Hot Mama.
Chelsea radiates new blonde look post-NY Mag cover in Ohio yesterday with Hillary in background. Justin Sullivan, Getty.
Today’s Reads
1. Chattering Classes Fail Us Again
Echoes of New Hampshire: Ten days ago, Hilary Clinton was all but dead and buried, according to the punditocracy on cable and the oped pages. Even standard news stories had hints of Obama triuphalism. Below is the anatomy of 10-day turnaround and a media failure.
First, Saturday Night Live struck. With one deft stroke Tina Fey chastized the media’s Obama amor fiesta. A few of that Sunday’s oped pages were slathered in anti-Obama essays, espeicialy the WaPost. But the Times was all prObama.
On Monday a Clinton staffer leaked a photo of Obama in Somali Islamic battle dress to the Drudge Report. Tuesday, at the MSNBC debate, Hillary referenced SNL and asked moderater Tim Russert if Obama needed “another pillow.” Still, Obama got glowing post-debate reviews everywhere.
From there the Clintons’ said “Fuck it” and attacked. Soon came a trickle of insightful stories about Obama’s friend/fundraiser/neighbor Antoinio Rezko, a corrupt Chicago “fixer.” Friday: the Clintons’ released an outright attack ad—the most vicous of the campaign cycle—positing a post-2008 terror attack. Cue a sleeping baby, “a narrator warned of a crisis unfolding in “a dangerous world” at 3 a.m. and asked, “Who do you want answering the phone?”‘
The next night Hillary parodied herself and appeared on SNL. Sunday’s papers were awash in not just “Is it Over” stories but also more on Tony Rezko’s corruption.
At the same time, the GOP were firing up their Obama Hate Machine—”Hussein” this and “My opponent wants defeat in Iraq” that.
Monday came another bombshell. Obama’s chief economic advisor met with a Canadian official to assure them all this NAFTA talk was just political posturing. The Bam camp denied the allegations at first, but AP got hold of the memo.
On Monday night Hillary appeared on the Daily Show. Looking especially leathery and stressed, she called herself “pathetic” when asked by Jon Stewart what she was doing on a fake news show the night before the potential end of her campaign.
But Obama faced a quadruple threat on Primary eve. Was he Red Phone ready? Why is he buying land and hanging out with Tony Rezko, felon? The GOP are really Hussein-ing this guy, could he beat McCain? And finally, does he really care about the working man or is he happy shipping jobs off to Cannucks?
Yes, all of the above developed in the last 72 hours before the primaries. But anyone who’s followed the Clintons, or read Berstein’s Hillary bio, knew that an attack was obviously coming. She called herself a “fighter” during the Tuesday debate like 7 times. History shows a Clingtonian love of political beef. Equally obvious was a GOP attack.
How did anyone expect a guy running on branded “Hope” but with only 3 years in Washington, with “Hussein” for a middle name, not to be damaged by the two most effective political organizations of the last 20 years? Between the Clintons and GOP, from the War Room to Karl Rove, modern politics in all it’s dirty glory was taking action against Obama the upstart.
Overall, the media’s crystal balls were busted. Momentum meant noting. For 40 million Texans and Ohioans, policy, fear, and experience trumped hope. And those who wrote Hillary’s obit are now stuck eating crow as the fight goes on.
2. An Apology* To Riverhead
Yesterday I wrote about Riverhead’s latest bogus memoir, “Love and Consequences” by Margaret B Jones nee Seltzer. I wondered how over 3 years editor Sarah McGrath, duaghter of Timesman Charles McGrath and sister of New Yorker Ben McGrath, two of the most fact checked humans, could have not asked for some pictures or proof to back up Jones/Sletzer’s white chick South Central gangland memoir. Turns of Seltzer did provide pictures. Motoko Rick reports:
Ms. McGrath, who never met Ms. Seltzer during three years spent editing the book, said Ms. Seltzer, who lives in Eugene, Ore., had provided what she said were photographs of her foster siblings, a letter from a gang leader corroborating her story and had introduced her agent, Faye Bender, to a person who claimed to be a foster sister.
Ms. McGrath said she also trusted Ms. Seltzer because she had come through “a respected literary agent” who had in turn been referred to the author by a writer whom Ms. Bender had worked with previously.
Sorry Riverhead. Rich’s story then adds:
“It is not an industry capable of checking every last detail,” said Ira Silverberg, an agent who represented J T LeRoy (without knowing he was actually Ms. Albert) and Ishmael Beah, author of the best-selling memoir “A Long Way Gone,” who was recently accused by Australian journalists of distorting his service as a child soldier in Sierra Leone’s civil war during the 1990s, a charge that he and his publishers have repeatedly denied. “So to present yourself as something you are not betrays all the trust.”
Nan A. Talese, who published Mr. Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” said the combination of these recent episodes could start to change the business’s practices. “I think what editors are going to have to do is point to the things that happened recently and say to their authors, ‘If there is anything in your book that can be discovered to be untrue, you better let us know right now, and we’ll deal with it before we publish it,’ ” Ms. Talese said. But she added: “I don’t think there is any way you can fact-check every single book. It would be very insulting and divisive in the author-editor relationship.”
Missing from Rich’s story is minor detail. Every book published by a major US imprint is vetted by a lawyer to protect the house from being sued. This is not a fact check per say, but it is a $500 per hour investment on the publishers’ behalf that basically looks at every sentence and asks: Can we be sued for this?
Consider: When I co-wrote a memoir for Viking-Penguin, my agent and I discussed hiring an independent fact checker. A New Yorker fact checker (Sy Hersh’s son actually) would cost us $40 per hour. We nixed the idea.
If a publisher is willing to pay a lawyer $500 an hour to protect itself from lawsuits, you’d figure they’d be willing to shell out $40 an hour for truth. A very basic fact check—is this person and story real—could be performed in like 6 hours or under $500. Recalling 19,000 hardcovers must cost hundreds of thousands. Just a thought, Riverhead…
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