New Orleans What a political season! We’re counting down the days now, but some things are increasingly clear at the margins.
The sell-by-date may finally be here for New Jersey’s Governor Chris Christie, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and Mr. Grouch, Rudy Guiliani, the former Mayor of New York City. It takes a crew like that hovering over the green rooms of Trump defenders to make Christie look good, even if he’s still in high water over the political vendetta bridge closing now in trial. With friends like these, no wonder Donald Trump is in constant trouble! If they are defending his honor, how can it be a surprise that he is obsessed with public humiliation according to even more recently released tapes of interview with him by a former biographer.
If this gang of three is finally around the corner and perhaps gone for good once the votes are counted, it looks like James O’Keefe, the video scammer, is breathing his last milliseconds of fame as well. Yes, he caught a heartbeat in some corners by tricking another couple of loose lips talking about Democratic dirty tricks, and a close friend of my said that viewing the video was pretty horrific in truth, but it had short legs and minimal traction in the klieg lights of this campaign. It wasn’t really about either Trump or Clinton, and that’s the story now in capital letters from Fifth Avenue to Wilshire Boulevard. I noticed a brief squib in a Milwaukee paper where O’Keefe was trying to file a Federal Elections Commission complaint based on something in Wisconsin accusing the Clinton campaign of colluding with PACS. The campaign spokesperson for Clinton virtually chortled in glee, saying that, first what they were doing was legal, and implying that how did the O’Keefers not know that, and then harping on why Trump hadn’t field his tax returns, so getting his licks in. The reporter ended the story reminding readers that O’Keefe had selectively edited the ACORN tapes, had paid $100,000 to one of the ACORN workers, and went through O’Keefe’s arrest for trying to bug ex-Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu’s office in New Orleans. You just can’t clean all of that kind of stuff off your shoes.
These folks are left with only one megaphone and that’s Fox News, and of course they are loud and clear over there, but that’s not enough for the real conversation anymore, and they have their own chaos and trouble. Who knows what to make of Megyn Kelly anymore? I’m not a fan of Kelly’s, not because she interviewed me years ago, but because she didn’t keep up her end of the agreement her producers made, but that’s business. She did humiliate Karl Rove in 2012 when he tried to spin away the Obama victory election night, and she did stand up to Trump at least a little bit and took his best shots, and seems to have done the right thing on the fall of Roger Ailes at Fox, and now she’s recommending anger management courses for Newt Gingrich, so let’s agree that she’s not all bad, even if she’s raw ambition on steroids. She may just be a product of her bad Fox environment. I’ll make a safe bet that she’s totally out of there when her contract runs out for darned sure.
Without all of these folks sucking up airtime and attention, future campaigns just aren’t going to seem the same anymore. Thankfully!