Notable Quotables - 09/09/1996
Nasty Dick Morris Scandal Ruins Bill's Big Night
"On paper it shouldn't hurt him
[Clinton]. This is about one goofy guy. We don't even know if the story is
true. The picture that I saw in the New York Post looks very much like it was
doctored."
- NPR's Nina Totenberg, who first publicized Anita Hill's
unsupported charges against Clarence Thomas, August 31 Inside Washington.
"Here in Chicago, the President
has been fine tuning, as they say, the speech he will be giving to this
convention and to the country tonight. And he has a lot to be pleased about. A
very upbeat convention. A very successful train trip here with rising poll
numbers to accompany it. And a very important set of statistics about the
economy today, which he will certainly point to as evidence that the country
should re-elect him. And then along comes a nasty little scandal to take the
edge off the good news, at least for one day."
- Peter Jennings opening
the August 29 World News Tonight.
We're All Afraid of Hillary
"Nancy pushed Ronnie into an
arms treaty with the Russians because she wanted him to win a Nobel Prize. So
maybe astrology was healthier than whatever the rest of the nuke-Managua globo-cops
were smoking in the Reagan White House. That Hillary should talk to Eleanor
Roosevelt bothers some of us less than the fact that her husband obviously
doesn't....Isn't it amazing that women have invented or designed or discovered
the prototype computer, nitrate fertilizer, penicillin, integral calculus,
food refrigeration, space helmets, atomic parity, automatic flight control,
pulsars and even DNA, not to mention square-bottomed bags, ice cream cones,
vacuum canning and the gardenia. And yet we're still afraid of what they'll
whisper into the ears of their powerful husbands. Might we at least concede
that the people we'll marry say more about us than the people we select for
the second place on the ticket of our glory-hounding selves; nobody elects
vice presidents, either. Our pathological fear of Hillary and any other uppity
woman, whatever her politics, is a form of foot-binding as well as a species
of hate radio."
- John Leonard on CBS's Sunday Morning, September
1.
"I think much of the opposition
to Hillary Rodham Clinton is the fact that she is a strong-willed woman doing
things in a man's arena, and we men don't seem to like that."
- ABC's
Sam Donaldson on This Week with David Brinkley, August 25.
"The world I graduated from
college into was certainly a man's world. That has changed. And one of the
people who was an agent of that change was Hillary Clinton and her generation.
And it's very difficult for the world to accept people who have been
revolutionaries."
- ABC's Cokie Roberts on This Week with David
Brinkley.
Democrats: Too Far Right
"Rita, how worried are the
Democrats about protests from some here that the party is running too far to
the right, particularly on welfare reform?"
- Dan Rather to Rita Braver,
August 25 CBS Evening News.
"Bill Clinton's been running
pretty hard to the right, so far that some Democrats now call him a `Republicrat.'
Do you go that far?"
- Dan Rather to Jesse Jackson, August 26 CBS
convention coverage.
"Did anyone else find it
unnerving that only days before Bill Clinton signed a welfare-reform law that
will plunge more than a million children into official poverty, he marked his
50th birthday with glitzy celebrations in New York City that added $10 million
to his party's bulging campaign war chest? Shades of Marie Antoinette, Newt
Gingrich, and Jesse Helms...As Jesse Jackson has repeatedly and unavailingly
pointed out, it makes little sense to elect a Democrat if he governs like a
conservative Republican."
- Time National Correspondent Jack E.
White in the September 2 issue.
You Think ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC Are Bad....
"The Democrats are running their
campaign on fiscal responsibility and deficit reduction, while the Republicans
have offered tax cuts. Don't you worry a little bit that voters will say,
`Hey, forget responsibility, let me take the cash'?"
- Tabitha Soren to
Chris Dodd on MTV's Party Pitch convention wrapup, Aug. 26.
Clinton: Almost as Bad as Newt Gingrich
"You said this morning that the
party's message will focus on the needs and cares of the people. Now, how do
you reconcile that with a President who has just signed a quote 'welfare
reform bill' which by general agreement is going to put a lot of poor children
on the street?"
- Dan Rather to Chris Dodd during an interview on the
August 25 CBS Evening News.
"But the Democratic Party for
sixty years, James Carville, fought for a minimum guarantee payment to poor
children and Bill Clinton undid that. Don't you have to draw the line
someplace and say 'I'm a Democrat and this is what I stand for'?"
- Meet
the Press moderator Tim Russert to James Carville, August 25.
"If you were a poor single
mother in a poor rural state in America, without many resources, and you
wanted to go to work, you want to do all the right things, but there aren't
many jobs for people who have real shills, wouldn't you be slightly terrified
looking into the next two years?"
- Tom Brokaw to HHS Secretary Donna
Shalala during PBS-NBC Democratic convention coverage, August 26.
An Enemy of Hillary's Is an Enemy of Ours
"We were just reminded in that
moving film that we saw here of your lifelong work as an advocate for
children's causes. And yet, late last week, your husband signed a welfare
reform bill that as you know, Senator Patrick Moynihan and other welfare
experts are saying is going to throw a million children into poverty. Does
that legislation threaten to undo so much of what you've worked for over the
years?....Eleaonr Roosevelt, whom you admire, mentioned her again just now,
said that much of the time she kept her disagreements with the President to
herself in private, but there were times that she felt it was important to
disagree publicly. Does there ever come a time with you, and if not welfare
reform, then what?"
- Questions from CNN's Judy Woodruff to Hillary
Clinton, August 26 Inside Politics.
"This has been a difficult
couple of years for you. Did that applause, the way you've been treated here,
the way people have been reacting to you, kind of make it all go away?"
-
NBC's Maria Shriver in an interview with Hillary Clinton after her August
27 Democratic convention speech.
"Any time the Doles play the
family-values card, they are betting that divorce and remarriage wipe the
slate clean and stop the questions - that suddenly leaving your marriage and
asking for an `emergency divorce,' as Dole did from his first wife (when his
daughter was 17), is morally equivalent if not superior to sticking out the
pain in your marriage and keeping a family together, as the Clintons did...Now
being divorced gives you a political pass, and staying married gets you an
inquisition."
- Time columnist Margaret Carlson, September 2
issue.
Cokie's Old Dates
"But with these guys coming
[Jesse Jackson and Mario Cuomo], it was kind of like your young love coming
back and oh, I remember when I was, you know, young and in love with this guy
who was totally unacceptable, and I did the right thing by marrying the right
guy - but gee, he was kinda cute."
- ABC's Cokie Roberts discussing
Tuesday night speeches, August 28 Good Morning America.
Very Prescient
"He is a small man and a dapper
dresser, openly devoted to his no-nonsense wife."
- From Susan Page's
August 28 USA Today profile of Dick Morris, one day before the
prostitute story broke.
-L. Brent Bozell
III; Publisher
-Brent H. Baker, Tim Graham; Editors
- Geoffrey Dickens, Gene Eliasen, Jim Forbes, Steve Kaminski,
and Clay Waters; Media Analysts,
- Peter Reichel; Circulation Manager;
-Jessica Anderson, Matthew Turosz; Interns
