Steamboat Today, Sept. 28, 2009 by Steamboat Pilot & Today

VIEWPOINTS

STEAMBOAT TODAY

Monday, September 28, 2009

Gore, McCain ran awful campaigns ��

Beck is challenging O’Reilly by caring Thomas continued from 8 where conservatives do and take seriously their concerns about a country to which they pay taxes and for which many of them, or their parents, or children have fought, maybe they would understand what has so many upset. Pollster Frank Luntz understands. In a recent column for The New York Daily News, Luntz reports on his interview survey of 6,400 people, the results of which appear in his new book “What Americans Really Want ... Really.” Luntz discovered that people are angry with the government because of the lack of accountability by our leaders and a lack of progress on anything meaningful in Washington. The “absence of accountability,” he writes, “ranks No.

��

Kinetic Energy Physical Therapy

��

ALL NEW!

PIZZARIA

PIZZA $8.99

��

BASIC �� PESTO�� 4 CHEESE�� VEGGIE �� MEATBALL �� ITALIAN BBQ�� CHICKEN ALFREDO�� MARGHERITE�� WHITE MARGHERITE�� ITALIAN SAUSAGE��

��

WHITE VEGGIE��

��

CAPRA ��

CARNE AMORE��

��

20512504

��

class that ignores the very real suffering of the working class (if they are, in fact, working) while pocketing million-dollar bonuses has convinced the public that no one cares.” Glenn Beck seems to care and that’s why his ratings are now challenging the godfather of cable, Bill O’Reilly. I ask if he fears being transformed into another “Lonesome Rhodes,” the politically corrupted main character in Budd Schulberg’s classic film, “A Face in the Crowd”? Beck tells me I am not the first to warn of such a possibility. He says he isn’t worried about yielding to that temptation. Beck believes in God and doesn’t think government is Him. And he’s going to his son’s ball game the next day. That explains Glenn Beck. Any questions?

��

1 in the hearts and guts of the average American. Washington spends billions to bail out big business and then can’t explain where the money went. Washington spends $800 billion on a stimulus package filled with earmarks and pork projects. And now Washington is trying to create a trillion-dollar health-care experiment when over 85 percent of Americans are satisfied with their health care just as it is.” As Professor Harold Hill put it: “Make your blood boil? Well, I should say.” Luntz continues: “This could be forgiven, perhaps, if those elected officials from Washington exhibited even an ounce of respect for the voters who pay their salaries. But the combination of a political class that ignores those with whom they disagree and a business

��

election. He chastised Gore for not running on bigger themes and for dropping the issue he was most passionate about: the environment. Gore asked Clinton for an explanation of Monica Lewinsky; he wanted an apology. Clinton blew up. Focusing on his mistakes, he told his VP, demeaned voters and ignored the public’s business. Branch summed up Clinton’s bottom line to Gore: “By God, Hillary had a helluva lot more reason to resent Clinton than Gore did, and yet she ran unabashedly on the Clinton-Gore record” for the Senate and won handily. Gore, Clinton said, was in “Neverland.” The wrong turns Clinton and W. took made it harder for Gore and McCain to get elected. But in the final analyses, Clinton and W., both clever pols, were right: Gore and McCain tripped themselves up with awful campaigns.

Serving Dinner Nightly 879-9010 • 1106 Lincoln Ave • Downtown

��

tion his sanity.” His book ends with the downbeat time when Bush supports McCain simply because “a McCain defeat would be a repudiation of the Bush administration.” Both Republicans were uncomfortable. McCain was distancing himself from the unpopular Republican president and W. “was clearly not impressed with the McCain operation.” One day, W. was told that a joint appearance in Phoenix with McCain, designed to show the two men could stand to be on the same stage together, was going to be closed to the press. “If he doesn’t want me to go, fine,” W. snapped. “I’ve got better things to do.” Then the president was informed that the event was going to be closed because McCain was having trouble drawing a crowd. Latimer writes that an incredulous Bush mordantly asked: “He can’t get 500 people to show up for an

event in his hometown?” Happy he wasn’t the only political wallflower, W. drove home the point: “I could get that many people to turn out in Crawford. This is a five-spiral crash, boys.” Like W., Bill Clinton had an awkward final act supporting Gore, even though Gore was distancing himself from Clinton, and Bubba was chafing at the misguided Gore campaign. Like W. with McCain, he felt a Gore defeat would be bad for his legacy. In his new book, “The Clinton Tapes,” Taylor Branch describes an explosive meeting between Clinton and Gore after the election characterized by Clinton as “surreal.” Gore said people around him blamed Clinton’s scandalous shadow for the defeat. And Clinton, who told Branch that W. was “an empty suit, meaner than his dad,” shot back that if Gore had used him more in the last 10 days in places where he was still popular, he could have swung the

��

Dowd continued from 8