NOW THAT HE’S HISTORY
After successful heart surgery last Friday, Florida Sen.
Bob Graham is gearing up to make his final
decision on whether to make a run for the presidency. “Had
[John] Edwards performed better
in the national spotlight, this might not be a serious
consideration,” says a Graham supporter in the Florida Democratic
Party. “But the guy has choked, and Graham has the Southern
connection and the heft to pull it off. He could be the Southern
player in this election for us.”
Edwards has his failings, but fundraising isn’t one of them, and
for all of his rookie mistakes, he remains viable in many polls. He
runs a distant fourth (in a virtual dead heat with Dick
Gephardt), for example, in New Hampshire polls that show
him trailing only favored regional sons Sens. John
Kerry, Joe Lieberman and Howie
Dean. Not bad for a newcomer.
But Graham has to be looking at how the South will be in play
for Democrats, at all of the potential fundraising he could do in
his home state, and how the press is already playing up his foreign
policy and intelligence know-how, and be thinking he could make a
big dent in the plans of some of the other Democratic presidential
hopefuls.
The best evidence he got recently that he might be able to make
a serious run was a fundraising swing Kerry made through Florida,
in which he attempted to draw off a number of old-line Clinton and
Gore donors looking beyond Lieberman for a place to put their
political dollars. While Kerry had a couple of successful
fundraisers, the bigger message he got from bigtime donors and
fundraisers was that before they could commit to him, they had to
wait to see what Graham was going to do.
“If there were another Southerner in the race with some real
experience and name recognition nationally perhaps Graham doesn’t
think about it,” says a DNC fundraiser. “But there’s only Edwards,
and Graham beats Edwards on just about everything but looks. Graham
might not play well in New Hampshire or Iowa, but he plays well in
a lot of states where the other guys don’t. He could make things
more interesting than they already are.”
IN SECOND GREER
In one of her priceless “Short Cuts,” Lucianne.com yesterday took
note of the latest involving an evolving neo-rightist and his
insights into our nation’s top impeached ex-president. She
wrote:
“Although Clinton bashing isn’t the sport it used to be — and
it is truly old — the redoubtable Christopher Hitchens
hasn’t finished playing the game and dusts off some cuttings
from the ‘No One Left To Lie To’ writing room floor. He’s claiming
BJ was a ‘double’ for the CIA during his Oxford years and that they
both slept with the same future radical feminist during that time.
Hitch gagged when we asked if it was Germaine Greer.”
We can’t help on the CIA front — though we do recall a visit to
our old offices a decade ago from an American businessman who’d
done business in Eastern European and insisted he’d come across
people with evidence Clinton had actually offered his services to
the KGB — but we are in position to recall what we published in
June 1993 issue of The American Spectator. It was a piece
by Stuart Reid entitled “Clinton’s Ex-Pats,” which included
this:
“…What is less well known is that among Clinton’s close
friends at Oxford was a fellow American Mandy Merck, who became an
archetypal professional expat and a minor success in such journals
as the New Statesman and Marxism Today. Theirs
was no a sexual relationship. As Ms. Merck said last year: ‘Bill
was the first boy I ever “came out” to. In fact, he was just about
the first person outside my circle I ever felt I could tell I was a
lesbian.’ One wonders what Clinton might have done to persuade Ms.
Merck to come out.
“Whatever, Ms. Merck was not a woman to mess with. She proved
her toughness when she joined the radical events magazine Time
Out in the seventies and, as ‘Mother of the Chapel,’ helped
organize a series of strikes that ended in 1981 when the entire
staff was sacked. With the help of a loan of £80,000 from the
Greater London Council, then run by ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone, the
ex-staffers started a rival (and even more radical) events
magazine, City Limits, which earlier this year went into
liquidation. A key element of the final dispute at Time
Out was that management wanted to pay some staff more than
others, on the old-fashioned principle that some staff are worth
more than others, while Merck & Co. insisted that all staff
should be paid the same wage. Tony Elliott, who owns Time
Out, now talks of ‘bloody Mandy Merck.’ She was, he says,
‘undisputably the prime mover in all our troubles, a classic case
of a dilettante radical — bright and manipulative.’ Remind you of
anyone?
“More recently, Ms. Merck has produced gay and lesbian programs
for both the BBC and Channel Four. In February, the feminist
publishing house Virago put out a collection of Ms. Merck’s essays
under the promising title, Perversions: Deviant Readings.
Pity the kids at Cornell, where Ms. Merck is now a visiting
professor in feminist ontology, or some such.”
Could Ms. Marck be Mr. Hitchens’ mystery woman? We await the
definitive biography of either principal — or better yet, the
memoirs of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Someone is bound to remember
something from those good old days.
