Dear Tucker,
Now that you mention it, I did notice how extremely … emollient the Esquire interviewer’s questions were. But I still think you underrate Clinton’s answers, which were some sort of Personal Best: “In a funny sense, when something like this happens to you, if you survive it, you’re living [on] a whole different plane than you ever would have had it never occurred in the first place.” Now we all knew it was only a matter of time before Clinton claimed that being impeached had made him a better person, but it’s still alarming to watch him do it.
My other objection to your last dispatch is that while you may feel that Bush sounds exactly the same every time he opens his mouth, you in fact conducted the single most enlightening interview anyone ever did with him. (This is, unavoidably, a plug for Talk magazine, for which you and I both write.) The passage of your Bush profile in which he mocked Texas murderer Karla Faye Tucker’s pleas for mercy before she was executed was, for my money, the single most revealing thing I ever read about him. And if I were inclined to like him, that moment of sheer puerile nastiness would have turned me off forever. Still, I take your point that campaigns become a tad repetitive if you’re in the business of covering them.
As for Bush’s verbal stumblings, I liked the Steven Pinker analysis on this morning’s Times op-ed page, which actually proffered a new take on why Americans are so willing to forgive him his garbled syntax: “A man who must rely on the charity of listeners to get his message across may not seem like an ideal president. But consider the other extreme: a man so verbally sharp that he can exploit the charity of listeners to keep his message hidden–for example, by using words like ‘alone’ and ‘sex,’ as Bill Clinton did, in narrow legalistic senses that differ from those assumed by ordinary listeners.” For a split second, when I thought about this, I felt a very faint attraction to Bush.
I’m off now to administer Halloween costumes. My almost-5-year-old daughter is going to be a “Barbie Butterfly Princess.” Doesn’t that sound like something Frank Luntz produced in a focus group of preschool girls? It hits all the important nouns. Anyway, the best news of the day, which applies to Halloween, was buried on page D7 of the New York Times. It seems that chocolate may actually be good for you, in limited doses, because of something called flavonoids, which are antioxidants associated with decreases in the risk of stroke and heart disease. Science has not yet decided how many leftover Butterfinger bars it is prepared to smile on, but the story gives me all the latitude I need.
Until tomorrow,
Marjorie
