WASHINGTON--You may recall the seventh rule of “Fight Club:” Fights will go on as long as they have to.In the summer of our discontent, fights are spreading like mountain wildfires--from a town hall in Lebanon, Pa., to one in Kinshasa, Congo.
Never before have we had so many tools to learn and to communicate.
Yet, the art of talking, listening and ascertaining the truth seems more elusive than ever in this Internet and cable age, lost in a bitter stream of blather and misinformation.
The post partisan, post racial, post-Clinton-dysfunction world that Barack Obama was supposed to usher in when he hit town on his white charger, with turtle doves tweeting, has vanished.
Hillary’s KO in the Congo on Monday made the covers of both New York tabloids. Using tough hand gestures not seen since “The Sopranos” went off HBO, Hillary snapped back at an African college student who asked about the growing influence of China on Africa and then, according to the translator, wanted to know: “What does Mr. Clinton think?”
It turned out that the student was trying to ask how President Obama felt about it, but before he was able to clarify, the secretary of state flared: “Wait, you want me to tell you what my husband thinks? My husband is not the secretary of state. I am.”
This raw, competitive response showed that the experiment in using the Clintons as a tandem team on diplomacy may not be going as smoothly as we had hoped. Once more, as with health care, the conjugal psychodrama overshadows and drags down the positive contribution the couple can make on policy.
At Tuesday’s Department of State briefing, Assistant Secretary P.J. Crowley explained that Hillary was particularly irritated to feel overshadowed by men in Africa, where she is pushing her “abiding theme” of “empowering women.”
Nice try, P.J., but we all know Hillary could just as well have made the same comment in Paris (and looking unhinged about your marriage on an international stage hardly empowers women).
She may have been steamed about Bill celebrating his forthcoming 63rd birthday in Las Vegas with his posse.
The New York Times’ Adam Nagourney irritated Clinton, Inc., when he reported that Bill went to the pricey Craftsteak restaurant at the MGM Grand Hotel Monday night with Hollywood moguls Steve Bing and Haim Saban, and former advisors Terry McAuliffe and Paul Begala, among others.
Another rule of “Fight Club,” as Brad Pitt explained in the movie, is: When someone yells “stop” or goes limp, the fight is over.
Unfortunately for Arlen Specter and Claire McCaskill, that rule didn’t apply at their town hall donnybrooks on health care Tuesday.
The two senators were punching bags for audience members irate about everything from the trillions in debt and gun rights to illegal immigrants, term limits and toilet paper.
As Katy Abram told Fox News after passionately confronting Specter: “I know that years down the road, I don’t want my children coming to me and asking me, ‘Mom, why didn’t you do anything? Why do we have to wait in line for, I don’t know, toilet paper or anything?’ ”
Besides the chilling prospect of 21st Century America morphing into a Cold War Soviet state--with Sheryl Crow in charge of toilet-paper rationing--there are also delusional fears about the government tapping bank accounts and convening “death panels,” as Sarah Palin dubbed them, to exploit the cost-saving potential of euthanizing the old and disabled.
At his more placid town hall in Portsmouth, N.H., Tuesday, the president had to explain that he did not intend to “pull the plug on grandma.”
He said that the specter of death panels had spun out of a proposal from a Republican, U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson (Rep., Ga.).
In an interview with the Washington Post on Monday, Isakson diagnosed Palin’s interpretation of his suggestion as “nuts.”
The young grassroots army that swept Obama into office has yet to mobilize now that the fight is about something complicated rather than a charismatic hope-monger.
No, they can’t?
Instead of a multicultural tableau of beaming young idealists on screen, we see ugly scenes of mostly older and white malcontents, disrupting forums where others have come to actually learn something.
Instead of hope, we get swastikas, death threats and T-shirts proclaiming “Proud Member of the Mob.”
President Obama has proven quick-silver instincts, but not in this case.
You would think that a politician schooled in community organizing and the foul balls of a presidential campaign would be ready to squash this kind of nuttiness.
(Like it or not, Speaker Pelosi, that’s democracy in action.)
Instead, the president’s overconfident Harvard Law Review side, expecting a high-minded debate, prevailed.
He knows how to rise to the occasion, even when others are in the dirt, but he may be running out of time.
