Former New Yorker and Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown’s much-maligned Washington Post column about life among the bold faced names is actually a must read today. It’s about the effect of the capture of of the rat in the rat hole on haut New York, and on display are the rat-like cunning and deep insights into shallow human beings that made Brown a great editor. She compared the moods at a dinner where everybody bemoaned the Bush administration ineptness before the capture and the general mood post-capture: “Twelve hours later the same people looked at their Democratic choices for president and wanted to scream.” She goes on: “Live-action heroism and a sinking sense that nice guys finish last have reduced the Democratic candidates to little more than the mannerisms that annoyed us in the first place. Lieberman, he of the censorious smile and jungle-book voice. Kerry, the talking tree with the 70s hair. Edwards, hopelessly puppyish at 50. Clark, cyborg hero of places no one can spell. Only Gephardt retained a certain Great Plains steadfastness.” The astute Tina was particularly good on Hawkish Hill’s positioning. She delivered a post-spider hole address on foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. She was “more hawkish than Bush on the need to ramp up the troop numbers in Iraq.” Does this mean that Tina thinks Hill will get into the 2004 race? “Maybe not yet a credible commander-in-chief but at least a Democratic Major Barbara. Distantly one could hear the voice of Maggie Thatcher during the Gulf War in 1990, commanding Bush 41 not to ‘go wobbly.’ She will wait this one out. Self-discipline, not self doubt.”
