John Cassidy's Blog, page 84

Can a Certain (Very Popular) Fat Guy from Jersey Win the White House?

The last President from New Jersey was Woodrow Wilson, who occupied the Oval Office from 1913 until 1921, and, arguably, he doesn’t really count. The scion of wealthy Virginia family that had owned slaves, Wilson moved to Princeton when his father took a job at the university, and after college he returned to the South for a few years, before decamping North for good. In the Garden State, he was always considered something of an outsider, even when he rose to the presidency of Princeton. In 1910, he ran (successfully) for the governorship as a high-minded independent, saying that he wouldn’t carry water for the local party bosses.

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Can a Certain (Very Popular) Fat Guy From Jersey Win The White House?

The last President from New Jersey was Woodrow Wilson, who occupied the Oval Office from 1913 until 1921, and, arguably, he doesn’t really count. The scion of wealthy Virginia family that had owned slaves, Wilson moved to Princeton when his father took a job at the university, and after college he returned to the South for a few years, before decamping North for good. In the Garden State, he was always considered something of an outsider, even when he rose to the presidency of Princeton. In 1910, he ran (successfully) for the governorship as a high-minded independent, saying that he wouldn’t carry water for the local party bosses.

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Will the G.O.P. Push Grover off the Cliff?

During this year’s Republican Convention, I hopped a cab from Tampa to St. Petersburg, where my old acquaintance Grover Norquist, the Republican anti-tax activist, was giving a speech at the University of South Florida. In 2004 and 2005, I spent quite a bit of time with Norquist, working on a lengthy Profile that described him as the “ringleader, visionary, and enforcer” of the conservative coalition. After the piece was published, I didn’t see him often in person, but when I got to the St. Pete campus he didn’t appear to have changed much. He was wearing his usual blue suit. His beard was still red, if perhaps a little grayer around the edges. And he was making many of the same lame jokes, such as the one in which he says he was born in Massachusetts “before emigrating to America.”

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It’s Time for Obama to Bite the Hedge-Fund Sharks

There’s nothing like a good insider-dealing story, and this could be one of the biggest since Rudy Giuliani, then an aggressive young U.S. attorney on the make, took down Ivan Boesky twenty-five years ago. The man in the dock is Mathew Martoma, a little-known thirty-eight-year-old hedge-fund trader who stands accused of generating two hundred and seventy-six million dollars by trading in the stocks of two health-care companies on the basis of information supplied by a neurologist involved in a clinical trial of a new Alzheimer’s drug. But it is pretty clear that the prosecutors’ ultimate target is Martoma’s former boss: Steven A. Cohen, the founder and driving force of the eponymous S.A.C. Capital, one of the world’s most successful hedge funds.

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Second Shoe Drops in Fleet Street Phone-Hacking Scandal

The long-running Fleet Street phone-hacking scandal took a fresh and ominous turn today, when prosecutors said they were charging two former editors at Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, and one current reporter, with paying public officials for stories, including stories about the royal family, a practice the prosectuors say amounted to bribery and corruption. Coming on top of the phone-hacking allegations that have been levelled at some of the same journalists, today’s development confirms that the British authorities are aggressively targeting another covert and disreputable but long-established tabloid practice—checkbook journalism involving payments to government employees.

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Gaza: More Funerals, More Questions

Day six in the latest Israeli military action against Hamas; another day of sharply contrasting images. At a funeral in Gaza City, members of the Dalu family carried aloft, wrapped in Palestinian flags, the bodies of four children killed by an Israeli bomb that demolished their home on Sunday. “Do these children look like terrorists?” grief-stricken relatives and neighbors asked reporters. In Israel, where dozens of Hamas rockets continued to fall on (mostly unoccupied) areas, Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet met to discuss their next move. And four thousand miles away in Rangoon, a day after reasserting that he is “fully supportive of Israel’s right to defend itself,” President Obama delivered a speech hailing the recent democratic reforms in Burma.

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Nixon Question Dogs Times C.E.O.: What Did He Know and When Did he Know it?

For his sake, I hope that Mark Thompson, the former BBC bigwig who recently took over as chief executive of the New York Times Company, rented an apartment rather than buying one. The way things are going, he could well be back in London pretty soon. A piece in Friday’s Times—the paper of record that Thompson is now overseeing, at least on the business side—has raised new questions about his role in the BBC sex scandal, which has already cost his successor his job.

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Romney’s “Gift” Gaffe: What He Meant to Say

What another fine mess Mitt Romney has gotten himself into. In telling some of his big campaign contributors, on a Wednesday conference call listened in on by at least two reporters, that he lost the election because President Obama bestowed “gifts” on blacks, Hispanics, and young voters, the Mittster has brought another large heap of opprobrium down upon his finely chiseled numbskull, including some finely crafted words of criticism from my colleague Alex Koppelman. As usual with Romney, it’s hard to tell whether his biggest problem is his thorny relationship to the English language, his rich-guy empathy deficit, or his stunning disregard for, or obliviousness to, how his words will be received. Whatever the problem is, I thought, as a parting gift to someone who rarely failed to deliver for the campaign press, I’d do a quick translation. Here, then, is what, I’m sure, Romney meant to say:

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Is Obama Willing to Leap Off the Fiscal Cliff? Let’s Hope So

President Obama is taking a commendably robust approach to the upcoming negotiations with congressional Republicans about averting the so-called fiscal cliff—a combination of tax hikes and spending cuts due to come into effect on January 1st if no agreement can be reached to avert them. In a meeting with progressive supporters at the White House on Tuesday, Obama said he would insist on restoring tax rates for the wealthy to their pre-2001 levels, and wouldn’t accept any agreement that extended the Bush giveaways to the rich for a second time. (At the end of 2010, they were extended for two years.) “I am not going to budge,” Obama said, according to a report in the Huffington Post. “I said in 2010 that I’m going to do this once, and I meant it.”

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The Generals and the Women: A Guide for the Perplexed

In the workday-existence life of a blogger, tough choices often crop up. Take today. Should I write about the latest developments on the “fiscal cliff,” which include the Republicans apparently conceding the principle of raising more revenue from the highest earners—probably by putting a cap on their total tax deductions? Or should I focus on the latest salacious details in the Petraeus sex scandal?

O.K, you twisted my arm. Since the negotiations between Obama and the Republicans about a possible fiscal deal don’t begin until Friday, there will be time enough to focus on them. For those readers who have no wish to expose themselves to tawdry tales of adultery and obsession, and for those who have already had their fill from Gawker and other celebrity-news sites, this might be a good time to look away. For everybody else, especially those who have been vacationing at the North Pole for the past few days, a quick recap.

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