Time’s Man (Whoops, Person) Of All Time

December 21, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, News media, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, Secretary Clinton | 1 Comment 

Tonight, Diane Sawyer, former aide in the Nixon White House who also was an editorial assistant for RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, made her debut as anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight. She did not get around to mentioning her old boss.

But over at NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams found some time for the thirty-seventh President. He reported on a blog called Teqnolog, which this weekend examined the thousands of images at Time magazine’s site to determine whose face had appeared on that venerable newsmagazine’s cover more often than any other.

The winner was not a complete surprise. I recall reading in Time once or twice in the last fifteen years that Richard Nixon had been on the cover more often than anyone else. But Technoloq did a breakdown on the 15 others who had appeared on the cover ten times or more. Here they are:

RN – 48 covers
Ronald Reagan – 45
Bill Clinton – 33
George W. Bush – 31
Jimmy Carter – 27
Barack Obama – 24
Gerald R. Ford – 20
Lyndon B. Johnson – 19
George H.W. Bush – 18
Dwight D. Eisenhower – 18
Hillary Clinton – 16
John F. Kennedy – 14
Saddam Hussein – 12
Franklin D. Roosevelt – 11
Al Gore – 10
John McCain – 10

It should be mentioned that these figures include covers in which the sixteen mentioned appear with other people, such as Henry Kissinger, or Leonid Brezhnev, or each other. (In fact, in 1976 Reagan, Carter and Ford were on the same cover.) In Nixon’s case, he appeared by himself on 24 of his 48 covers, while FDR and Hussein were solo on almost all of their covers.

It may not be much of a surprise that the Secretary of State was the only woman on this list (though the former Governor of Alaska may catch up by 2012), but to have Saddam Hussein appear on more covers than, say, Stalin or Castro or Gorbachev or even Churchill is somewhat startling.

The blog pointed out that President Obama, in less than two years, or about 100 weeks, since he scored his first Time cover, has risen to sixth place on this list, while it took RN until the early Seventies, nearly two decades after his first appearance, to get to 24 covers. Teqnolog remarked that at this pace, it would take Obama only another two years to surpass RN, by which time he’d still be in his first term, and that if he were re-elected and featured as frequently as he is now, he could perhaps have his face on as many as 150 covers.

And even if the President failed to be re-elected, he’d still stand a good chance of building on such a number – FDR, JFK, Reagan, and of course RN were on the cover more than once after leaving office.

Annals Of The Obama Administration

November 10, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Annals of the Obama Administration, International Affairs, Secretary Clinton | Leave a Comment 

In today’s Telegraph, blogger Nile Gardiner notes Secretary Clinton’s historically short-sighted remarks at the celebrations marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It’s bad enough that President Obama could not be bothered to attend the celebrations marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But Hillary Clinton’s refusal to even acknowledge the role played by Ronald Reagan in the Wall’s demise as well as the downfall of Communism was highly insulting towards one of the greatest figures of our time, and reeked of petty and partisan mean-spiritedness.

The Secretary of State’s remarks yesterday in Berlin completely erased from history the huge contribution played not only by President Reagan but also by the United States in confronting the Soviet Empire. In her speech she applauded half of Europe, but could not bring herself to thank those Americans who bravely served their country and in many cases laid down their lives in defeating Communism, under Reagan’s leadership.

Here is what Clinton said in Berlin on behalf of the Obama administration:

“We remember the allies who conducted the largest humanitarian airlift in history, completing more than a quarter million flights to sustain the people of West Berlin. We remember the Poles – (applause) – who waged a campaign for liberty that began with a strike in the shipyards of Gdansk and ended by shattering a system of tyranny. We remember a Polish Pope who spoke out for the aspirations of people across Europe and the world. (Applause.) We remember the people of the Baltics who joined hands across their lands and helped to break the chains that held their nations captive. We remember the students of Prague who propelled a dissident playwright from a jail cell to the presidency of a free republic. And tonight, we remember the Germans on both sides of the wall, but particularly the Germans in the East who stood up and finally were able to say, “No more. Freedom is our birthright and we will take it by our own hands.”

Incredibly, Clinton ended her remarks, with a tribute not to the tens of millions of victims of Communism, but to Barack Obama!

“I am deeply honored to introduce now a message from someone who represents the fall of different kinds of walls – of walls of discrimination, of stereotype, of character, the walls that too often are inside minds and hearts. Let me introduce a message from President Barack Obama.”

Hillary Clinton would do well to learn from Margaret Thatcher, a great friend of the United States, whom I had the privilege of working for in her private office. Like Ronald Reagan she is a statesman who understands that evil must be confronted and defeated, and a true leader who believes in the greatness of America as a force for good on the world stage.

As Lady Thatcher observed in her eulogy to Reagan at his funeral service at the National Cathedral in Washington in June 2004:

“We live today in the world that Ronald Reagan began to reshape… It is a very different world, with different challenges and new dangers. All in all, however, it is one of greater freedom and prosperity, one more hopeful than the world he inherited on becoming president. .. With the lever of American patriotism, he lifted up the world. And so today, the world – in Prague, in Budapest, in Warsaw and Sofia, in Bucharest, in Kiev, and in Moscow itself, the world mourns the passing of the great liberator and echoes his prayer: God bless America.”

These were the words that Clinton should have echoed in front of the Brandenburg Gate – a recognition of President Reagan’s huge contribution to the advancement of freedom in Europe and across the world.

Obama Shapes The Court, Chapter One

May 1, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Hillary Clinton, News media, Obama administration, Presidents, Secretary Clinton, Supreme Court | Leave a Comment 

It seemed difficult on Wednesday to come up with a more dramatic finish to the forty-fourth President’s first Hundred Days then Sen. Arlen Specter’s party switch, but with a few hours left in the day Supreme Court Justice David Souter managed it by phoning White House Counsel Greg Craig to state that he planned to retire from his position when the Court’s current session wraps up in June. (This, according to Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic Monthly website.)

Various friends of the Justice from the Granite State had already begun hinting that such a move was in the works, and after forty-eight hours or so of rampant speculation, President Obama himself, in the finest LBJ tradition, strode into Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’s daily briefing a few hours ago to inform reporters that he had just received Justice Souter’s formal letter announcing his retirement plans.

And thus begins a ritual which we will likely see twice and perhaps thrice more in the Obama Administration. Justice John Paul Stevens is now 89 and, if he stays until the end of Obama’s first term, will have beaten both Oliver Wendell Holmes’s record for age and William O. Douglas’s for duration of service. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is now battling cancer and, though still a strong and spirited force on the high court, her retirement sometime in the next eight years seems probable. And, if Obama makes it into a second term, he will most likely be replacing Justice Anthony Kennedy, the perennial swing vote in close decisions. Thus, the President has the opportunity to alter the ideological balance of the Supreme Court in a way that would resonate decades into this century.

(And then again, he might be surprised. When the first President Bush selected Souter at the urging of his Chief of Staff John Sununu, the latter assured one and all that the choice was “a home run” for conservatives – which proved to be just about the last thing that could honestly be said about it.)

A number of articles and blogposts since yesterday morning have discussed the various prospects to replace Souter. Two of the more notable are today’s AP article by Mark Sherman and Jennifer Loven, and a Washington Post online discussion with Robert Barnes, the paper’s man covering the Court beat.

The AP dispatch focuses mainly on possible female candidates, since Obama has indicated more than once that he wishes to have a woman serving alongside Justice Ginsburg. These include Solicitor General Elena Kagan and Sonya Sotomayor, Sandra Lynch and Kim Wardlaw from the U.S. Court of Appeals.

In the Post discussion, three names are tossed around by Barnes and those offering comments. These are (very bizarrely) Harriet Miers, the Bush nominee whose name was withdrawn in favor of Samuel Alito’s a few years ago; Harvard constitutional-law professor Laurence Tribe (who, despite calling our Chief Executive “the best student I ever had,” is at a disadvantage owing to his gender); and, inevitably, the name that has been repeatedly showing up in the ruminations of bloggers (such as Ambinder), pundits and reporters alike: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

TNN readers will recall that last year I pointed out more than once that one of the surest ways Sen. John McCain could mobilize the grassroots as the GOP nominee was to emphasize that an Obama victory could result in the elevation of then-Senator Clinton to the high court. But the McCain campaign never really followed up on this suggestion, which I was not alone in making.

With a Congress that would almost certainly be ready to wave through any Obama selection (barring Harriet Miers, of course), the possibility has now emerged that the Clinton brand of liberalism could become as strong a current of American law as the activism of the Warren years or the laissez-faire regulatory approach of the 1920s and 1930s Courts, and that this may be a major counterbalance to any resurgence of conservativsm for the foreseeable future.  For this and for many other reasons, there’s a lot of suspense involved in what Obama will decide, and it will keep building as May goes by (since the White House apparently plans no announcement of a nominee until the end of the Court’s current term).

As Others See Us…..And Themselves

April 1, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Barack Obama, International Affairs, Secretary Clinton | Leave a Comment 

Quentin Letts is a columnist for the Daily Mail.  He cut his teeth as the Telegraph’s Peterborough, and has been The Times‘ New York correspondent. Much of what he writes is calculatedly over the top (think: Maureen Dowd but without the labored Shakespeare references).

Today he fixed his sights on this morning’s joint press conference by President Obama and Prime Minister Gordon Brown.  I think it’s fair to say that Mr. Letts’ respect for the PM is….measured.  If Frost/Nixon started out as Peter Morgan’s five finger exercise in comeuppance for Sir David Frost for his many years of masquerade as a Tory wolf in Labor’s clothing (which it did), imagine what fun Mr. Letts would have with Brown/Obama.

Oh Gordon, your smile! The Prime Minister, appearing alongside Barack Obama after breakfast today, stared at his American visitor and almost shattered the TV camera lenses with his moony grin.

Mr Obama uttered a sentence. Mr Brown nodded. Mr Obama paused. Mr Brown froze, frowning. Mr Obama made a very slight joke. Mr Brown gassed himself, laughing for a good 30 seconds, eyelids fluttering like the wings of a soft-flapping Cabbage White.

Allegedly the most charismatic politician in the world, Mr Obama was a disappointment. It sounded as though he had a blocked nose and so his lack of energy may have been a symptom of a cold. Jet lag, too. He probably wished he could have stayed in bed.

He spoke slowly, in a meandering manner. Some might say that he was thoughtful and professorial. Others might call his manner circuitous, even yarny. Am I saying that he was a bore? Oh dear. I find that I possibly am.

But in a good way, arguably. He came across as a president who would consult and think thrice before bombing the smithereens out of a foreign capital. This, comrades, can be counted progress.

The usual goons were in attendance. What a kerfuffle an American presidential creates. Outside, in the road off Whitehall and in the great court of the Foreign Office, I counted 24 Range Rovers, all of them pretty brand spanking new.

Mr Obama fiddled with the cuff of one sleeve, Prince Charles-style, while Mr Brown hosed him down with treacle. The Prime Minister, fluffing with nerves in a couple of places, spoke of the president’s ‘leadership, vision, courage, dynamism, energy, achievements…’

On and on it went. Stop, man! But he would not. ‘A partnership of purpose, resilient, constant.’ We were in total love mode. For his part, Mr Obama stared at Mr Brown with two weary, slightly glazed eyes, his mouth agape.

When Mr Brown let him get a word in, it was ‘Gordon’ this and ‘Gordon’ that. Mr Brown had by now turned his profile to us and it meant we could see the silhouette of his pouchy-cheeked, greedy grin. His lips puckered, forming the shape of a robin’s beak, and he nodded slowly, repeatedly, at times even swallowing, so much was he salivating.

When he turned back to face us his eyes were narrow with creamy pleasure and he pushed forth his chin, stretching his lower neck. Now he placed his hands behind his back and bounced a half inch or so on the balls of his feet, relishing the sound of Solomon Obama’s replies to a few questions from the Press.

Secretary of State Clinton and British Foreign Secretary David Miliband in London this morning.  Quentin Letts writes:  ”What an odd duo Mrs. Clinton and the boy Milipede make. She looks like a mother taking her teenage son round a university campus on Open Day.”

Annals Of The Obama Administration

March 30, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Annals of the Obama Administration, Culture, Faith, History, International Affairs, Latin America, Obama administration, Religion, Secretary Clinton | Leave a Comment 

SOS Clinton’s reset button gaffe was explained as having been the result of moving her political apparat to Foggy Bottom. 

But news arrives from her Mexican trip that fits into the “you couldn’t make something like this up” category of world class diplomatic blunders.  

On Friday she visited the most sacred of Mexican sites: the Basilica of the nation’s patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Mrs. Clinton can be excused for not being personally aware of the history of the shrine and the miraculous painting.  That’s why there are legions of staff at State to prepare briefing books and pithy remarks.  (And I know there’s no reason why she, or anyone at State, should be as intrigued as I am by the story of the Virgin’s eyes, which is something like the western hemisphere’s Shroud of Turin.)

But nothing can prepare you for the sheer tin ear incompetence of what actually went down.  Here’s the Catholic News Agency’s account.   Read it and cringe.  

During her recent visit to Mexico, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made an unexpected stop at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe and left a bouquet of white flowers “on behalf of the American people,” after asking who painted the famous image.

The image of Our Lady of Guadalupe was miraculously imprinted by Mary on the tilma, or cloak, of St. Juan Diego in 1531. The image has numerous unexplainable phenomena, such as the appearance on Mary’s eyes of those present in the room when the tilma was opened and the image’s lack of decay.

Mrs. Clinton was received on Thursday at 8:15 a.m. by the rector of the Basilica, Msgr. Diego Monroy.

Msgr. Monroy took Mrs. Clinton to the famous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which had been previously lowered from its usual altar for the occasion.

After observing it for a while, Mrs. Clinton asked “who painted it?” to which Msgr. Monroy responded “God!”

It’s bad enough already — but it gets worse.  It turns out that she had been there before and still didn’t know what she was seeing.

Clinton then told Msgr. Monroy that she had previously visited the old Basilica in 1979, when the new one was still under construction.

Banality is the mother’s milk of diplomatic diplospeak, but, surely, a worldly Wellesley grad supported by scores of assistant under secretaries and stables of speech writers should be able to come up with something better than this:

After placing a bouquet of white flowers by the image, Mrs. Clinton went to the quemador –the open air area at the Basilica where the faithful light candles- and lit a green candle.

Leaving the basilica half an hour later, Mrs. Clinton told some of the Mexicans gathered outside to greet her, “you have a marvelous virgin!”

Secretary Clinton wrapped up her good will visit to Our Lady of Guadalupe by flying to Houston to receive an award from Planned Parenthood.

This evening [Friday 27 March] Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is set to receive the highest award given by Planned Parenthood Federation of America — the Margaret Sanger Award, named for the organization’s founder, a noted eugenicist. The award will be presented at a gala event in Houston, Texas.

Annals Of The Obama Administration

March 24, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Annals of the Obama Administration, International Affairs, Obama administration, Secretary Clinton | Leave a Comment 

Apparently the Clintonization and the politicization  (some would say that’s the same difference) of America’s foreign policy has been proceeding apace  in Foggy Bottom.

Remember that “reset button” fiasco —the pesky peregruzka problem— a couple of weeks ago?

In today’s Politico, Ben Smith reports the bigger institutional story that was uncovered while digging around to find out who was responsible for the linguistic gaffe:

Hillary Clinton’s departure for the State Department was meant to end the era of Clinton drama, and to leave the turmoil of her campaign behind. But one former Clinton aide, now a senior adviser to Secretary Clinton, has brought at least some of that drama along with him.

State Department reporters and observers have been buzzing about the brewing conflict since her second foreign trip, earlier this month, to Europe and the Middle East. On that trip, her longtime Senate press secretary Philippe Reines – one of the combatants in Hillaryland’s long civil wars – took over as the political staffer charged with handling the press.

The trip was marked by tussles over information and access, but it became known for a high-profile blunder in Geneva on March 6. There, Clinton met Sergei Lavrov, the dour Russian Foreign Minister, and cheerily presented him with a large red button in a yellow case, with the words “Reset” and “Peregruzka” written on it.

“We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?” Clinton asked.

“You got it wrong,” said Lavrov.

The error appalled some in the State Department, because the button – which was inscribed in Latin script, not Cyrillic – hadn’t been assembled with the help of State’s cadre of Russian speakers and professional translators, but rather by Clinton’s small political team. The day of the event, people involved said, Reines showed the finished product to officials who spoke Russian, but who weren’t native, or up-to-date enough to catch the error in a word out of computer terminology.

One of those was the senior director for Russia at the National Security Council, Michael McFaul, a well-known Russia scholar. Three people familiar with the incident said that, in its aftermath, Reines sought to place public blame on McFaul, a former Stanford professor.

Pressed Monday on the button incident, Reines denied that he’d ever blamed McFaul, and sent over a joking statement taking responsibility for the gaffe.

“Ultimotely [sic], this was my soul [sic] risponsibility [sic], nobody else’s in or out of the building. While the Russians laughed off the error and accepted the gift in the spirit of cooperation that it was meant, I’ve been sic [sic] about the mistake since, especially that I let down the Secretary and the fine professionals at the State Department,” he e-mailed.

McFaul didn’t respond to e-mail seeking comment, and National Security Council official Denis McDonough brushed a question about it off as a “typical Washington story.”

A McFaul ally said that “the notion that it was all on him, if that’s what they’re saying, is clearly unfair. He was asked to look at it.” 

DSPQ

March 12, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Double Standard Paranoia Quotient, International Affairs, Obama administration, Secretary Clinton | Leave a Comment 

Secretary Clinton’s Russian reset button goofski didn’t exactly go unnoticed.  But it has, apparently, gone entirely unexamined.

No questions have been asked about it during the daily DOS press briefing; and the Department hasn’t made —and won’t be making— any explanation.

Can you imagine if this mistake had been made by a Republican SOS in the service of a Republican POTUS?  Can you?  I mean, really, can you?

The Washington Times was apparently the only journalistic operation with an inquiring mind in this regard:

Although the networks aired small segments on the debacle Friday, no media ever sought an explanation, or, more importantly, what steps the State Department was taking to make sure it didn’t happen again. Even after the secretary returned, not one reporter has asked about the episode during the department’s daily briefings.

“This is another clear example of the double standard that exists,” said Roger Aronoff, a media analyst for Accuracy in Media. “If this had happened in the Bush administration, to President Bush in particular or even to Condi Rice, it would have gotten a whole lot more publicity and ridicule by the mainstream media.”

Then again, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would likely have caught the mistake – she’s fluent in Russian.

Rich Noyes, research director for the Media Research Center, has an easy explanation for the quick disappearance of the fiasco. “It was a weekend story, and so it didn’t get huge coverage,” he said, but he added that the mixup doesn’t jibe with the positive coverage of Mrs. Clinton’s trip, which “has been all about how she’s going to give us a fresh start.”

The U.S. media have all but ignored the gaffe, but the Russian media have had a field day with it. The newspaper Kommersant ran a picture of the red button alongside the words: “Sergei Lavrov and Hillary Clinton pushed the wrong button.” A correspondent for Russian NTV television called it a “symbolic mistake.”

Mrs. Clinton certainly isn’t the first U.S. official to blunder when trying to say something in a foreign language.

In Warsaw, President Carter’s translator, trying to relay to Poles that the president “understood their anxiety,” stated that the president desired them sexually.

Still, Irene Frishman, managing director of Language Solutions International in New Hampshire, found Mrs. Clinton’s error hard to understand.

“So Hillary Clinton went to Russia using garbage translators?” the native of Russia said. “Ha. This is not a difficulty in the translation, but rather the person who did the translation was simply not qualified for the job. Tell her we will help next time.”