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Speaking of overshadowed men, and going back Hanna’s interest in pols who don’t cheat, I’d been wondering today whether Obama was perhaps squirming a little, and his staffers might be casting about for a way to cultivate at least a bit of a bad boy image. I mean, McCain’s out there boasting about his demerits at the Naval Academy, even as Maureen Dowd makes Barack sound like a sissy compared to Hillary. It’s not just that he abstains from chocolate (shades of Harvard’s head virgin, who forgoes dessert, too, as Melinda noted). He can’t bowl, and “genteely” sips beer from a bottle. On top of that, he’s got that Times article—the one speculating that he was actually a much tamer teenager than his memoir suggests—to live down. The obvious tough-guy image enhancer is out of bounds: Obama can’t come out swinging at the former goody-goody girl who lately seems more macho than he does, without appearing a hypocrite. But hey, a real alpha male sticks to his gentlemanly guns, right? A drawn-out primary can at least prove his endurance.
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When Brad and Jen broke up, I started finding US Weekly around the house. Finally, mystery solved: My husband, as is turns out, just cannot read enough about Angelina's humanitarian efforts on behalf of children around the world! (Here, included in the magazine's 24/7 coverage of her, is a recent story about her buying her son a bag of Cheetos.) Maybe there is no surplus of Brad Pitts out there—although if we asked Jen, she might say even one was one too many. But I'm not sure there's a shortage of men who are proud of their big-deal wives, even in Hollywood; off the top of my head, Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, and J Lo are all in marriages with less prominent men. And unless you're Norman Maine or something, wouldn't it be a career-booster to have a famous mate in the movie business? In any business, come to think of it. Plus, I don't think we should assume those Oscar-winners who divorced three minutes after saying they couldn't have done it without their mister's love and support—Kim Basinger is another—got left by jealous men; maybe it's the women who were trading up.
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Hillary Clinton has another "It's 3:00 a.m and your children are safe and asleep, but there's a phone ringing in the White House" ad. This time, it's not about national security, but housing foreclosures, and Clinton is awake and fresh-looking, taking the call. That must be some housing crisis for the government to be releasing new figures at 3:00 a.m.! Since Clinton said the reason she "misspoke" about her false memory of landing under sniper in fire in Bosnia was that she was sleep-deprived, does she really want to make people think that her plan as president is to be up all night, every night, awaiting unemployment numbers and dodging imaginary bullets?
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I hear you, Hanna, and I've sometimes thought about the downside of success for Hollywood women when their marriages fall apart. Cases in point: Hilary Swank wins an Oscar. She and her husband break up. Reese Witherspoon wins an Oscar. She and her husband break up. These are my only two examples, so perhaps I'm being too simplistic about it. Or do men really have a hard time when their wives are more successful than them? Then again, Brad Pitt doesn't seem to mind living in the shadow of Angelina Jolie (probably not many men would mind living anywhere in the vicinity of her shadow), but the paint hasn't dried yet on that relationship.
And two more examples. Why do even some of the most beautiful women in the world get screwed around on? Cases in point: Halle Berry and Elizabeth Hurley.
And the final case in point: Bill and Hillary Clinton. I think he's going mad that she can run for president this year and he can't ever again!
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So here's a question to the men out there: Do we think this story will get less play because of an undercurrent of pity for Thomas Athans; i.e., Men who are married to more powerful women are justified in their straying, to satisfy their sense of manhood? Michael Lewis once wrote a sort-of-but-not-really joking column in the Los Angeles Times about how the mark of a great man these days was marrying a woman more famous than he was and then destroying her career. Sir Denis Thatcher was always a figure of some fun in Great Britain, endlessly spoofed in Private Eye, known for calling his wife "The Boss," and subject of cuckold jokes featuring Ronald Reagan.
As for starting a new XX Top 10 List of Pols Who Don't Cheat: The only problem with that is, it will lead us to glorify the overly ascetic types, such as the latest incarnation of Barack Obama, as portrayed in Maureen Dowd's column this morning: no chocolate, no chocolate cake, no white-chocolate frosting, ("too decadent for me"). Affairs, presumably, also fall into that category.
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No, not the politicians' spouses who can't keep away from prostitutes .... Before it gets forgotten in a flood of Big Beaver jokes, I wanted to pick up on what Juliet wrote:
I saw that BBC poll about world-perceptions-of-America too, and reckoned it was interesting only because it reinforces something I know from observation and anecdote: That this year's U.S. election campaign has had a stunning, transformative, whatever-adjective-you-want impact on foreign perceptions of the United States. Partly this is because the process has been so genuinely surprising, unlike, say, the Russian process—or indeed the British process—in which the leader annoints his successor. Also, I've recently become aware that most of the world thinks segregation still exists in the United States—this despite Powell, Condi, four decades of post-civil-rights-movement politics etc. Whether he wins or not, Obama's candidacy has done more to change that view than any amount of public diplomacy money ever could.
As for the world liking Germany and Japan more than us, or hating us more than Russia, I wouldn't worry about it: Most people in most countries simply know a lot more—a LOT more—about the U.S. and U.S. politics than they do about, say, Russia and Russian politics, so they have strong opinions. Maybe we should sponsor more tourism there (Siberia in January?) as an antidote. And we could send Debbie Stabenow's husband too.
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The good news is, Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow did not hold a news conference to say she was sticking by her hubby of five years after he confessed to police that he'd been with a prostitute. On the contrary, after the news came out, Stabenow didn't show up at a previously schedule press availability; instead, she put out a compact, two-sentence statement calling her mate's behavior "very disturbing and serious.''
The bad news, beyond the obvious: The hooker was arrested, but the john wasn't? What kind of nonsense is that, that he gets off with only a ticket for driving with a suspended license? Post-9/11, cops are seriously staking out the hotel rooms of prostitutes-in-training? And post-this latest spate of sex scandals, readers still see this sort of story in a partisan light? Most shocking to me were the comments appended to the story in today's Detroit Free Press -- from Democrats saying hey, at least he's not a toe-tapper like that Republican hypocrite Larry Craig. And from Republicans and even some Obama supporters laughing it up that this somehow shows the moral superiority of their team: "Obama is getting more and more supers to rally behind him,'' one poster said. "But the ones Billary have sewn up are the adulterers and their spouses.'' Jeez, can't we at least admit that human failings are bipartisan? Though the Free Press story notes portentously that Hillary Clinton once attended a fundraiser for the former employer of this doofus, I don't see how voters could possibly conclude that this has anything to do with anything.
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From Cullen Seltzer, a lawyer in Richmond, Va., who has written for Slate, on the tenacious hold of the billable hour:
Here's the rub and why the billable hour will always be a relevant factor in legal work: The only thing lawyers have to sell is their time. We don't make anything. We can spend months, or even years, of very successful lawyering and, at the end of the engagement, have only an abstraction (vindication of a right, an entitlement to property) to show for the work. Our most eloquent arguments are ephemeral and, when the case is over, valueless. So when our firm quotes a flat fee, we do some very rudimentary math. We figure, as best we can at the very beginning of a case, how long it will take us, working efficiently, to do the legal work the client requests. We then multiply those hours by the hourly rate that we hope to collect. That rate, by the way, is a function of what we need to bill to keep the lights on plus the profit we think we reasonably deserve for our work which is, in turn, at least in part a function of what we think the market will bear. Then we add 10% to account for unknowns.
After all that, we explain that calculus to clients. More often than not, clients opt to pay by the billable hour. They correctly understand that paying lawyers for the time they actually expend is fairest to all concerned. Now, do we compete on the basis of our rates? Of course. And not just that, we compete on the basis of our experience, training, and substantive knowledge. We try to explain that we are not just advocates but counselors. Those aren't just the ethical demands of our profession; they are the essence of what people hire lawyers to do. Some will say that lawyers who bill by the hour have an incentive to work more slowly and less efficiently. There is a term for lawyers who indulge that temptation. Thieves. No tinkering with billing schemes or revolution in accounting will solve that problem.
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I thought this factoid from the article was striking, too, and sad. Of the 20-year-old prostitute: "She told police she had only been working as a prostitute for about a week and didn’t know how many men had visited her the day she was arrested, according to the report."
Let's see, four men an hour ... an eight-hour day, or whatever ... ugh.
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Last week I proposed gelding politicians. This week, I propose gelding their spouses. U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow's husband, Thomas Athans, was just caught in a prostitution sting. Some choice quotes from the Detroit Free Press:
"Athans was pulled over by police on I-75 minutes after leaving the Residence Inn on Livernois, just east of I-75 and south of Big Beaver, the evening of Feb. 26."
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"On further questioning, he acknowledged he had paid the woman $150 for sex."
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"Police went to the hotel after a detective working on Internet-based prostitution at hotels in the city came across a solicitation for sex on a Web site, backpage.com. Plainclothes detectives went to the hotel and set up a surveillance and watched Athans drive up, go inside and then leave about 15 minutes later."
So Athans is cheap, fast, and knows a punch line when he sees one.
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When I saw the headline "America's Global Image Stops Sinking in a Poll" on the New York Times Lede blog, I clicked on it eagerly, expecting (because I'm gullible) some moderate to good news. Sadly, the poll—a worldwide survey conducted by the BBC and GlobeScan—isn't very comforting.
On the plus side, America's reputation abroad has actually improved over the past year in 11 of 23 countries and worsened in just three. But 47 percent of responders still think the U.S. has a negative influence in the world, and just 35 percent think the U.S. has a positive influence.
Also, the world hates America more than it hates Russia, which is pretty amazing. We've only managed to stay ahead of four countries in favorability ratings—North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, and Israel, which isn't much to brag about.
The Axis powers, meanwhile, are doing great: Germany and Japan are at the top of the "mainly positive influence" list. So stop yourself before trying the old "you'd be speaking German if it weren't for us" line on your anti-American friends in Europe.
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Last weekend, I finally got the chance to finish watching Frontline's excellent two-part, four-hour series, "Bush's War," which recounts in excruciating detail the events leading up to the Iraq war and the events of the war itself. I'm sure some will dismiss the series as radical, far-left propaganda.
But can someone please remind me why Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the lot of them aren't in prison?