American Politics Journal -- It's Smorgasbord Time in Tamara's Kitchen



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It's Smorgasbord Time in Tamara's Kitchen
Sheehy's Hillary-Trashing Boomerangs As Critics Find Major Errors of Fact
Bradley Hits up Republicans for Cash
Public Schools Revisited: Are Our Teachers Really That Bad?

by Tamara Baker

Monday, Dec. 13, 1999 -- ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA -- So.... how bad of a job did Gail Sheehy do on her Hillary book?

Lloyd Grove on Sheehy:
Dec. 8
Dec. 9
Dec. 10

Lloyd Grove's "Reliable Source" column in the Washington Post spent three full days tabulating the errors, and didn't even claim to come close to getting them all.

Here's a few choice ones:

"It is worth noting that his marriage, to a woman smarter than he, did not survive," psychobiographer Gail Sheehy writes about Clinton pals Mack and Donna McLarty on Page 123 of her just-published Hillary's Choice. It may be worth noting--but it ain't so. The McLartys have stayed happily married for three decades.
"In fact," Gail Sheehy writes in Hillary's Choice, her just-published psychobiography of the first lady, "she told Tony Podesta, an Illinois Democratic Party official, that she might have saved Senator Carol Moseley-Braun 'if my team had gotten to Chicago a month earlier.' "

"I am not now, nor have I ever been, an Illinois Democratic Party official," Washington lobbyist Podesta told us yesterday. "I was the president of the College Young Democrats of Illinois in 1964. Sheehy once made an appointment to interview me and then she canceled it." Hmmm. Maybe she mistakenly showed up to interview Podesta at party headquarters in Springfield, Ill.

But wait! There's more!

On Page 209, the first lady's psychobiographer writes that even some of her admirers believed: " 'There's something a little Al Haig-ish about her' (referring to Nixon's chief of staff, who seized the moment of his president's resignation to tell the world he was now in charge)." Nope. Haig said it in March 1981, when he was secretary of state for the just-shot Ronald Reagan. On Page 42, Sheehy introduces Clinton pal Eleanor Dean Acheson as "E.D., as she was known," and refers to her as "E.D." repeatedly. Acheson, assistant attorney general for policy planning, is known as Eldie.

These are just a few of the many gaffes -- or "Gail goofs" -- that Mr. Grove describes in the columns he devotes to the subject. Looks like you could just about open the book to virtually any page and you'd hit at least one Sheehy blooper.

And Grove doesn't even take into account the many Whitewater howlers Sheehy committed. That task was left to Mr. Gene Lyons of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Lyons is famous for having written Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater, and has co-authored a soon-to-be-published book with Joe Conason on the larger details of the near-decade-long effort by certain conservative powers to destroy the Clintons. If anyone would know the ins and outs of Whitewater, it would be him.

In his December 8th column, Lyons takes apart a short passage of the book sent to him by a reader. The passage, dealing allegedly with Whitewater, manages to pack eleven major fallacies, misstatements and errors into a handful of short paragraphs. I'd quote you some of it, but I don't have the space to do so, and besides, Gene does such a good job of eviscerating Ms. Sheehy that you really should click on the link and read for yourself.

Meanwhile, Bill Bradley's campaign suffered a major setback when it was announced that he has for some time been suffering from atrial fibrullation (irregular heartbeat), which he keeps in check for the most part with medication. But the medication must be taken according to a set schedule, and forgetting to take it as directed can result in flare-ups of the condition, as happened to Bradley last week.

How this will impact his campaign remains to be seen, but I will take a big guess and state that this probably means that his days of getting big-money donations are over.

Why would I say that? Because many of Bradley's biggest donors are Republicans who want either Bush or McCain to win in 2000 -- and they are only donating to Bradley in the hope that he either defeats Gore for the nomination, or weakens Gore enough to soften him up for whoever Gore winds up facing in November of next year.

Want evidence? Check this out:

From the Manchester Union-Leader, in an article on McCain picking up yet another important supporter that Shrub had hoped to get, we find this:

AMONG THE GUESTS at a recent private Bill Bradley fund-raiser on Manhattan's Upper East Side was Columbia University Prof. Robert Mundell, the father of the supply-side movement who won the 1999 Nobel prize in economics.

Ah, yes. The man who gave us Reaganomics.

Mundell has been associated politically with Republicans, especially supply-sider Jack Kemp. But he admires Bradley and asked to attend the money-raiser (though Mundell, as a Canadian citizen, could not contribute to the former senator's Democratic Presidential campaign).

The event was hosted by Republican David Smick, who was Kemp's chief-of-staff and in the 1980s sponsored international monetary seminars that included Kemp, Bradley and Mundell as speakers.

Now Bradley's people have been working the far-left fringes of the Democratic party, painting BB as the "liberal alternative to Gore".

Yet over the past 20-odd years, he's voted for Iran-Contra, voted for Reaganomics, and has been hanging out with the people who INVENTED Reaganomics, the same folks arch-conservative Jack Kemp hangs with.

Excuse me?!?!

As the reader who sent me this said, "Bradley has got to be running a scam on somebody."

But it's a moot point now, because Bradley's career is now effectively over. I can't see Gore even wanting him on the ticket, because the same Republicans that were donating to Bradley in droves will now turn on him, to use the Hunter S. Thompson expression, like rats in a slumfire.

Bradley's apologists are pointing to George Bush's own heart conditions, which were diagnosed in 1991, as proof that this is a survivable political setback. There are three problems with this analogy: George Bush was already President when the problem was diagnosed, no one wanted to remove Bush if it meant giving Danny Quayle the briefcase with the launch codes, and George Bush lost the election to Clinton the very next year.

In a column last week, I mentioned the Bush family's efforts to trash public education under the guise of reforming it. I also mentioned how the Sandia Report, which was suppressed by the Bush Administration because its findings did not agree with established Reagan-Bush ideology, particularly as set forth in A Nation At Risk, that classic Reagan-Administration-commissioned work of fiction.

Unfortunately, a lie, if repeated enough and if it's audacious enough, often becomes accepted as truth, and so it has been for the most part with A Nation At Risk. It has been used as an excuse to break teachers' unions, the pretext being that awful old things like tenure and decent work conditions keep new teaching blood from crowding out old incompetent teachers. (It somehow never occurs to those people pushing this "solution" that a much better way of getting good-quality teachers would be to make sure they were paid a living wage. But the concept of "you get what you pay for" is totally foreign to the "reformers", especially if it means that their biggest campaign contributors are doing the paying.)

Richard Rothstein, in the December 6, 1999 issue of The American Prospect, addresses this issue cogently and concisely. At the article's end, he sums up:

... Money is needed for higher salaries in hard-to-staff fields and locations, recruitment of even more teachers to replace mentors who move out of full-time classroom roles and into supervisory ones, class-size reduction for the most disadvantaged children, and expansion of public schooling to preschool years, especially for at-risk youth. Even if average teacher salaries increased by only $10,000 annually to compete with other professions, the bill for these reforms could easily total $50 billion a year, politically a nearly inconceivable increase of almost 20 percent in what schools presently spend. Attacks on teacher ability are cheap; providing the teachers our schools need will not be.