Who wrote Clinton’s attack line?

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both turned in strong performances tonight, and Clinton’s closing statement was moving. But she may have really blown it when she leaned too hard on Obama’s use of a few lines from Deval Patrick — who, as a prominent Obama supporter, basically qualifies as an unpaid speechwriter.

“That’s not change you can count on, it’s change you can Xerox,” she said. Question: Who wrote that line for her? And, assuming she didn’t write it herself, how does that make her any different from Obama — or any other politician?

The feeding frenzy is under way

The John McCain story has led to the media-ethics feeding frenzy of 2008. We’re going to know a lot more in a few days. Right now, we should just hang on. Still, I can’t resist posting a few tidbits.

The New Republic’s backgrounder, by Gabriel Sherman, is a must-read. It seems possible — even probable — that it was Sherman’s nosing-around that finally led the New York Times into running what it had. Bill Keller sounds really steamed. I’d love to hear a recording of him sarcastically spitting out the phrase “special correspondent.” Except that it was in an e-mail.

I and others have already speculated how miffed Mitt Romney must be that the Times waited until after McCain had all but wrapped up the nomination before dropping its bombshell. Well, Charles Kaiser of Radar now says one of the Times’ tipsters was former congressman Vin Weber, who just so happened to have been an official with the Romney campaign. Weber has denied it, but Kaiser’s not taking it back. So who knows?

Adam Reilly points out that the Boston Globe chose to run the Washington Post’s version rather than the Times’ more incendiary (i.e., sex rumors included played up) story, even though the Globe is owned by the New York Times Co. Interesting. But last night, I noticed that there was a link to the Times story featured prominently on the home page of the Globe’s Boston.com site.

Finally, no offense to Ryan Lizza, but I don’t think I’m going to get around to reading his New Yorker article on whether McCain can remake the Republican Party. Talk about bad timing.

File photo of Cindy and John McCain (cc) by Chris Dunn and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Making sense of the McCain story

Josh Marshall, fresh off his Polk Award, does a good job of putting into perspective today’s New York Times story on John McCain, which suggests, without quite saying out loud, that he may have had an affair with a lobbyist for whom he did favors during his 2000 “straight talk” campaign.

Word is that the McCain campaign tried to spike this story back in December. At Salon, Alex Koppelman recalls that it made a brief appearance on Drudge around that time, then went underground. Is it a legitimate story? Marshall thinks so, but hedges his bets:

I find it very difficult to believe that the Times would have put their chin so far out on this story if they didn’t know a lot more than they felt they could put in the article, at least on the first go. But in a decade of doing this, I’ve learned not to give any benefits of the doubt, even to the most esteemed institutions.

If this has legs, Mitt Romney clearly has plenty to howl about. It would have been the story of the campaign. Then again, Romney has merely “suspended” his campaign, hasn’t he?

Not that this can be compared to the Times’ mind-blowing decision to hold its story on the Bush administration’s no-warrant wiretapping program for more than a year, until after the 2004 presidential election. That still stands as some sort of record.

More: The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz offers some context.

Still more: Adam Reilly notes that Sam Stein hit the Romney angle last night. OK, let me try for something else original: Is this bad news for Hillary Clinton or what? For her to have any chance of staging a comeback in Texas and Ohio, she’s got to (a) get the media to subject Barack Obama to a raking-over of epic proportions and then (b) hope something turns up. Right now, thanks to the Times, (a) looks pretty unlikely.

Browser blues

The last few days, it seems that certain sites take forever to load in Firefox 2 for the Mac — especially the Boston Globe. Firefox freezes up once a day or so, too. So I played around with Safari 3 and found the Globe and the New York Times to be much zippier. But Safari quits whenever I try to load the Boston Herald. Safari is also incompatible with Blogger.

I see that Safari 3 is still in beta, which used to mean that it wasn’t quite ready for public release. Increasingly, though, beta is Greek for “we take no responsibility for our product.” I mean, Gmail and Google Calendar are still in beta, and I use them dozens of times a day.

I’ll be glad when this Internet fad blows over.

Update: I’m trying Camino 1.5.5 for the first time in a couple of years. It’s a Mac-only, open-source browser from Mozilla, and I’m pretty sure it uses the same underlying technology as Safari. I’m living dangerously by posting this from Blogger, but so far, so good.

Obama’s media moment

In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that the media, looking for a reason to make up for their brutal coverage of Hillary Clinton, are about to turn on Barack Obama. Although maybe not. Obama’s somewhat-better-than-expected margin in Wisconsin, combined with Clinton’s graceless “concession” speech, may forestall his inevitable turn in the interrogation room.

“Just words”

And lots of them! Barack Obama really gave a long speech tonight, didn’t he? Too long, by my estimation. He made the mistake of talking to the crowd rather than the folks back home. TV viewers were made to feel like they were watching an event rather than being spoken to.

As good a speaker as he is, I’ve thought for some time that he needs to work on his conversational skills. People don’t have the stamina to be speechified at for four years. It’s instructive that of the best presidential communicators of the television age — John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton — only Kennedy, with his feet planted in two different media eras, excelled at delivering a set speech.

Reagan and Clinton, by contrast, always came off as though they were talking to you. That’s what TV demands. And Obama’s shortcoming in that area makes him seem surprisingly old-fashioned sometimes.

Northeastern graduate wins Polk Award

Leila Fadel has done Northeastern proud. The 2004 graduate, now Baghdad bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers, has won a George R. Polk Award for foreign reporting. McClatchy has assembled a portfolio of her work here.

The very first piece, an account of a heart-stopping drive from the Baghdad to the Jordanian border last October, demonstrates passion, courage and a commitment to the truth. She writes:

A few months ago, no American would have been foolish enough to do what I had just done: drive from Baghdad west through Iraq’s Anbar province, long the hotbed of the country’s Sunni Muslim insurgency, and into Jordan. The route was notorious for hijackings, kidnappings and roadside bombs, and passed some of the best-known symbols of the country’s mayhem: Abu Ghraib, Hamdaniyah, Fallujah, Ramadi and beyond.

But western Iraq has changed, and the drive last Sunday was proof of that.

In December, Editor & Publisher ran a profile of Fadel and her fellow bureau members. I found a story Fadel wrote for the Northeastern News in 2003 on how students viewed the war in Iraq. She was also a co-op student at the Boston Globe.

I don’t know Fadel, but former Globe reporter Raphael Lewis does. He e-mails:

She is an amazing woman who, at 26, serves as the Baghdad bureau chief for McClatchy. Her work is quite excellent, and she was a standout student in Newswriting 1 and 2 when I taught as an adjunct at NU. I can’t tell you how proud I am of her.

What’s most encouraging about this is that Fadel shows it’s possible to succeed as a foreign correspondent at a young age. Even though the media landscape is changing, opportunities still exist.

Schilling hits the wall

It’s never pretty when a great athlete reaches the end. What compounds the human drama is that the very qualities that made him great cloud his ability to see reality.

Not that I’m going to try to choose among doctors. But it seems obvious that the Red Sox are hoping against hope that they might get some useful innings out of Curt Schilling this year through a conservative rehab program, whereas Schilling believes if they’d only let him have surgery, he can return to his glory days.

Neither scenario is realistic, but at least the Sox are pursuing the one route that might work to a limited degree. If Schilling has surgery, it’s likely that he’s done for the year, if not forever. If he doesn’t, well, maybe there’s a chance that Schilling’s got one good post-season run left in him.

It’s inevitable that the Boston sports media, and especially Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy, would try to turn this into a controversy. Schilling hasn’t helped, either. But it seems to me that there are really only two areas of possible controversy here, and neither hold up to inspection:

  • The course of treatment. Doctors disgree. What do we know? Nothing. End of discussion.
  • Schilling’s condition at the time of his signing. We know he took a physical and got an MRI when he signed a one-year, $8 million deal last fall. We may assume that he did not pass with flying colors. I’m sure the Red Sox were told that it was no worse than expected and that, with luck, he’d be able to pitch one more season. It didn’t happen. But to suggest that Schilling was hiding something is to assume that he could somehow fake his MRI.

Schilling says he needs surgery just to lead a normal post-retirement life. He sounds like someone who is deeply conflicted. I suspect he knows what he should do — announce his retirement, undergo surgery and forfeit the $8 million. If he feels like Josh Beckett next spring, well, he can always unretire.

But I’m sure Schilling believes he signed his contract in good faith, with both sides knowing the end was near, and that the Sox shouldn’t get a pass for refusing surgery — especially since his own surgeon seems to think he could be back by mid-season. (Let’s not forget that we’re talking about a 41-year-old who took a year and a half to recover from ankle surgery.)

The thing is, I see no evidence that the Red Sox aren’t acting in good faith, too.

All that said, I think there’s something to what John Henry told Shaughnessy today — that Schilling’s surgeon has created considerable doubt in the pitcher’s mind as to whether rehab will work. Might a compromise be possible? How about letting Schilling go ahead with the surgery, but not letting him collect the $8 million if he’s not back by, say, Aug. 1?

It’s worth asking him. Then again, maybe they already have.

Photo (cc) by guano, and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.