WASHINGTON, D.C., 2 March — “If George W. Bush didn’t look entirely presidential last night in his first address to the nation since the inauguration, he did come off as chairmanly — you know, like a good CEO, one telling his stockholders words they wanted to hear. Two in particular: Tax cut,” wrote Tom Shales in yesterday’s Washington Post.
“Bush took too long wandering down the aisle of the House and shaking hands when he arrived in the chamber, delaying the start of the speech until 9:10 (it lasted 50 minutes 12 seconds by Dan Rather’s count). And as was to be expected, there were too many interruptions for applause, so many that it looked as though Bush would have gotten applause for a cough and a standing ovation for a sneeze.
“But the speech itself was better than past Bush speeches, delivered crisply but also with a warmth that usually evaded Bush’s old man — that other George Bush who served as president. George W.’s television persona is definitely improving. He was relaxed and confident and thereby reassuring. He certainly didn’t fumble the ball,” noted Shales.
“There was no soaring oratory — the age of soaring oratory is past, anyway — but Bush did have an effectively emotional finish, with the camera moving in for a close-up. Most of the time he was held in what’s called a medium shot, about from the sternum to the top of his head. He looks good. Medium rare.
“And though he obviously doesn’t have the fiery-pulpit bombast of Bill Clinton, viewers probably were comfortable with him. There was a sense of someone turning down the heat, offering a cooler demeanor than what we had for eight years, a feel-good aura that Bush rarely exuded on the campaign trail,” said Shales.
Paper calls on Hillary to resign
“Had she any shame, she would resign.” With those words Wednesday morning, the New York Observer — newspaper of record to Manhattan’s intelligentsia — became the first major publication to suggest that the corruption now coming to light in the Clintons’ pardons-for-cash scandal makes it untenable for Hillary Rodham Clinton to continue serving as New York State’s junior US senator.
“With the nation and indeed the world watching, we (New Yorkers) entrusted her with the US Senate seat once held by Robert F. Kennedy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan,” the Observer says in its scathing editorial this week.
“It is clear now that we have made a terrible mistake, for Hillary Rodham Clinton is unfit for elective office. Had she any shame, she would resign. If federal officeholders were subject to popular recall, she’d be thrown out of office by springtime, the season of renewal.”
Place your bets
Last week Hillary told a group of journalists that “we should go hunt down ‘the person’ or ‘people’ who issued those sulfurous pardons, because she was plum shocked about the whole thing,” writes Maureen Dowd in the New York Times.
“Again and again, she alluded to her husband without using his name. No matter what bad, bad thing her bad, bad boy did in the past, Hillary never before shoved him into traffic, saying: ‘You’ll have to ask him,’” writes Dowd.
“It was the first shot in the War of the Roses. The dame has decided to ice the dude. Bill has been chained in Chappaqua, while Hillary reigns on Embassy Row. But they know they’re bad for each other, they won’t be able to stay apart. Soon they’ll be hanging from that pricey Walter Kaye chandelier and screaming about who owes what to whom. We have reached ground zero of American’s most Byzantine marriage. The Clintons have run out of aides to blame, friends to ruin, Republicans to decry, conspiracies to denounce and hearts to break. Now they are turning on each other.”
