indeed, there were years when Clinton could not locate certain papers of her own for the FBI, forgotten “in a White House closet full of tasteful Arkansas tchotchkes.”
Now, she must “relish the prospect of a delicious payback with Louis Freeh, a man she must detest. He spent much of his tenure as FBI chief slapping around the Clintons and egging on their tormentors.”
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Dan’s view on bill
Impressions vary in the media. In an interview on Fox News on Tuesday night, Bill O’Reilly asked CBS’ Dan Rather, “Do you think President Clinton’s an honest man?” “Yes, I think he’s an honest man,” Rather replied, and went on to elaborate: “Listen, who among us have not lied about something? ... I think at the core, he’s an honest person. I know that you have a different view. I know that you consider it sort of astonishing anybody would say so. But I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things.”
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Power surge
Steakhouses are in vogue, men wear boots and women pearls. “The Republican Party controls every lever of power in town: the Oval Office, the Senate, the House, the Cabinet. The Democrats? Let ‘em eat crumbs,” Fortune magazine says.
“Although the Grand Old Party isn¥t about to get everything it wants, a new establishment has taken hold with George W. Bush,” the magazine says. “This year’s Power 25 survey — Fortune’s list of Washington’s most powerful lobbying groups reflects the turn. Republican organizations are notably on the rise, while Democratic ones are waning. “For the first time in four years, the Power 25 has a new No. 1. The heavily Republican National Rifle Association has replaced the nonpartisan American Association of Retired Persons as the group with the most clout in the capital.”
