Notable Quotables - 03/10/1997
Work-Nots Before Workers
"But isn't that going to only exacerbate
the feeling, especially in the cities in this country, that there is a growing
schism between the haves and the have nots because we're going to mandate
welfare reform. We're going to mandate a lot of immigration reform but there's
going to be no money that comes in behind it."
- NBC anchor Tom Brokaw
on welfare and immigration reform, to New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, March
3 MSNBC InterNight.
"[Food] stamps, a blessing, allowed them
[able-bodied adults without children] to purchase about $25 worth of food a
week. They would not be able to eat like a President or member of Congress,
but they could have some soup, maybe a little pasta, some tuna, some beans.
They wouldn't starve, and they would have enough energy to continue looking
for a job...After 90 days, the following notice is to be disseminated: Put
down that soup spoon, poor person, the Clinton administration and the
Republican-led Congress are clearing the table."
- New York Times
columnist (and former NBC reporter) Bob Herbert, February 21.
End Public Cynicism: Lie to Your Constituents
"Here was Torricelli defying such facile
media labels ["poll-directed"] with an unpopular vote against a
gaudily wrapped package of constitutional mischief....Why do political weather
vanes sometimes point true north? What prompts a pragmatic legislator to
courageously resist, at the last moment, the siren song of expediency?...Two
freshman Senators, so different in style and temperament, deserve plaudits for
sticking their necks out to block a constitutional calamity. Despite my
cynical doubts, sometimes the system works."
- USA Today Politics
columnist and former Time reporter Walter Shapiro praising Senators Bob
Torricelli and Tim Johnson, who campaigned for and then voted against the
Balanced Budget Amendment, Feb. 28.
Clinton Just Wanted to Get Re-Elected
Larry King on White House fundraising zeal:
"A little Nixonian?"
Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward:
"...Well, sure. It was all about raising money, in part, for Nixon. But
it's not Nixonian, because Nixon was clearly a criminal President. What
Clinton wanted to do was be re-elected, and in that burning desire did he
cross a line? Did he kind of open the flood gates? Well, he did the money, did
he watch the boundaries of the law? We're gonna see."
- Feb. 28 Larry
King Live on CNN.
Oh, Everybody Does It
How can you keep a straight face when
you talk about this President, who is a Democrat, inviting people to the White
House - big, heavy rollers, contributors - when the same thing was done by
Republican Presidents?"
- CNN's Bernard Shaw to U.S. Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.),
February 25 Inside Politics.
"President Clinton's best defense for any
campaign fundraising excesses or irregularities by Democrats appears to be
that the Republicans do it too. And even more."
- NBC's Jim Miklaszewski,
February 19 Today.
"Democratic National Committee documents
show that Mr. Gore's appearances at dozens of fundraisers brought millions
into Democratic Party coffers. But White House aides point out that Vice
President Dan Quayle was also a super-active fundraiser during the Bush
years."
- Rita Braver, March 3 CBS Evening News.
"Clinton did not invent a new system. He
milked the old one for all it's worth. But you still don't have any proof that
is illegal...What the Democrats did was modeled after what the Republicans had
done."
- Newsweek contributor Eleanor Clift, March 1 McLaughlin Group.
Kissinger's "Conservative"?
"Dr. Kissinger, the death of Deng
Xiaoping has triggered an interesting intellectual debate on the conservative
right, with a lot of conservative journals now and writers coming and saying
that to be a conservative, and you were associated with a conservative
administration, to be a conservative on China is to understand that you have
to stand up strategically, to contain this burgeoning giant, and morally, to
contain this very oppressive regime. How do you as a conservative, and who has
been an object of some of these attacks, react to that argument?"
- New
York Times columnist Tom Friedman to Henry Kissinger, February 23 Face the
Nation.
Great Killer's Record Marred by Runaway Capitalism
"Deng Xiaoping. He was one of the most
remarkable and controversial men of the 20th century. An intel- lectual giant
in a tiny frame who helped shape the modern China, from the long march to the
communist revolution to the mix of communist ideology and free
enterprise."
- Tom Brokaw, Feb. 19 NBC Nightly News.
"And finally, there was the most
troublesome shadow of all, Mao Zedong, Deng's friend and foe, his rival for
the soul of a country so ancient it has had the misfortune both to forget its
history many times over and to repeat it again and again. Only history will
decide who was the greater."
- Time Senior Editor Howard Chua-Eoan and
Senior Writer James Walsh, March 3.
"For all of China's economic success,
much of the vast country is still either desperately poor or suffering from
the excesses of runaway capitalism - or both."
- Newsweek's Bill
Powell, March 3.
Only Craig Livingstone Can See Those
"Remember the outcry from conservatives
eight years ago when the Senate looked at summaries of FBI reports on John
Tower, the unsuccessful nominee for Defense Secretary? Now, Senate
Intelligence Chairman Richard Shelby wants to go much further, demanding CIA
nominee Tony Lake's raw FBI files. As Senators Dick Lugar and Bob Kerrey have
said, this is outrageous. It's time to end Shelby's McCarthyite
witch-hunt."
- Wall Street Journal Executive Washington Editor Al Hunt's
Outrage of the Week, March 1 Capital Gang.
Plenty of Clinton Scandal Coverage
"It seems to be pretty tough; it seems to
be pretty thorough; it seems to be that there's been no laziness on the part
of the media with this one."
- ABC's John Cochran to independent
journalist Marc Morano at a Feb. 27 National Press Club dinner. ABC did not
air a story the night the Gore fundraising story broke.
"There's no question that [Clinton] had
extremely intense scrutiny on this issue. No one can argue that anybody in the
press, right, left, center, above or below, has failed to cover everything in
Whitewater to the maximum extent and continue to do so. And the same thing
with these new and what I consider to be very serious questions about campaign
contributions."
- Dan Rather to Morano. CBS didn't report the March 4
issuing of subpoenas to White House staff for documents on hush money payments
to Webster Hubbell.
"I think in a way, the press is paying
the price here for the frenzy of some of its past scandals because the tone of
the stories now is identical to that of Travelgate and Filegate and Mena,
Arkansasgate and other things which really didn't go anywhere in terms of
their significance. So I think there is a crying-wolf problem which we in our
business have when it comes to unveiling this sort of thing."
- U.S.
News & World Report Editor James Fallows on CNBC's Equal
Time, February
26.
Rather Hard on Mr. Nuts
"I think it's inappropriate for our competitors, who have gone through their own incarnations - including moments like Connie Chung anchoring from Tonya Harding's rink - to judge us."
"Whenever there is the first hint of a
counter-clockwise symbol on a weather map that a hurricane might hit land,
`Mr. Hard News' is down there wrapped around a lamp post."
- Tom Brokaw
reacting to Dan Rather calling NBC Nightly News "news-lite," quoted
by Gail Shister in the March 5 Philadelphia Inquirer.
- L. Brent Bozell III, Publisher; Brent H.
Baker, Tim Graham; Editors
- Geoffrey Dickens, Gene Eliasen, James Forbes, Steve Kaminski, Clay Waters;
Media Analysts
- Kathleen Ruff, Marketing Director; Carey Evans, Circulation Manager; Brian
Schmisek, Intern
