Talking points: Dan Rather, Hillary Clinton, and the bridge to nowhere

Dan Rather: Putting the blame on CBS

Welcome back, Dan Rather, said Jonah Goldberg in National Review Online. Like many Americans, I have missed the regular spectacle of Rather—“one of the 20th century’s most pompous gasbags”—finding a new way to humiliate himself, but this week brought joyous news. Three years ago, you’ll recall, Rather lost his job as CBS news anchor after relying on forged—or at least “shoddily verified”—documents to report that President Bush used family connections to avoid military service during the Vietnam War. Now, a tearful, self-pitying Rather has emerged from obscurity, announcing that he’s suing CBS for $70 million. The network, Rather charges, wanted to “pacify the White House” after bloggers noisily challenged the documents’ authenticity, so it made him a “scapegoat.” It’s a ludicrous charge, of course, but here’s hoping this grizzled old “grassy-knoll theorist” sticks to his guns. In these “dour times,’’ we could all use some comic relief.

CBS isn’t laughing, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post, because Rather’s larger point has merit. To appease angry conservatives, he says, CBS management utterly failed to “defend the story’s central thrust’’—that because of his father’s political connections, Bush got special treatment while hiding from the war in the Texas Air National Guard. CBS’ own private investigator, the lawsuit says, concluded that Bush did, in fact, evade some of his National Guard service. By then, though, management’s only concern was making the scandal go away, said Mary Mapes, one of the CBS producers fired in the scandal, in Huffingtonpost.com. The coordinated wave of right-wing outrage “scared the bejeezus out of the CBS corporate types,” illustrating how journalism has been “trivialized and castrated” in the age of corporate media ownership.

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Yes, but what about “that pesky accountability thing?” said The Philadelphia Inquirer in an editorial. Rather—who was not merely the anchor but the “managing editor’’ of the CBS Evening News—undeniably broadcast a story that leaned heavily on some woefully underverified documents. This was “one of the most significant errors in the history of American TV journalism’’—and it came with Rather’s personal stamp of integrity. When the story started to unravel, where else was the buck supposed to stop? In now blaming CBS for his own career suicide, said Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times, Rather has surrendered his last shred of dignity. When CBS made him an anchor, “Rather took the best seat in the house that [Edward R.] Murrow built, and then left the place a ruin. Now he has returned to torch the rubble.’’

Clinton: Her momentum is growing

“Can anyone, or anything, stop Hillary Clinton from winning the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination?” asked Philip Gailey in the St. Petersburg, Fla., Times. With a large and unwavering lead in most polls, the New York senator “has not even worked up a sweat” in establishing herself as the Democrats’ inevitable candidate, easily deflecting criticism from her opponents and rarely straying from carefully calibrated talking points. Nothing—not the fund-raising embarrassment involving accused swindler Norman Hsu or her continually “evolving” positions on Iraq—seems to be slowing her momentum. With the first primaries just four months away, her rivals, Barack Obama and John Edwards, are getting panicky, said Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zeleny in The New York Times. “They’ve run a great campaign,” admits Obama’s senior advisor, David Axelrod. Joe Trippi, Edwards’ main strategist, says ruefully, “It’s pretty clear that she has sort of pulled away.”

Hillary’s near-universal name recognition gives her an advantage that’s hard to overcome, said John McCormick in the Chicago Tribune, especially since the three candidates are philosophically so similar. She’s particularly well-regarded by the party’s working-class “beer voters,” who’ve come to see her as tough. Obama, on the other hand, is drawing most of his support from the white-wine crowd of academics, lawyers, and corporate chieftains, which has been great for fund-raising but does not bode well for his prospects in rural primary states such as Iowa and New Hampshire. At the moment, he’s in the same position as Gary Hart in 1984, Bill Bradley in 2000, and Howard Dean in 2004—insurgents who started off with a big head of steam, wilted, and watched the nomination go to mainstream Democrats.

Hillary has one big obstacle left, said Rick Klein in ABCnews.com. She has to convince Democrats that a candidate so closely identified with the partisan wars of her husband’s administration can win the general election. That’s still very much in question, with polls consistently finding that 45 percent of the public views her negatively. Obama—with “an insane amount of money” in his war chest—is just beginning to advance his argument that he’s the Democrat most likely to benefit from the country’s hunger for a fresh, new face. A new poll of 31 critical “swing districts” across the country reveals the depth of independent and Republican voters’ distrust of Hillary, said Chris Cillizza in The Washington Post. In a head-to-head matchup, Republican Rudy Giuliani beats Hillary, 49 percent to 39 percent, while Giuliani and Obama are virtually tied. So hold the coronation: Before Clinton is elected the U.S.’s first female president, she has to change a few million more minds.

The Bridge to Nowhere: A farewell to pork?

Did you hear about the Bridge to Nowhere? said John Fund in Opinionjournal.com. Turns out that it’s … going nowhere. Alaska’s Gov. Sarah Palin has finally canceled the obscure construction project that last year became such a damning symbol of greed and corruption in the last Republican Congress. The bridge in question, just to remind you, would have cost federal taxpayers $398 million, all for the pleasure of seeing the tiny Alaskan town of Ketchikan (population 7,400) connected to its airport on a nearby island (population 50). The U.S. senator who “earmarked” the funds for the bridge, Ted Stevens, is now the subject of an FBI bribery probe, and Democrats are in charge of Congress, having swept into town with a pledge to end the earmark culture that let lobbyists and GOP lawmakers grow so fat. But have they delivered?

They’d certainly like you to think so, said Lee Drutman in The Providence Journal. The Democrats’ lobbying- and ethics-reform bill was signed into law last week with maximum fanfare, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi declaring that “Democrats in Washington are draining the swamp to make this the most honest Congress in history!” Someone had better tell “Reps. Jack Murtha (D-Pa.), Pete Viscolsky (D-Ind.) and Jim Moran (D-Va.),” said David Freddoso in National Review. In the first six months of the year, these three Democrats alone funneled $100.5 million in earmarks to clients of the PMA Group, a lobbying firm. PMA, as it happens, contributed $542,350 to the campaigns of the three lawmakers over just the last six months. Coincidence? Perhaps. Reform? Not so much.

If there’s a hypocrite here, it’s President Bush, said USA Today in an editorial. All of a sudden, “in the twilight of his presidency,” the man who swelled the national debt from $5.7 trillion to $9 trillion in just seven years is threatening to veto all the Democrats’ spending bills if they have the temerity to include any “wasteful spending.” Among the “wasteful” programs that Bush dislikes is a proposal to extend health coverage to children whose parents lack health insurance. All the Democratic proposals Bush says he’ll veto, not incidentally, “would be dwarfed by Bush’s request for more Iraq war spending,” which is now running at $12 billion a month. It’s time for all parties to stop blaming one another for the country’s growing fiscal crisis and “start seeing it as an urgent call to action.”