Erik:
It’s convention day in Philly; all quiet on the southwestern front–finally. Here in Austin, the truncated week of big-tentism and brotherly love is a welcome break from W. mania, which has subsumed our fair city since early last summer. Literally, there’s been no escaping it. At the head of Congress Avenue, the main north-south drag, is the state capitol, where the governor is ostensibly still holding down a job, and just to the west is his residence, where a steady stream of out-of-state guests have come to pay their respects, write checks, and get vetted for naught. Nine blocks away, in a nondescript glass office tower, is campaign headquarters. Halfway between is the Driskill Hotel, one of two places where the national media stars and wannabes stay when they parachute into town for a stand-up or sit-down; the other, the Four Seasons, is within walking distance. Around the corner is Las Manitas, a tiny Mexican food restaurant that used to be the province of writers and punk rockers and high-tech hipster doofuses but has lately been colonized by the Bushies. Help! It’s going to get worse before it gets better, I suppose. I’ve yet to see Dick and Lynne Cheney dancing the Cotton-Eyed Joe at the Broken Spoke, but I know that day is coming.
Did you catch the would-be veep on the Sunday morning shows yesterday? I only caught him on ABC, and my reaction was both mildly good and very bad–mildly good in the sense that he was unprepossessing and likable in a bland sort of way, very bad in the sense that he dismissed the discussion of his record in Congress as “trivial.” Who’s feeding this guy his lines? Nope, Mr. Secretary, your record isn’t even remotely trivial. On the one hand, we’re being told by W. that Cheney’s strength as a ticket-mate resides in his years of Washington experience, and on the other, Cheney himself is discounting the particulars of that experience? This is a man who voted against the Equal Rights Amendment, freeing Nelson Mandela, banning cop-killer bullets, funding Head Start, etc. Women, blacks, cops, dual-income parents, and single mothers, to name a few, might not think there’s anything trivial about his opposition on those issues. And if he thinks it’s OK to take his record off the table, if he thinks the past isn’t fair game, I’m sure we won’t be hearing anything about policy disagreements that he and W. had with Gore and Clinton these last eight years, or about Buddhist temple fund-raisers, or Monica Lewinsky.
The New York Times has a good story today that dances around a lot of these same points, which is not surprising, since the Times has been pretty vehemently anti-Cheney for a couple of days now. What is surprising is that this represents a tectonic shift in their attitude toward Bush, at least from where I sit. Are they atoning for going sort of easy on him the last couple of months? (I’d ask the same of Maureen Dowd, who’d been doing her typical charmed-I’m-sure number on the subject of W. until she tore Cheney a new one last week in what was the most withering op-ed piece I’ve read in recent memory.) I was beginning to think that the Times, like a lot of the rest of the press, had pretty much given up on the possibility that Gore could win and was quietly currying favor with the other guy. Whatever the reason, my days of seeing Frank Bruni at the Jamba Juice may soon be over.
At least there’s Tony Snow. Here’s my favorite quote from today’s Times story on Cheney: “He was also interviewed on Fox News Sunday but was not asked about his House votes.” No shit.
Regards,
Evan
