FROM: The Management
TO: Our Splendid Readers
RE: Hiatus
The Management at Campaign Outsider is preparing to launch a new website that will focus on the old-fashioned belief that people have the right to know when they’re being advertised to.
So we’ve winterized the Global Worldwide Headquarters and given the hardworking staff an unpaid furlough.
But we’ll be back before you know it – or maybe even want it. In the meantime, play nice.
Go figure – Mo blows a save, then Pap blows a save, then the Yanks load the bases but can’t win, then the Yanks load the bases and do win.
How great a game is baseball?
As a Made Yankee Fan in Boston, I am of course dismayed that the Yanks (who are giving “Bronx Bombers” a whole new meaning) have been slapped around by the Red Sox the past two days.
But I’m not surprised.
New York’s pitching is spotty, they’ve had too many anemic performances at the plate (Paging Derek Jeter. Paging the former Derek Jeter), and their mojo is mostly nogo.
(And note this New York Times piece giving Sox skipper Terry Francona his due for steering an injury-ravaged team to at least respectability, if not a shot at a miracle finish.)
Let the bandwagon-jumping begin in Boston. Who the hell knows how this will turn out?
The hardworking staff has no beef with the content of Brian Mooney’s largely dismissive piece about gubernatorial candidate Jill Stein (G/R – You Still There?) in Saturday’s Boston Globe.
Representative sample:
Stein, a graduate of Harvard and Harvard Medical School, is the Green-Rainbow Party nominee, polling in single digits. Her shoestring-budget campaign, funded in part by $55,000 of her own money, operates out of a sparsely furnished storefront in the Fields Corner section of Dorchester. She frequently complains that the news media do not take her seriously, stifling her message. But her campaign rarely communicates with reporters or provides her schedule . . .
She describes society’s problems in complex, interconnected terms. But when talking about her political opponents or the moneyed interests she blames for many of the nation’s ills, they become two-dimensional cut-outs, serving as her foils.
The Globe piece also describes her as – at least in one instance – clueless about Massachusetts politics.
All fair points as far as the hardworking staff can see.
But the Saturday Globe? Really?
Why not just stick a Please Marginalize Me sign on Stein’s back and get it over with?
After 1) morphing the Wall Street Journal from a knockout financial daily into a reasonably interesting general-interest newspaper; 2) launching a glossy WSJ. (don’t forget the period) magazine; and 3) bankrolling a WSJ New York Metro section (in hopes of bankrupting the other Big Town broadsheet) . . .
Rupert Murdoch’s latest brainchild is WSJ Weekend, designed to compete with the Sunday edition of the New York Times, the paper Murdoch wants to either a) own, or b) obliterate.
The WSJ new stand-alone features a book review insert and a lifestyle section “[that] will include coverage of travel, fashion, wine and food, among other topics,” according to a Times report.
We’ll see who in the end gets to say, “And I only am alone escaped to tell thee.”
All across this great land of ours, longshot political candidates are finding inspiration in Massachusetts junior senator Scott Brown’s improbable win this past January.
(See – actually, hear – this Here & Now piece from last month.)
These candidates believe they can apply the Scott Brown Formula (sounds sort of like a ’60s British Invasion band) to their particular race.
Fools.
All you fledgling Brownnabes, take this simple test:
1) Do you have a camera-ready wife?
2) Was one of your two telegenic daughters a contestant on “American Idol”?
3) Do you have an opponent as tin-earred and ham-handed as Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley?
4) Are you campaigning for the seat of a local and national legend?
5) Will the election occur in Massachusetts? In January?
Unless you answered yes to all of the above, your campaign is less Scott Brown Formula and more Nestlé’s Baby Formula.
Which is to say, less than useless.
Enter Linda McMahon, former professional wrestling diva and current Connecticut GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate.
As the Associated Press reports (via the Boston Globe),
HARTFORD — A nephew of President Kennedy is asking Linda McMahon, Connecticut’s Republican candidate for Senate, to pull her political advertisement featuring the late president talking about tax cuts.
The two-page letter from Edward M. Kennedy Jr., obtained by the Associated Press, calls the ad misleading to voters. The letter says McMahon “distorts the legacy of President Kennedy in order to mislead voters into thinking’’ that he would have supported her position on tax policy.
The offending ad:
The Scott Brown Inspiration (sounds sort of like a ’90s Christian Invasion band):
Memo to Linda McMahon:
I don’t know Scott Brown. Scott Brown’s no friend of mine. And you’re no Scott Brown.
The first Boston Media Consortium bakeoff (accent on Con, since it required participants to raise $100,000 by October 1, even though the debate took place on September 21), proceeded smartly last night, thanks in no small part to moderator John King’s gatling-gun questions.
The CNN anchor/chief national correspondent was sharp, focused, and well-grounded in the major issues of the Massachusetts governor’s race. But that didn’t mean he had an iron grip on the candidates.
Ads ‘n’ ends from the gubernatorial rumpus:
End of the Daze
If you chose “end of the day” for your drinking game, Charlie Baker had you knee-walking by 7:30, passed out by 7:44.
Tea Party for Aunt Zeituni
The first question out of the box went to Baker (R-Blue Shirt Republicans). King asked him if he’s a Tea Partier. Baker essentially said he’s a Tea Part-timer.
Soon after, King asked Jill Stein about Monday night’s WBZ-TV interview with Barack Obama’s aunt Zeituni Onyango, an illegal immigrant currently living in Boston public housing.
Baker said he’d check the immigration status of anyone receiving government benefits. Tim Cahill (I-Will Bust You) is willing to go the Arizona route if need be. Deval Patrick (D-We’re #1!) just wants us all to get along.
Easy to Be Hard
Cahill called Baker a liar, Baker absolutely blowtorched Cahill in return, Patrick accused Baker of kicking Bay Staters to the curb when times are tough.
Overall, Baker seemed the toughest. His problem, though, is that he’s right on the line between aggressive and abrasive – a highwire act very few have carried off in Massachusetts politics. (See: John Silber, circa 1990.)
Dr. Jill, We Hardly Knew Ye
Jill Stein delivered a skittish, not-ready-for-primetime performance that virtually guaranteed we’ve seen the last of her. Maybe it’s time for the Green-Rainbow party to choose another standard-bearer.
Ad at End
As soon as the debate ended, a Deval Patrick TV spot began. Once again, the hardworking staff protests.
Whenever we talked about religion (which was far too often), my father, Jack Carroll – a.k.a. Black Bart (don’t ask), a.k.a The Silver Fox (he turned gray at age 26 . . . because of me, he always said) – would eventually tell me, “Read Cardinal Newman, friend.”
(Never a good sign when the old man called me “friend.”)
Cut to: John Henry Newman, currently fast-tracked for sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church.
Via the New York Times:
Pope Ends British Trip With Beatification
Lede:
A day after drawing both adoring crowds and the largest protests of his papacy, Pope Benedict XVI wrapped up a historic and contentious four-day visit to Britain on Sunday, moving a Catholic convert one step closer to sainthood and recalling the valor of Britons during the Second World War.
The valor of Britons during the Second World War always plays well in England, but not so for Newman!
[I]n a move that may prove less popular here, the pope beatified Cardinal John Henry Newman at an outdoor Mass in a park here on Sunday.
The pope praised Cardinal Newman, a 19th-century thinker and writer who left the Church of England and the pulpit of Oxford University to convert to Catholicism, for “his insights into the relationship between faith and reason, into the vital place of revealed religion in a civilized society, and into the need for a broadly based and wide-ranging approach to education.”
The beatification was sure to raise hackles with some Anglicans, who are already smarting from the Vatican’s announcement last year that it was creating a new structure for traditionalist Anglicans uncomfortable with the church’s ordaining women and openly gay priests to convert to Catholicism.
“Some Anglicans” might not like the idea of St. John Henry Newman. But the Silver Fox decidedly would.
The hardworking staff received this response after we wondered why Ward Sutton’s Tea Party cartoon did not appear in yesterday’s Boston Globe and, in a rare burst of activity, emailed him:
Thanks for the concern and your email. I’m happy to say that the piece will be running – it just got postponed. I believe it will be running next week instead. I’m really excited about this piece – the editors have been incredibly supportive and enthusiastic about it. I don’t want to give anything away before it’s in print, but I hope readers enjoy it.
Cheers,
Ward
Okay. Chalk one up for actual fact-gathering.
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