Find Cheney, and Muzzle Rove; More Times Deception; Too Much Talk About Talk

The most serious political problem President Bush currently faces comes down to two words: Dick Cheney.

There's no excuse for Mr. Taciturn to impersonate Hillary Clinton and keep secret the contents of his six meetings that included Enron representatives when he chaired an energy-policy commission last spring. White House officials insist nothing improper took place?and by the way, isn't it time to pink-slip press secretary Ari Fleischer, who makes the insufferable Joe Lockhart look like the younger William F. Buckley in comparison??so just deliver the goods. Postponing the inevitable is dumb: of course Democrats and the media will pounce on (and distort) one, two or three details, but unless there's a legitimate scandal in the closet, the administration ought to take its medicine sooner rather than later.

National Review editor Rich Lowry neatly summed up the Beltway hysteria on the magazine's website on Jan. 17. He wrote: "The problem for the follow-the-money campaign-finance reformers is that everyone in the scandal played to type. The Clinton administration, recipient of Enron largesse, did Enron a big favor by signing the Kyoto treaty, which would have created major new business for Enron had it gone into effect.

"Does anyone really believe the Clinton administration signed the global-warming treaty because of Enron contributions?

"The Bush administration, in turn, aggressively pushed energy deregulation, which was in accordance with Enron's interests. This leads some critics to say that Enron 'wrote' the Bush energy plan, but are we supposed to believe that Bush would support energy re-regulation if it weren't for Enron?

"Both the Clinton and Bush administrations were following, not money, but their ideologies. What's the scandal in that?"

But just as important, where the hell is Dick Cheney? Frankly, all this undisclosed-living-quarters jazz strikes me as far more suspicious than any charges that he rolled over for Kenneth Lay. Consulting with industry chieftains happens every day in Washington, DC, as Robert Rubin, Al Gore and Bill Daley could tell you. Did Cheney have another heart attack? A minor stroke? Is he so bored with his job?during one of the most perilous periods in American history?that his passion for fishing has escalated? I admire Cheney, and believe he's an asset to the administration, but the guy's not indispensable. Bush, the number-one assassination target (ahead of his father and brother Jeb), is making appearances throughout the country, just as a wartime president ought to. The Vice President needs to be seen at press conferences, on talk shows, and often.

Cheney's disappearing act, and refusal to release those records, gives DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe, who needn't adhere to the bipartisan charade (on the war) as closely as the 10 Democrats currently fundraising for a 2004 run against Bush, valuable ammunition for this fall's midterm elections.

Not that Karl Rove, Bush's political architect, is helping out his boss. Rove's an arguably brilliant strategist, but, as I've written before, he should keep his mouth shut when even a single reporter gets within 25 feet of his whiskers. There was no advantage in having Rove give rah-rah speeches to the annual meeting of the Republican National Committee in Austin last weekend. The following statement from Jan. 18 gave Rove's opposition a gimme opportunity to wrap themselves in Old Glory: "Americans trust the Republicans to do a better job of keeping our communities and our families safe... We can also go to the country on this issue because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America's military might and thereby protecting America."

Rove's correct: but you don't make such a boast in public. Did he think his speech would be ignored by the elite print reporters who are delighted to be back on the horse-race political beat, no matter how much they pretend to be interested in employee pension plans?

The results were predictable. The New York Times last weekend ran two stories that were virtually identical about Rove's remarks. The first, written by Richard Berke (headlined "Bush Adviser Suggests War as Campaign Theme") began: "Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser, sought today to turn the war into partisan advantage, telling Republicans gathered [in Austin] that the administration's handling of terrorism could be an important theme for the party to trumpet in the November midterm elections."

On Sunday, Alison Mitchell reinforced that theme, extolling Dick Gephardt's "fiery" repudiation of Rove's imprudent battle cry. Her article, under the headline "Democrats Say Bush Aide Uses War for Political Gain," had this lede: "Democratic leaders today pledged an election-year struggle over economics and domestic policy even as they assailed the president's chief political adviser for telling Republicans that President Bush's handling of terrorism could be an important campaign theme."

Because of Rove's gaffe, Gephardt was able to say: "These young people in Afghanistan are not fighting for the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. They're fighting for the greatest country that has ever existed on earth. That's the United States of America." Never mind that the Democrats are clearly hoping for an extended recession?which they'll blame on Bush's tepid tax cut that was signed long after the economic slowdown began?to whip up voters next November.

McAuliffe, the multimillionaire who was called the greatest fundraiser in history (as in soft money) in the summer of 2000 by Al Gore, also struck a populist tone at the Democrats' Washington, DC, session, even as he introduced a compressed 2004 primary schedule that will benefit those contenders who can raise the most money in the shortest period of time. The chairman sermonized last Friday: "If the White House is politicizing the war, that's nothing short of despicable. For Karl Rove to politicize the issue is an affront to the integrity of the entire United States military." Who can doubt that McAuliffe, one of Bill Clinton's shadier associates, is more concerned about U.S. Marines abroad than his golf game or a close Senate contest in Arkansas?

Patriotism out of the way, the hyper money-man got down to business on Saturday. He said, apparently with a straight face, "How about that Enron story? Folks, it's simply outrageous, and my heart goes out to the employees and shareholders who were victimized by a web of greed and deceit. I do want to be fair though; there's no evidence yet [italics mine] that anyone in the Bush administration did anything improper in this case." He then spoke about the "interesting parallels between Enron and the administration it so generously supported. Think about it, risky investments, mountains of debt, accounting shenanigans and a little fuzzy math, then the folks at the top cash in while innocent working people are left holding the bag."

Folks, if McAuliffe and the Democrats are politicizing Enron's bankruptcy for political gain, that's nothing short of despicable! It's an affront to all the elected officials who gladly accepted campaign contributions from the vaporized company!

Times headcase Frank Rich was less charitable toward Enron employees who got burned, writing on Jan 19, "...[E]veryone instantly gets an epic fraud in which arrogant high-fliers stacked the deck to fleece thousands of peons to the tune of zillions."

I wonder: If Enron were based in Manhattan rather than Houston, would Rich have called its workers "peons"?

A Times Deception

Last Sunday, The New York Times ran a lengthy editorial about the Enron meltdown, and, after paragraph upon paragraph of pious proclamations about the skullduggery of big business, predictably called for campaign finance reform as the antidote for similar financial scandals in the future. Although the writer included one sentence about the Clinton administration's interventions on behalf of Enron (as opposed to mention of Bush Cabinet members Paul O'Neill and Don Evans, who refused to bail out the radioactive company), the focus was on Republicans.

I agree that Sen. Phil Gramm must recuse himself from any Enron investigation, just as John Ashcroft did, but what about Sen. Joe Lieberman (his New Democrats Network bagged $25,000 from Enron; Citigroup has given the presidential aspirant $112,000 since '97), who's chairing one of the inquisitions?I mean inquiries? What about Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer ($68,857, more than Rep. Tom DeLay, by the way), Jeff Bingaman and John Breaux? Why no mention of Robert Rubin's call, on behalf of Citigroup (where he's chairman of its executive committee), to treasury official Peter Fisher?

In its Jan. 19 issue The Economist writes of Rubin: "What he did was legal, but only because Bill Clinton, in his last days as president, canceled an executive order that barred top officials from lobbying their old department for five years after leaving office. The order was in place throughout Mr. Rubin's tenure at Treasury."

But as Andrew Sullivan pointed out in an invaluable post on his andrewsullivan.com, the Times is no position to criticize elected officials for alleged breaches of ethics. The paper's economics op-ed columnist, Paul Krugman, a man whose mission is to skewer the Bush administration's tax cuts (and ties to Enron and corporate America in general), was paid $50,000 to serve on an Enron advisory board in 1999, which he partially disclosed in a column last year after he began writing for the Times. Conveniently, he left out the tiny fact that he was compensated for his services. Krugman told The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz: "No bad blood would explain why I have ridden Enron hard. The only moral here, for good or bad, is how closely intertwined the modern establishment, including me, has become."

However, the Times' conflict of interest goes beyond a mere crank columnist. The Enron collapse, which will likely lead to deserved criminal charges against some of its executives and auditing firm Arthur Andersen, is mostly about Houston and Wall Street, not Washington, DC. The problem for the Times, if the investigations are fair, is that New York-based companies, such as Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase and the like, which pump millions of advertising dollars into the paper's coffers, will be tarnished. In the midst of a recession, which has disproportionately affected the media, that wouldn't sit well with Times shareholders. So the paper will continue to focus relentlessly on the political dynamics of Enron's failure, hoping to minimize a maze of financial complications that could shred its bottom line.

The Wall Street Journal, which has provided the best coverage of this business bust-up so far (and I'm referring to its news pages, not editorials), will continue its dogged reporting, which is based on fact, not an agenda. That's an obstacle for the Times, but one that probably can be surmounted by the mere fact that it, not the Journal, dictates the agenda for the liberal newspapers and tv networks.

So Much for Synergy

The closing of Talk last Friday was far more interesting for the media-saturation it elicited rather than the actual demise of the glossy itself. Considering the money Tina Brown and her backers spent on the monthly's editorial content, Talk was an awful magazine, maybe even a notch below the atrocious Esquire. Its political articles were dated?a problem Brown didn't figure on after running the weekly New Yorker and Vanity Fair (also a monthly, but one with a shorter leadtime)?and its Miramax-related celebrity stories were dime-a-dozen fluff. Chelsea Clinton's account of her travails on Sept. 11 was downright embarrassing (the notion young Clinton expressed about being a real New Yorker was breathtaking in its dishonesty), another example of Brown preferring "buzz" over substance.

And when the occasional worthwhile article appeared in Talk, the magazine's publicity machine trotted out its author to the talk shows weeks before the piece even appeared on newsstands. For example, last summer Lisa DePaulo wrote a fine story on the Chandra Levy-Gary Condit mystery, but with her nightly appearances on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, etc.?which were somewhat unseemly?by the time Talk was released there was no reason to read it. (Also, there were so many new developments in the case by that time that the article was only a partial accounting of the affair, so to speak.)

Miramax's 50-percent partner in the enterprise, the Hearst Corp., never seemed to take the publication very seriously, which was odd considering its reputation for squeezing nickels. One of the advantages of Hearst's participation, it was said at the outset, was the company's circulation expertise. What a joke. Like many people, I succumbed to Talk's direct-mailing come-on and signed on as a charter subscriber. I never received a single issue. And there's a reason that Talk's newsstand sell-through was a disastrous 20 percent: the placement at stores was inconsistent, and old issues were often underneath the current copy.

But back to the media's rapid, and gleeful, reporting of Talk's folding. Matt Drudge (still dubbed an "Internet gossip" by the clueless CNN/Washington Post critic Howard Kurtz) posted the news on his website hours before the magazine's staff was given the bad news in person. The New York Observer's Gabriel Snyder filed a remarkably complete report even before the magazine's employees had downed their third cosmopolitans. The New York Post put Brown on Saturday's front page with the headline "Talk Shuts Up"; the Daily News one-upped their competitor with a banner that read "Tina's Talk Buzzes Off."

The New York Times, which purportedly eschews celebrity journalism (notwithstanding op-ed columnists Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd), ran two page-one articles about Brown's downfall, one on Saturday, the next on Sunday. It's true that 100 people lost their jobs, but in an environment where not only is the media laying off employees almost every week, but entire industries are downsizing, the attention given to a relatively tiny company was absurd. Do you suppose if, on this Thursday, say, a prosthetics manufacturer goes bust, leaving 1000 employees without jobs, the Times would give the story similar play? Would it even merit a 5-inch story in the bowels of its abysmal business section? Doubtful.

Nonetheless, Alessandra Stanley's Jan. 20 Times article was a bitchy hoot. She began: "Her announcement to the staff about the suspension of Talk magazine on Friday evening was emotional, but Tina Brown's tears had dried in time to spin the first colossal failure of her glittering career. 'There is nobody more boring than the undefeated,' Ms. Brown said jauntily three hours after the staff meeting. 'Any great, long career has at least one flameout in it. I'm very proud of having taken the risk.'"

Stanley collected one beaut of a statement from New York's media critic Michael Wolff, who apparently had time on his hands since his weekly had just published a thin "double issue" (unusual so soon after the traditional holiday "doubles" that most weeklies put out these days) and thus had no pressing deadline. Wolff was right on the mark: "I think the curtain comes down now?she has to go home. This is no ordinary failure. She staked everything and was wiped out. She's a little Enronish. There was a lot of illusion. But over time at Talk you could see Tina as the depreciating asset. She started out fully valued. She wasn't just a genius editor, she was the social arbiter of New York."

Wolff was probably eager to sound off about something. He missed President Bush's adventure with a pretzel on Jan. 13?he'd already turned in his first decent column in an eon, a critical look at the Times' Adam Moss?and the opportunity to theorize once again that Bush was back on the sauce.

Few will miss Talk. Newsday's pedestrian columnist Ellis Henican broke out of a two-for-41 batting slump with his take on Brown. He wrote on Jan. 20, ridiculing the false excuse given by publisher Ron Galotti, among others, that Sept. 11 crushed the monthly: "What a self-serving crock that was! The problems at Talk went so much deeper than one day's terror attacks. And they began a whole lot earlier than four months ago... But, oh, the stories you hear from people at Talk! About junior staffers storming from the office in tears. About long-planned cover stories jettisoned on closing night. About pieces enthusiastically assigned and unceremoniously dumped... I'd love to see how much of [the money invested] was spent on writers and editors?and how much on Cristal and canapes. I'll bet Talk's caterers did a whole lot better than its writers and associate editors. I assume they got paid quicker too."

The magazine's editorial content, which read like a mid-90s primer on the "zeitgeist," never articulated a reason to even exist, didn't find a niche that wasn't already occupied by superior publications. Brown, after a successful stint at The New Yorker, refused to leave the print media as a champ. She could've hosted a David Frost-like tv program, for example, instead of frittering her allure on a vanity project like Talk.

Then again, it wasn't her $50 million that went down the toilet.

 

Jan. 21

Send comments to [MUG1988@aol.com](mailto:mug1988@aol.com) or fax to 244-9864.