IN RENOLAND
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton was eager, according
to campaign aides, to attack former Sen. Fred
Thompson for his remarks about Cuba being a state
supporter of terrorists. “Our porous border is unable to
distinguish between friend and foe. My feeling is that Cuban
Americans share this concern,” Thompson said last week.
He further warned that a terrorist-backing Cuba matched with
Hugo Chavez’s desire to “go nuclear” in Venezuela
would create additional security challenges for the United
States.
Comparatively, a sober view, no? Not to Clinton. “Everyone is
attacking Fred Thompson right now, because he’s
the frontrunner. She wanted to slap him around a little bit, even
if there wasn’t anything to slap him around over,” says a campaign
aide.
So Clinton went out and said she was shocked that Thompson would
lump members of the Cuban diaspora with terrorists, something
Thompson did not do.
There’s a reason Clinton attempted to hit Thompson: her own
record with Cubans is shoddy at best. Recall, that back during the
Elian Gonzalez crisis, she went out and announced
that Elian’s seizure — by goons sent in by her husband’s attorney
general — ”was accomplished rapidly and without injury.”
“Yeah, we’ve got a problem with that statement and all the
pictures of that scared little boy hiding in the closet with all of
those automatic weapons in his face,” says the campaign adviser.
“When we mentioned this to our policy guys, they didn’t care. We’re
at a stage now where we have to attack Thompson, create an image in
the public of who we want him to be, and then move on to lesser
guys like Romney. It’s Giuliani who we’re not going to be beating
up any time soon.”
GUEST STARRING ROLE
Despite the mythology that the John Edwards
campaign is putting forward, Elizabeth Edwards did
not “impulsively” call into MSNBC’s Hardball show hosted
by former Democrat political operative Chris
Matthews, to attack right-wing queen Ann
Coulter.
After booking Coulter, MSNBC producers reached out to the
Edwards campaign. “It was an easy decision,” says an MSNBC
associate producer. “It was the idea of Coulter’s publisher to do
it.”
The call was made to the Edwards campaign by an NBC — not MSNBC
— producer, says a source familiar with the arrangement. “Mrs.
Edwards was told what time we’d be calling, and what the questions
would be leading into her call. Coulter may not have known that the
deal was done, but we thought her publisher had told her about what
was happening,” says the MSNBC source. “This was not Mrs. Edwards
idea; it was a something hatched between her, the campaign and the
publisher to promote her and Coulter’s book, nothing more.”
FILTHY RICH
The decision by former Vice President Al Gore to
cancel a trip to Taiwan to lecture the people there about global
warming may have less to do with the cost of hot air on the
environment and more to do with the value Gore places on his own
hot air.
“It had far less to do with any political considerations, and
everything to do with money,” says a former Gore staffer.
According to the former Gore aide, the Democratic Progressive
Party, which was attempting to get Gore to travel to Taiwan, was
balking at the VIP treatment Gore was demanding via his speakers
bureau, the Harry Walker Agency. Gore was demanding first class
travel and accommodations for himself, as well as first class
accommodations for his entourage.
“It’s surprising that he’d be so focused on the money,” says a
staffer for presidential candidate John Edwards. “When you hold
tens of millions of stock options from Google and are already one
of the wealthiest potential presidential candidates out there, who
needs to worry about travel expenses?”
Democrat competitors are monitoring Gore’s financial portfolio,
in part, because they believe that should he decide to run, Gore
would use profits from his Google stock as seed money for a
presidential campaign. Gore has been on an intensive weight loss
regimen in the past six months, and has bragged to friends that he
has lost close to 40 pounds.
THE SKY’S THE LIMIT
Word is that former Clinton State Department spokesman and current
Christiane Amanpour mate Jamie
Rubin will be leaving his gig as a talking head with Sky
News, and return to U.S. politics. The Hillary Rodham
Clinton presidential campaign has been negotiating with
the communicator for some time, and word has it that he’s already
been informally assisting the campaign on messaging and policy.
