Scrapbook
'That's Why You Lost' It's been tough sledding this week for any Dole staffers with a little fight left in them. At a post-election forum 32 hours after Clinton declared victory, political...
...No, the Man Who Would Have Been Counselor to the Vice President insists, it was America's economic policies that caused World War II, specifically the Smoot-Haw-ley Tariff Act of 1930, "a hypothesis that I originated," he proudly notes...
...Consider some of the examples offered up by the Observer's Robert Sam Anson in what is among the most devastating profiles in memory...
...I am not a reporter," Blumenthal declared...
...tScrapbook Afternoons at the DMV have moved more quickly than the tedious two-hour production, which featured a lackluster cameo appearance by none other than outgoing labor secretary Robert Reich...
...Blu-menthal's reputation as a duplicitous Clinton shill grew so strong that Michael Kelly, the New Yorker's Washington bureau chief, barred him from entering the magazine's D.C...
...many of the one-liners seemed as hackneyed as the play's title...
...And Wan-niski has provided one...
...He Bombed in New Haven In a recent issue of the New York Observer, Sidney Blu-menthal helps explain how he has become the least respected political journalist in Washington...
...Another ad featured Hillary encouraging supporters "to see what happens after the election, when Al [Gore] and I feel totally at ease to be our real selves...
...Once a noted author and journalist, Wanniski is pioneering a new literary genre these days—the self-published (on his World Wide Web home page) letter-to-the-editor...
...offices...
...Blumenthal's answer: "It doesn't matter...
...His Nov...
...The letter responds to the syndicated column of George Will, who had called Wanniski "Kemp's crackpot adviser...
...But even a marionette show deserves a curtain call...
...Few of the jokes were funny...
...Twenty-three students were arrested for illegally occupying a bell tower at the University of California at Berkeley in protest...
...Nearly all 23,000 copies of the paper were stolen (the largest such theft of student newspapers anywhere, according to the Student Press Law Center...
...It's set in the White House press room, where a group of bumbling reporters tries to bring down the president by manufacturing a ridiculous scandal about his dog...
...Comparing Clinton to a disengaged boat captain, Castellanos said, "The captain can have a little transgression here and there, fall off the boat, chase the stewardess, whatever . . . but if we're still moving forward, it's hard to change captains...
...Then there was the guerrilla war against an editorial in the Berkeley student newspaper, the Daily Californ-ian, that endorsed CCRI...
...The forum, sponsored by the Hotline newsletter, was held in the auditorium of the National Education Association...
...No, we got it, all right...
...At the New Yorker, where he moved after the election, Blumenthal was widely suspected of tipping off the administration when his colleagues planned to write unflattering pieces about the Clintons—a couple to whom he had grown close ever since the three were introduced at (where else...
...It's true: We had thought to ring down the curtain on the self-described "puppeteer," the Geppetto to Kemp's Pinocchio, who provided the most diverting subplot in the campaign...
...Renaissance Weekend...
...On a recent Monday night, a play by Blumenthal called This Town opened for its first and only night at the National Press Club...
...A collection of advocacy groups, including the ACLU, immediately challenged its constitutionality in federal court...
...a fellow journalist wondered...
...Jack'n' Jude, Part VIII Many of the Scrapbook's readers have expressed sadness that our long-running chronicle of the co-dependent relationship between sometime supply-side publicist Jude Wan-niski and onetime vice-presidential candidate Jack Kemp seemed to reach its end last week...
...A Dole campaign with the spine to run those ads would have done a sight better than the campaign that lost so mindlessly...
...In 1992, Blumenthal "urged other reporters to desist from writing anything that could jeopardize Mr...
...When Castellanos insisted that "Bill Clinton isn't fit to make Bob Dole's license plate—though he may soon be doing so," White House political director Doug Sos-nik was compelled to interrupt...
...That's why you lost," he sniffed...
...Berkeley, which actually has a monument to "free speech," has once again revealed that it's free speech for me, but not for thee...
...Castellanos was there to show some Dole commercials—not the vanilla pap we saw on TV but effective negative spots that were, needless to say, vetoed by Dole senior staffers and therefore never publicly aired until the post-election forum...
...This is too important...
...Now it's certainly true, as Will suggested, that Wan-niski monomaniacally believes tax policy is the engine driving world history...
...These spots—they really tell me why you-all lost," she snarled in nearly the same formulation as Sosnik's (leading us to believe that White House talking points had instructed all Clintonites to talk incessantly about why Dole lost...
...After they were shown, Democratic consultant Mandy Grunwald let loose...
...At a post-election forum 32 hours after Clinton declared victory, political consultants and operatives lined up 18 across for an epiphanic requiem filled with conventional wisdom...
...Word of the pro-CCRI editorial had leaked out...
...But it turns out, in Wanniski's words, that he has "never come close to making that crackpot assertion" about Germany's tax policy...
...As Sidney Blumenthal is not the first to demonstrate, propaganda hardly ever makes good art...
...She continued: "You play to your faithful, and that's not what America wants to hear...
...Clinton's chances...
...Mario Savio, the radical activist who began the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964, died Wednesday—and his friends blamed the anxiety caused by CCRI for his demise...
...The Los Angeles City Council declared it wouldn't be enforcing the measure...
...a delivery driver reported seeing someone follow him at each of his stops, apparently confiscating the papers along the way...
...When Castel-lanos recounted how Clinton lied about everything from middle-class tax cuts to telling the press he only ate one doughnut when he actually consumed two, a journalist in the audience yelled, "Alex, get over it...
...For that, he was booed...
...There was a Clinton corruption montage set to the song "You Cheated, You Lied" and a clever spot called "How To Speak Liberal...
...5 letter to the Washington Post (so far unpublished by the paper) is titled "I Ain't No Crackpot...
...What about telling the truth...
...I don't believe that the accumulation of isolated fact upon fact yields some sort of pure truth, capital T." The admission comes as no surprise...
...This "that's why you lost" business is eerily reminiscent of the mantra about Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas five years ago— "You just don't get it...
...Liberalism After CCRI_ The commanding victory of the California Civil Rights Initiative set off predictable cries of horror from the state's liberals...
...Needless to say, the press comes off as inept and malicious, the administration as honorable and blameless...
...The only insider attempting to put a little English on his delivery was Dole media man Alex Castel-lanos—and he was punished swiftly and without mercy...
...And with this our chronicle of Wanniski ends . . . we think...
...Remember, she was talking about ads that neverran...
...Wanniski is intent on ridiculing Will's assessment that the Wanniski Weltanschauung boils down to this proposition: He "thinks World War II was caused by Germany's tax and monetary policies...
Vol. 2 • November 1996 • No. 10
