Obama on "60 Minutes": "I’m the first one to confess that the spirit that I brought to Washington, that I wanted to see instituted..."

"... where we weren’t constantly in a political slugfest but were focused more on problem-solving that, you know, I haven’t fully accomplished that, haven’t even come close in some cases."

This sentence poses an interesting rhetorical conundrum. If your goal is to avoid constantly being in a slugfest and you are ever not in a slugfest, you have achieved that goal. You could even say you have fully accomplished it, since it was such a low bar, not being constantly in a slugfest.

But obviously Obama did not mean that, since he's confessing failure, though not complete failure. He hasn't fully accomplished what he wanted. But maybe looking at that elaborate, professorily built-up sentence, I'm seeing the opposite of my first reading, and I want to say that he has completely failed. If it's an on-and-off slugfest, it's really still a slugfest. Even a real-life boxing match has rounds and little rest periods. You can't claim to have partially accomplished a change in the slugfestiveness as long as the slugfestivities keep popping up.

The thing is: Our Professor-President has a way of stringing phrases along in what actually ultimately congeals into a sentence that is weirdly arranged but completely grammatical, that conveys the feeling of intelligence and thoughtfulness but — if you pull it apart — yields no significant meaning. But you're not supposed to pull it apart. Why would you do that? It was so lovely, so lulling... so likeable.

Goodbye to Mike Wallace.

The monumental broadcaster was 93.

ADDED: Here's a nicely detailed obit. Excerpt:

Mr. Wallace was a master of the skeptical follow-up question, coaxing his prey with a "forgive me, but…" or a simple, "come on."...

His late colleague Harry Reasoner once said, "There is one thing that Mike can do better than anybody else: With an angelic smile, he can ask a question that would get anyone else smashed in the face."

Mr. Wallace said he didn't think he had an unfair advantage over his interview subjects: "The person I'm interviewing has not been subpoenaed. He's in charge of himself, and he lives with his subject matter every day. All I'm armed with is research."

Adele.

1. Delightful on "60 Minutes."

2. In depth analysis of why her songs make people cry.

Obama processing doubts about running for reelection.

Here's the moment in Obama's "60 Minutes" interview that struck us:



Transcription:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: ... And as Michelle reminds me, "You volunteered for this thing."...

KROFT: Have you and Michelle ever had a conversation about whether you should really seek a second term? Have there been any doubts in your mind about not running again?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: No. Not because our quality of life might not be better if I were not president. Not because Michelle is so enamored with me being President. But because we both think that what we're doing is really important for a lot of people out there.

Hearing that, what stunned me was the way Obama processed the question in terms of his personal life with Michelle and seemed to reveal that he's not enjoying life as President and that Michelle isn't happy about it. Then he yanks himself out of that personal brooding and plugs in the appropriate, conventional, and utterly bland assertion that he's doing important things for people. And even that appropriate statement involves Michelle. Michelle and the "people out there."

People out there... what a phrase. It's so... Norma Desmond....

Imagine starting something when you're 59 years old, and becoming a fixture — an icon — doing it for 30+ years.

Andy Rooney, dead at 92.



ADDED: Did you ever notice how nobody notices Joe Piscopo anymore?



That was from 1984, when it was considered hilariously obvious that Andy Rooney was too old and too boring and repetitious to be on TV anymore.

AND: Here's the late Phil Hartman doing Andy Rooney, back when people had the idea that Andy Rooney was racist and homophobic:



From the CBS News article at the first link:

Rooney was also mistakenly connected to racism when a politically charged essay highly insensitive to minorities was written in his style and passed off as his on the internet in 2003....

Many assumed he wrote the screed because Rooney's longtime habit of writing or speaking plainly on sensitive topics had left him open to attacks in the past by activist groups. The racist essay was one of the many false Rooney quotes and essays bouncing around the Internet. The racism charge angered and hurt Rooney deeply, especially because as a young soldier in the early 1940s, he got himself arrested in Florida for refusing to leave the seat he had chosen among blacks in the back of an Army bus.

At the height of the AIDS crisis, Rooney had his biggest run-in with a group and it had dire consequences. In February 1990, the gay magazine The Advocate interviewed him after he associated the human choices of drugs, tobacco and gay sex with death in a CBS News special, "A Year With Andy Rooney: 1989." The magazine printed racist remarks attributed to him from the interview, which he vehemently denied making. A torrent of negative publicity followed, after which then-CBS News President David Burke suspended him for three months. The outcry for his return was deafening. Burke reinstated him after only three weeks, saying Rooney was not a man "who holds prejudice in his heart and mind." The ratings for "60 Minutes," CBS' only top-10 hit that season, dropped while Rooney was off the air.

How loathsome is CBS?

"For me, I will often see a calendar in my head, and it's usually a month at a time."

"When I hear the date, it's like my brain immediately goes to a position on a calendar and once I locate it, I see what happened instantly."

The "60 Minutes" profile of John Boehner.

Very nicely done, with much crying. Watch the whole thing — plus extras — here. Don't miss the last line.

ADDED: Meade said:

Leslie Stahl: "...and third in line to the presidency."

Oh, I see - after Friday's presser, Obama is now first in line.

"Are you punch-drunk?"

Asks Steve Kroft as Obama keeps giggling.

(And what's wrong with Kroft? He sounds drunk.)

"Where does the story come from that I don't like beer? Come on, man."

Barack Obama on "60 Minutes," fending off a Steve Kroft crack about how he's gone out of his way to seem like the common man.

ADDED: Here's some transcript (and video):

"You know, I think we really underestimate people in the neighborhood. In the neighborhoods I came from, you came from. I really think we underestimate them," Biden remarked. "People get it. I think they're looking for more than whether or not Joe Biden's from Scranton and she hunts. I think that's you know, 'What ya gonna do about it?'"

"But you tried really hard to reach these people. You went and sipped beer, which I know you don't particularly like - I mean you even…," Kroft remarked.

"Steve, I had a beer last night. I mean, where do these stories come from, man?" Obama asked.

"I'm the one… [that] doesn't drink," Biden pointed out.

"Where does the story come from that…I don't like beer? …C'mon, man," Obama said.

"You even tried bowling," Kroft remarked.

"Time out there," Obama said.

"I've got to defend my bowling honor here," Obama said, laughing. "It is true that my bowling score left something to be desired. The reason I bowled though, wasn't to try to get votes....."

Scalia on "60 Minutes."

Jeralyn aptly identifies the highlights:

• torture is not punishment when you are trying to get information out of someone
• Fetuses are not persons within the meaning of the Equal Protection Clause. Persons means people who can walk around. Pregnant women shouldn't be counted twice.
• He has 9 kids and 28 grandkids. He was an only child. Why? They practiced their version of "Vatican Roulette."

And then there was the part where Leslie Stahl tried to ambush him with evidence that he suffered from depression in the mid-90s, and he managed to reduce it to mere concern that he was repeating himself. He feels better now, he noted.

ADDED: Here are the transcript and the video — part 1 and part 2 — thanks to How Appealing.

"Clinton is pressed to say that Obama is not a Muslim. She does - but then she pulls it back."

Andrew Sullivan is looking at this video:



Here's the whole "60 Minutes" segment, which aired yesterday. Watching the short excerpt, I was inclined to minimize Clinton's "as far as I know," because it seemed as though Steve Kroft was using a technique of continuing to ask the same question until he extracted the quote that would make news. Clinton's initial response is completely appropriate, and, to my ear, it seemed as if the backing off in the end was a lawyerly precision about her lack of personal knowledge of the subject rather than a sly attempt to stimulate doubts.

But let's look at the whole context (at the end of the segment):

1. One seriously confused citizen, interviewed on camera, expresses the belief that Obama is a Muslim and says that's what he's "been told."

2. We see Barack Obama, interviewed by Kroft, who tells the candidate that something that's "popped up" on their "radar screen" — "not widespread" — is the idea that he is a Muslim. "60 Minutes" has skipped over any independent effort to trace the rumors. Kroft simply asks Obama: "Where's it coming from?" Obama says: "This has been a systematic email smear campaign that's been going on since actually very early in this campaign. Clearly, it's a deliberate effort by some group or somebody to generate this rumor."

3. "60 Minutes" shows the African garb photograph of Obama that, we're told, was on the internet and "attributed to people in the Clinton campaign."

4. Kroft informs us that "Senator Clinton denied any knowledge of it," and then we see Clinton talking not about the source of the rumors, but about whether she believes Obama is a Muslim. Her denials then come across as a little too smilingly cute and constrained. She doesn't know.

Now, I think this "60 Minutes" segment is very poor journalism. We're shown one ignorant man, told about rumors that are some unknown degree short of widespread, then treated to the statement of one candidate who asserts there is a "a systematic email smear campaign," followed by the statement that the one photo was "attributed to people in the Clinton campaign." What kind of reporting is that? Why don't you tell us the extent of the rumor, what was in the emails, and investigate the source? Why is there no following up on Obama's assertion that there is "a systematic email smear campaign"?

Instead, the Obama interview is edited to allow him the chance to profess his longstanding belief in Christianity and to say some magnanimous things about Muslims. Obama seems delightfully warm and flashes a beautiful smile. Hasn't he — with the help of "60 Minutes" — just slyly facilitated the rumor that the Clinton campaign is the source of the email?

Hillary Clinton has no way to know this is the set up, and her interview is cut to make it seem as though she's unwilling to squelch the rumor. But what exactly did she say about whether her campaign is the source of the email or the photograph? Did Kroft probe? It didn't make the edit. Maybe it wasn't punchy and entertaining enough, and maybe "60 Minutes" meant to leave her looking like the insincere face of an underhanded campaign.

ADDED: Mickey Kaus agrees with me:

It seems like mere reflexive politico-legal ass-covering on her part, not innuendo-spreading. If you're Hillary, you have to have learned not to make sweeping declarations of fact about things you can't really know--e.g., "Obama is not a Muslim"--without adding a caveat. Her sin, if any, was not realizing that this instance was an exception to the normal rule --an occasion where she'd be expected to make a sweeping declaration of fact about something she couldn't really know. And to do it on 60 Minutes--where smart politicians are normally primed be very cautious.

AND: There's room here to criticize Hillary for being too much of a lawyer, but there is also an argument that she is being distinctively Christian. It is a Christian point of view to see religion as something internal, known only to the individual and to God. You might go to church every Sunday and still not be a Christian, in Christian terms. Thus, if the question is whether someone else is a Christian, the most you can ever say is as far as I know. To claim to know more is to put yourself in the place of God.

"How smart is it for a woman with such a bad reputation for truthfulness and veracity to put those character traits at the center of the campaign?"

Stuart Taylor, Jr. asks the classic I-thought-you-were-supposed-to-be-smart question of Hillary. He notes her ridiculous citation of Obama's "I Want to Become President" kindergarten essay and proceeds to enumerate the Clintonian dishonesty:

Gennifer and Monica. ... Although well aware of her husband's philandering history, Hillary backed his squishy denials, famously asserting on "60 Minutes" that she was not "some little woman standing by her man like Tammy Wynette." More deceptively, she suggested to ABC's Sam Donaldson that Bill's contacts with Flowers were just an example of how he loved to "help people who are in trouble" and "listen to their problems."

"Hillary's words uncannily foreshadowed her insistence six years later to ... a White House aide that Bill had 'ministered' to [Monica] Lewinsky because she was a troubled young woman," Sally Bedell Smith writes in her fine new book about the Clintons, For Love of Politics. Hillary has continued to insist that she believed what she said about Lewinsky. But friends and former aides have told Smith and others that she knew her husband was lying all along.

Travelgate. ... [H]er statements were contradicted by evidence, including a long-concealed memo to McLarty and a written chronology prepared by White House aide David Watkins that came to light years later....

While saying that no provable crime had been committed, Robert Ray, who had succeeded Kenneth Starr as independent counsel, reported in October 2000 that Hillary's statements had been "factually false" and that there was "overwhelming evidence that she in fact did have a role in the decision to fire the employees."

Cattle futures. ... Hillary's first explanation (through aides) of this extraordinary windfall was that she had made the investment after "reading The Wall Street Journal" and placed all the trades herself after seeking advice from "numerous people." It was so preposterous that she soon had to abandon it.....

Removal of Vince Foster documents. ...

Castle Grande. .... Castle Grande was a sewer of sham transactions... Hillary told federal investigators that she knew nothing about Castle Grande. When it turned out that more than 30 of her 60 hours of legal work for Madison Guaranty involved Castle Grande, she said she had known the project under a different name. A 1996 Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. report said that she had drafted documents that Castle Grande used to "deceive federal bank examiners."...

Billing records. ....

Taylor lays it out crisply.

Orin Kerr devastates Frank Rich...

... with facts that Rich should be quite embarrassed not to have checked.

ADDED: Rich also asserts that Thomas never turns a critical eye on Republicans. Rich stresses Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" and writes:

One former Nixon White House colleague, Pat Buchanan, said on "Meet the Press" last weekend that it was no big deal for Republican candidates to skip a debate before an African-American audience because blacks make up only about 10 percent of the voting public and Republicans only get about a tenth of that anyway....

Mr. Thomas seems ignorant of this changing America. He can never see past his enemies' list, which in his book expands beyond his political foes, Yale and the press to "elite white women" and "paternalistic big-city whites" and "light-skinned blacks."

But as I wrote back here:

At page 178, of "My Grandfather's Son," Justice Thomas, who was chairman of the EEOC, states that his "main quarrel with the Reagan administration... was that it needed a positive civil-rights agenda, instead of merely railing against quotas and affirmative action."

At page 179, he writes: "Too many of the president's political appointees seemed more interested in playing to the conservative bleachers..." He suspected this was because "blacks didn't vote for Republicans," so there was little to be gained by helping them. As proof that his suspicion was right, he notes that he offered to help the Reagan reelection campaign "only to be met with near-total indifference." A "political consultant" told him "straight out that since the president's reelection strategy didn't include the black vote, there was no role for" him.

So Clarence Thomas wrote explicitly about the exact issue that he "seems ignorant of" to Rich. Yes, of course, he seems ignorant to you, Frank Rich, because you knew the attitude you intended to take and you had your assumptions all lined up when you wrote this idiotic tirade.

Take another look at the column, and you'll see that Rich got most of the material for his column by watching television. I've added some boldface to point this up:

Since kicking off his book tour on "60 Minutes" last Sunday, he has been whining all the way to the bank...

It's useful to watch Mr. Thomas at this moment, 16 years after his riveting confirmation circus....

This could be seen most vividly on "60 Minutes,"...

Bill O'Reilly may have deemed the "60 Minutes" piece "excellent," but others spotted the holes. Marc Morial, the former New Orleans mayor who now directs the National Urban League, told Tavis Smiley on PBS that it was "as though Justice Thomas's public relations firm edited the piece." On CNN, Jeffrey Toobin, the author of the new best-seller about the court, "The Nine," said that it was "real unfair"...

[Thomas] asserted to a compliant Jan Crawford Greenburg of ABC News last week...

Did Rich even read the book?

Clarence Thomas on middle-class white women who think they're "oppressed."

Harsh words for feminists at pages 98-99:

Many of the women I'd met [at Yale Law School] had come from the most privileged of circumstances, yet they often referred to themselves as "oppressed." I found it hard to take their "oppression" seriously, since I'd spent the first part of my life living among black women who cooked and kept house for the middle- and upper-class whites of Savannah. They never talked about being oppressed. What right, then, did the elite white women of Yale have to complain about their lot?

This is in a part of the book where he describes feeling much more comfortable around the people who worked in the Missouri attorney general's office in Jefferson City. He liked the way these people talked about a lot of things other than politics and had political opinions that "ranged all the way across the spectrum, with a generous sprinkling of indifference in between." He especially liked the way none of the "white secretaries" were radical feminists. Because they didn't complain about oppression, he got the feeling these women would, like him, have scoffed at the privileged white feminists at Yale, and he liked that feeling: "I began to relax, and to see and live life more fully."

Secretaries who don't complain are so much easier to take than those feminists who are always needling you.

ADDED: Welcome Instapundit readers. This is one of many posts about the book. I'm blogging as I go. If you want to find the other posts, go to the main page of the blog and scroll. So far, there's this on the "60 Minutes" interview, this on taking a bath at his grandfather's house, this on feeling like law school was a swirling miasma, and this on his reading of Ayn Rand. More to come.

MORE: As chairman of the EEOC, Thomas had little feeling for the problems of white, middle class women. Here's his description of a meeting with Women Employed, a group advocating for equal pay (page 165):

About a hundred mostly white women showed up. They gave every impression of being successful, and judging by the questions they asked me, they were smart and sophisticated as well. Yet I couldn't understand how angry they seemed to be about their lot in life. How could these well-off white women be more bitter than the poor blacks and Hispanics with whom I met regularly at the EEOC?

Anita Hill reemerges, as she must, to respond to the Clarence Thomas memoir.

In an op-ed in the NYT:

In the portion of his book that addresses my role in the Senate hearings into his nomination, Justice Thomas offers a litany of unsubstantiated representations and outright smears that Republican senators made about me when I testified before the Judiciary Committee — that I was a “combative left-winger” who was “touchy” and prone to overreacting to “slights.” A number of independent authors have shown those attacks to be baseless. What’s more, their reports draw on the experiences of others who were familiar with Mr. Thomas’s behavior, and who came forward after the hearings. It’s no longer my word against his.

Many people were involved in bringing Hill forward and bolstering her testimony, but it was in a situation where there was a powerful political motivation to destroy him. It was hardly the usual he-said-she-said situation. There was a huge crowd of promoters behind both of them.

In a particularly nasty blow, Justice Thomas attacked my religious conviction, telling “60 Minutes” this weekend, “She was not the demure, religious, conservative person that they portrayed.” Perhaps he conveniently forgot that he wrote a letter of recommendation for me to work at the law school at Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa. I remained at that evangelical Christian university for three years, until the law school was sold to Liberty University, in Lynchburg, Va., another Christian college. Along with other faculty members, I was asked to consider a position there, but I decided to remain near my family in Oklahoma.

I don't think Thomas's quote connotes that she lacks religious belief. Take the word "religious" in context, between the adjectives "demure" and "conservative." I think he's using the word "religious" to connote a certain type of demeanor -- perhaps someone who forgives, turns the other cheek, and judges not. (Under my interpretation, you can criticize him for stereotyping religious people.)

Regrettably, since 1991, I have repeatedly seen this kind of character attack on women and men who complain of harassment and discrimination in the workplace. In efforts to assail their accusers’ credibility, detractors routinely diminish people’s professional contributions. Often the accused is a supervisor, in a position to describe the complaining employee’s work as “mediocre” or the employee as incompetent. Those accused of inappropriate behavior also often portray the individuals who complain as bizarre caricatures of themselves — oversensitive, even fanatical, and often immoral — even though they enjoy good and productive working relationships with their colleagues.

True and important. If only the politics could be set aside. If only Hill had also addressed what happened to our perceptions about the seriousness of sexual harassment during the Clinton era, when the politics cut the other way.

***

I'll update this post when I've read through the relevant part of the memoir. When I picked up the book yesterday, I intended to go right to the part about Anita Hill, but I let myself read the first page -- "My father had broken the only promise he ever made to us" -- and got caught up in the chronological narrative.

ADDED: Captain Ed attacks Hill.

Old, unsubstantiated allegations only have credibility among those who use them for political purposes. Contrast Hill's reception to that of Paula Jones and her allegations of indecent exposure and sexual harrassment against Bill Clinton. Unlike Hill, Jones made her complaint contemporaneously, and pursued legal action through the channels that Hill espouses in this column after the incident got publicized. All of the same people who lined up behind Hill against Thomas didn't just ignore Jones, but called her every name in the book, including "trailer trash". Hill, who thinks that she helped lead an evolution in how harrassment gets treated, somehow neglects to mention Jones as part of that evolution.

Oliver Willis attacks Thomas ("absolute filth... whose odor wafts from every case he gets his grubby little paws on").

Justice Clarence Thomas on "60 Minutes."

"I was never a liberal. I was radical," he says, talking about how difficult it was for him to go to work for a Republican after he graduated from Yale Law School. His Yale Law degree was worth almost nothing, he says. Though he graduated in the middle of his class, he couldn't get a job, and he was enraged to see that the degree meant one thing for whites and another for blacks. Everyone assumed he got into Yale because he was black, and not because he had grown up in severe hardship, and yet had always done well in every environment -- from all black to all white.

ADDED: The video.

"She was not the demure, religious, conservative person that they portrayed. That's not the person I knew."

"She could defend herself, let's just put it that way... She did not take slights very kindly and anyone who did anything, she responded very quickly."

"Didn't take 10 years?"

"It didn't take 10 minutes."

Clarence Thomas talks about Anita Hill in his "60 Minutes" interview (to air this Sunday, leaked at Drudge).

Ironically attacking his own reputation, Dan Rather sues CBS for ruining his reputation.

What a mind-boggling legal theory! Dan Rather's reputation had to do with the appearance that he was vouching for the stories he read on the air, that he was taking personal responsibility for their truth. He's suing CBS for allowing him to report a phony story:

By his own rendering, Mr. Rather was little more than a narrator of the disputed broadcast, which was shown on Sept. 8, 2004, on the midweek edition of “60 Minutes” and which purported to offer new evidence of preferential treatment given to Mr. Bush when he was a lieutenant in the Air National Guard.

Instead of directly vetting the script he would read for the Guard segment, Mr. Rather says, he acceded to pressure from Mr. Heyward to focus instead on his reporting from Florida on Hurricane Frances, and on Bill Clinton’s heart surgery.

Mr. Rather says in the filing that he allowed himself to be reduced to little more than a patsy in the furor that followed, after CBS concluded that the report had been based on documents that could not be authenticated.

So, his own actions, as he describes them, warrant the diminishment of his reputation. In which case, in asserting the basis for his lawsuit, he's diminishing his own reputation. Why then is he filing the lawsuit? You may say: for $70 million. But he has to win the lawsuit to get the money. And he has to pay his lawyers out of that recovery. Very expensive lawyers, too. Sullivan & Cromwell. (I used to work there.) And he's already dumped a lot of his own money into investigating the matter.

So, if it's not about getting money, what's it about? Well, there's this:

“I’d like to know what really happened,” he said, his eyes red and watering. “Let’s get under oath. Let’s get e-mails. Let’s get who said what to whom, when and for what purpose.”

Who, what, when, and why... I get it. It's like reporting. Except you use the judicial process to force people to talk to you and produce documents.

(Hilarious photograph at the link.)

ADDED: A lawyer from Sullivan & Cromwell is quoted in the linked article, but that firm doesn't represent Rather. His lawyers are Sonnenshein Nath & Rosenthal, and here's the complaint -- courtesy of Beldar, who's writing about that case. On one point, he says:

.... I'm sorry, but that's so badly wrong as a matter of law that every one of the Sonnenschien lawyers whose name appears on this complaint ought to be sanctioned for making it...

Also:

[I]fCBS has the guts to fight it — and that is an open question — CBS will win it. You can bet the ranch on it.

"They're convinced that the United States will pack it in and go home if they just kill enough of us."

Says Dick Cheney, speaking of our terrorist enemies, on tonight's "60 Minutes." "They can't beat us in a standup fight, but they think they can break our will."

He's right. And so are our terrorist enemies.

Dylan videos.

Google video has just added some great Bob Dylan videos, including outtakes from D.A. Pennbaker's "Don't Look Back," a 1969 duet with Johnny Cash, and a rousing 1975 concert video of "Isis." Very impressive!

ADDED: There's also some of that 2004 "60 Minutes" interview, which I blogged about at the time, here.