Thursday, February 23, 2006
Dick Cheney has bad judgment
If there was still at this late date any reason for doubting that, the fact that he chose Washington hack Mary Matalin to be his primary defender in the media over Shotgungate should end the debate.
Here are some excerpts from a 2001 "Slate" piece by Andrew Ferguson to remind us of just how incredibly hackish Matalin is, even by the immensely hackish standards of Washington:
Failing upward is a common form of getting ahead in certain corners of corporate America, but nowhere is the method as sure-fire as it is in Washington. Many of the capital's most recognizable personages sashay through town trailing a long history of fuck-ups. Think of Oliver North, whose idiocy and ineptitude almost destroyed the administration he worked for and who received, as compensation, a nightly TV show and five-figure speaking fees; or Warren Christopher, whose bungling of the Iranian hostage crisis under President Carter catapulted him to the job of secretary of state in the next Democratic administration; or think of the Monster of the Mess-Up, the Icon of Incompetence, the Big Bopper of the Blooper, Robert McNamara, whose achievements include not only blood-soaked rice paddies in Vietnam but also, and almost as bad, the Edsel. For this he was awarded the presidency of the World Bank, and we honor him still. In this company of stars, Mary Matalin holds a special place. So great is her success, so large (by Washington standards) is her fame, and so unidentifiable is her talent that the rest of the capital's strivers can only gawk in wonder....
Of course, political warriors in Washington like to pretend to the ideal of comity. "We're all friends after five o'clock" was the often quoted and utterly insincere motto of Tip O'Neill. In fact Democratic and Republican true believers cleave almost exclusively to their own—as unmingled as Hutus and Tutsis, though with better table manners. Why it should to be otherwise? If politics is truly the encompassing passion of your life, no one should be surprised if you seek friendship and conviviality and love (especially love) among people whose politics are similar to yours. They should be surprised if you don't. Solemnized a year after Election Day 1992 in an elaborate New Orleans wedding, the union of right-wing Mary and left-wing James thus raised an uncomfortable question. Which were they faking—the love or the politics? It would be unseemly to question their love, so let's assume the answer is politics, but with an important qualification. There are two kinds of politics. One involves the clash of dearly held ideas, a contest between defining views of the world. The other has to do with buzz and gamesmanship, tactics and maneuvering. In this second kind of politics, ideas and worldviews are mere instruments, a board game accessory, as exchangeable as Monopoly money.
By sheerest coincidence, James and Mary rose to celebrity just as cable TV was metastasizing a kind of chat show dedicated precisely to politics as they understood it. Following such '80s successes as Crossfire and The McLaughlin Group, it was the mission of Hardball and Talk Back Live and Hannity and Colmes—and to a lesser extent, the new Meet the Press, where they were soon appearing regularly—to trivialize politics into a compulsively entertaining freak show. It was a parody of idea politics. Two sharply drawn sides, conservative and liberal, sputter across a desk, and Carville and Matalin obliged by becoming the Battling Bickersons of the Beltway….
All this activity serves to obscure the important question of why Matalin and Carville should have become famous at all. It's a funny thing about failing up in Washington. People who fail up here are not failures in the conventional sense; they're failures only at what they're supposed to be good at. McNamara, for example, was held to be a genuis at "strategizing" (the term was new then) and organizing large bureaucracies; he failed miserably at both while excelling at the far more valuable art of bum-bussing and knowing whose bum to buss. Carville and Matalin are reputed to be crackerjack political operatives. The evidence is slim. Matalin's signature political experience was as an architect of George Bush's re-election campaign. Carville went from failure to failure as a consultant until he engineered the upset win of a Pennsylvania Senate seat, after which Bill Clinton plucked him from obscurity. In short, one of them helped design what is widely understood as the worst presidential campaign in modern memory, and the other ran against the worst presidential campaign in modern memory and managed to win only 43 percent of the vote….
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