22 February 2008

Change You Can Xerox



The ground is cold this morning, waiting. Well below freezing, bone cold, and thus the rain is turning immediately to ice. I am hoping for a snow day today, though that comes with peril. People will be stuck at home, with nothing to do except e-mail one another.

One of our earnest entrepreneurs made an announcement about the Storm Warning at the bar last night. He said that after what he had suffered in traffic last week when it iced up, he simply had cleared his calendar for the day and was going to stay home. He looked over his amber glass of beer pensively.

“No matter what, I would make it to DC from Annapolis. It was a demonstration of determination. Not any more. I'm not doing it.”

We were at the monthly networking soiree at the Capital City Brewery off the big highway in Arlington. We hope to institutionalize the third Thursday as something special in our little circle, extend the ability of some of the old Spooks to network and mentor the younger ones, connect with others in the business, and act as a general beneficent society.

We talked some business and old times, notably about the Philippines back in the day. I am always interested in stories that put the past in context for the magazine I edit, and I was alert to the possibility. Stories about liberty in Olongapo and Subic City are certainly informative, but would have limited appeal if they were bowdlerized for publication, and would carry the risk criminal prosecution if not.

I wound up at the end of the bar with two comrades who are female. They both came up the same way we all did, though there were key differences since their careers spanned the time when women were neither equal officers, nor citizens.

I hoped to one of them to draft a story about it, the casual and pervasive nature of degrading conduct, but the anger was still raw and palpable. I had to blink, since being male, I am mostly oblivious to what goes on around me, so I made a note to explore the topic.

I did not have to wait long. I screwed around longer than I usually do this morning, since the schools are closed all over the region, and the business day is going to be unsettled regardless of what I do. There will undoubtedly be decent parking whenever I show up.

I curled up, metaphorically of course, with the New York Times. The Gray Lady is a world apart from the one in which I live. That is the point. I used to subscribe to the Sunday edition when I lived on an aircraft carrier that operated out of Japan. The heavy parcels would arrive in no particular chronologic sequence, which leant a certain surreal quality to them. I dispensed with the news, since it was old by the time I saw it, but the cultural events and book reviews were always welcome, and assured me there was something someday to come home to.

I stopped reading the Washington Post years ago. It was too arch, too political, and too connected to what I was doing, day-to-day, and there was never anything good about seeing people I knew depicted in the pages, since the implication was always negative.

The Times, though, read in real time, is like a visit to an unknown land. There was a scathing attack on Senator McCain early in the week, for an alleged dalliance with a lobbyist a decade ago, which prompted a fierce and unambiguous denial. The OpEd page today archly suggested that if evidence surfaces that the affair was real, the candidate is sunk.

The staff at the paper appear to march to some drummer that only they can hear. Their many little wars are perplexing to me. It is entertaining to derive their predispositions from the stories they report, an exercise in effect-and-cause. This morning I was intrigued by an account of the spending patterns of Senator Clinton's campaign.

I would say it was breathtaking, but I have enough to get by. If one totaled up the dollar amounts of pizza consumed by hungry volunteers, or food platters to celebrate a state-wide victory, it certainly mounts up. Their reporting on the hotel bills, though, was striking.

The Clinton campaign appeared to be determined to act Presidential, even as they were shaking down the fat-cats for big donations. Rooms at the Bellagio luxury hotel in Vegas cost more than $25,000 on one junket; the Four Seasons, another $5,000. The very best consultants collected about $5 million in January, the month that everything began to come off the tracks.

There is a lot that I do not care for in Senator Clinton's record, and I distrust her instincts, which have been wrong in so many events. This story is just another in the long line, and presages the behavior that would come in another Clinton presidency. It might be the thing that is at the root of my unease with her, and that is the sense of entitlement to life in the finest style, regardless of what one has done to earn it.

But I had to put it aside when I got to the account of the debate in Texas that I missed so I could drink beer with the insiders. I had to tune in the radio so I could hear the exact moment that the Clinton campaign died. It had nothing to do with the Four Seasons, or the elegance of the campaign debt.

It had to do with the exchange about a non-issue. There was so little difference between the Senators respective positions on the issues that the first forty minutes of the debate went without comment by the cognoscenti. Then came the moment that Senator Clinton played one of the few cards she appears to be willing to play among the many that actually mean something.

It is the controversy about the alleged plagiarism by Senator Obama of the words of Governor Deval Patrick. The shared language is more than a coincidence, and looked like a possible way to put the knife into the man who speaks so eloquently of hope in his stump speeches.

It worked against Senator Joe Biden, after all. Senator Joe is a perennial presidential candidate with a predilection for stressless scholarship. His appropriation of a speech by British politician Neil Kinnock in 1987 knocked him out of that race. There was no reason that it would not work again, and reinforces the pedigree of Senator Clinton's vast experience.

It was grasping at straws, an act of desperation. It is even more ridiculous, since the words uttered by Governor Patrick were not his, any more than the ones uttered by Senator Obama. They were produced by consultant David Axelrod, who is working now for Obama and worked then for Patrick.

How can you plagiarize yourself? The candidates are not a great deal more than photogenic sock-puppets.

But I give high marks for the carefully planned line that Senator Clinton used to try to bushwhack Senator Obama. It is a good one, and I can imagine the exultation in the meeting where it was born, a fantastic put down. She said Obama was “the candidate of change you can Xerox.”

It carries truth, and it carries the message that Senator Clinton actually thinks up some of the stuff she says. It should have been perfect.

The reaction of the crowd to what she said is what convinced me that her campaign was over. They booed. I have no objection to people staying at the Four Seasons, and aspire to do so myself some time. I take a certain grim satisfaction from that, since it is apparent to me that in the future, Senator Clinton will be staying there only on her own nickel.

Not ours.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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