I really like her. I think she's one of the best op ed columnists.

March 15, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
George Speaks, Badly
By GAIL COLLINS
Watching George W. Bush address the New York financial community Friday brought back many memories. Unfortunately, they were about his speech right after Hurricane Katrina, the one when he said: “America will be a stronger place for it.”

“You’ve helped make our country really in many ways the economic envy of the world,” he told the Economic Club of New York.

You could almost see the thought-bubble forming over the audience: Not this week, kiddo.

The president squinched his face and bit his lip and seemed too antsy to stand still. As he searched for the name of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (“the king, uh, the king of Saudi”) and made guy-fun of one of the questioners (“Who picked Gigot?”), you had to wonder what the international financial community makes of a country whose president could show up to talk economics in the middle of a liquidity crisis and kind of flop around the stage as if he was emcee at the Iowa Republican Pig Roast.

We’re really past expecting anything much, but in times of crisis you would like to at least believe your leader has the capacity to pretend he’s in control. Suddenly, I recalled a day long ago when my husband worked for a struggling paper full of worried employees and the publisher walked into the newsroom wearing a gorilla suit.

The country that elected George Bush — sort of — because he seemed like he’d be more fun to have a beer with than Al Gore or John Kerry is really getting its comeuppance. Our credit markets are foundering, and all we’ve got is a guy who looks like he’s ready to kick back and start the weekend.

This is not the first time Bush’s attempts to calm our fears redoubled our nightmares. His first speech after 9/11 — that two-minute job on the Air Force base — was so stilted that the entire country felt like heading for the nearest fallout shelter. After Katrina, of course, it took forever to pry him out of Crawford, and then he more or less read a laundry list of Goods Being Shipped to the Flood Zone and delivered some brief assurances that things would work out.

O.K., so he’s not good at first-day response. Or second. Third can be a problem, too. But this economic crisis has been going on for months, and all the president could come up with sounded as if it had been composed for a Rotary Club and then delivered by a guy who had never read it before. “One thing is certain that Congress will do is waste some of your money,” he said. “So I’ve challenged members of Congress to cut the number of cost of earmarks in half.”

Besides being incoherent, this is a perfect sign of an utterly phony speech. Earmarks are one of those easy-to-attack Congressional weaknesses, and in a perfect world, they would not exist. But they cost approximately two cents in the grand budgetary scheme of things. Saying you’re going to fix the economy or balance the budget by cutting out earmarks is like saying you’re going to end global warming by banning bathroom nightlights.

Bush pointed out — as if the entire economic world didn’t already know — that Congress has already passed an economic incentive package that will send tax rebate checks to more than 130 million households. “A lot of them are a little skeptical about this ‘checks in the mail’ stuff,” he jibed. Jokejoke. Winkwink.

Then, after a run through of “ideas I strongly reject,” Bush finally got around to announcing that he was going to “talk about what we’re for. We’re obviously for sending out over $150 billion into the marketplace in the form of checks that will be reaching the mailboxes by the second week of May.

“We’re for that,” he added.

Once the markets had that really, really clear, Bush felt free to go on to the other things he was for, which very much resembled that laundry list for Katrina (“400 trucks containing 5.4 million Meals Ready to Eat — or M.R.E.’s ... 3.4 million pounds of ice ...”) This time the rundown included a six-month-old F.H.A. refinancing program, and an industry group called Hope Now that offers advice to people with mortgage problems.

And then, finally, the nub of the housing crisis: “Problem we have is, a lot of folks aren’t responding to over a million letters sent out to offer them assistance and mortgage counseling,” the president of the United States told the world.

But wait — more positive news! The secretary of Housing and Urban Development is proposing that lenders supply an easy-to-read summary with mortgage agreements. “You know, these mortgages can be pretty frightening to people. I mean, there’s a lot of tiny print,” the president said.

Really, if he can’t fix the economy, the least he could do is rehearse the speech.

criticising bush is like shooting fish in a barrel, but she's still right.

yah i just like her. im going to post all of her op eds i like here. she doesnt spend a lot of time on bush.

cool, i'd be interested to read.

Op-Ed Columnist
How Will It Play in Apex?
By GAIL COLLINS
You have to give Bill Clinton credit. Sure we think he’s self-involved. But on Wednesday the former president of the United States was campaigning for his wife in North Carolina, making appearances at Apex, Sanford, Lillington, Dunn, Hope Mills, Lumberton and Whiteville. Following a 7:45 a.m. event in Apex, he was scheduled to discuss “Solutions for America” on “the lawn in front of McSwain Extension Education and Agriculture Center.”

This does not sound like the itinerary of a person who’s incapable of relinquishing center stage. In a way, though, it’s his idea of heaven. The man is perfectly happy to go anywhere as long as he gets to talk. Harvard, McSwain Extension Center, somebody’s living room, somebody’s lawn, the checkout line at Rite Aid. Just sit him next to a human being with ears and he’s good to go.

Men with egos are, of course, the central topic this week, what with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. dominating the American conversation to an extent that even he could have not imagined in his wildest dreams. It’s getting so you can’t even have a starlet-in-crisis story without an overweening father figure lurking in the background.

This week, Miley Cyrus, the 15-year-old star of the excruciatingly popular “Hannah Montana” TV series, got into hot water for appearing in Vanity Fair clad only in a blanket. While she issued a statement saying she “never intended for any of this to happen,” it seems hard to believe one could accidentally pose for an Annie Leibovitz photo spread. Personally, I blame Miley’s father, a formerly famous singer named Billy Ray Cyrus.

Dad, who appears in his daughter’s series, also showed up in the photo spread, lounging with his child in a shot that might have seemed weirdly intimate if we had not been distracted by the blanket thing. He claims he wandered off before things got R-rated. You’d think that a truly concerned parent would have given top priority to the topless part of the proceedings, but I suspect Billy Ray was too engrossed in his role in the picture-taking to focus on anyone else’s.

We digress. The subject here was the damage that egoistic men can do to a political campaign belonging to somebody else. The Jeremiah Wright event has raised questions about Barack Obama’s presidential campaign that go beyond speculating about how aging white voters are going to react. (As an aging white voter, I would like to report that we have moved on and are now concentrating exclusively on the fate of the farm bill.)

Obviously, Obama doesn’t share Wright’s racial paranoia. But the saga does play into Hillary Clinton’s most powerful argument: that he is not seasoned enough to be elected president.

By seasoned, she actually means hardened by the soul-searing fires of humiliation and defeat. When Hillary was around Barack’s age and still in Arkansas, it’s perfectly possible that if her longtime pastor suddenly became a political embarrassment, she’d have loyally tried to distance herself without disowning him entirely.

Since then, she’s had a long string of painful lessons learned. One is that when beloved associates become political embarrassments, they tend to be much more concerned about their own reputation than yours. Many bodies under the bus later, when she tells you that she’d have dumped Rev. Wright at the first mention of chickens coming home to roost, you’d better believe it.

This sales pitch — I know how the cruel world works — is powerful in a political party that keeps losing elections that it thinks it deserves to win. On the other hand, young voters who have yet to have their hearts broken by a politician find it wicked depressing.

One hitch in the Clinton argument is that Hillary still has Bill, a walking encyclopedia of political near-death experiences.

She has suggested that her husband would be kept offstage, serving as a “roving ambassador” in her administration. (“On Wednesday, the former president will continue his goodwill tour of Paraguay, appearing in Limpio, Ñemby, Encarnación and Mariano Roque Alonso, where he will discuss Solutions for South America behind the ice cream cart three houses down from the bus stop.”) It would be pretty to think so, but can I see a show of hands on how many of you believe it?

When Hillary was on the ropes in New Hampshire, Bill rather famously told a crowd that “I can’t make her younger, taller, male ...” And while the “younger” part was a little hurtful, the message really seemed to be that he sees himself as the central player in this drama.

We’re down to a race between the candidate who claims he will make the political process better but has yet to demonstrate exactly how that works, and the woman who claims she’s the only one who’s powerful enough to take on the Republican forces of darkness. Don Quixote vs. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Both accompanied by their lieutenants — the men who think it’s all about them.