Mullings: An American Cyber-column By Rich Galen

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Bimbosity

Monday June 9, 2003

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Let's say you want to run for President. First think you have to do is to assemble a team of experts who know how to do the technical things:

How to file the papers; how to report the income and expenditures; how to - in the words of Sir John Gielgud - "alert the media;" how to arrange the fundraising events; how to arrange the political events (two different skill sets); how to calculate the time necessary to get from point "A" to point "E" with all the points in between, every single day; and, if you are the Governor of Arkansas and you are running for President in the 1992 cycle at least one person who knows how to control what became known as the "Bimbo Eruptions."

Rampant Bimbosity is not new in American politics. Indeed, a recent biography of John F. Kennedy is eerily prescient the matter in dallying with interns in the White House. According to the CBS News web site, she was a "beautiful unpaid employee [who] was only used for Kennedy's sexual gratification."

Nor has Bimbosity been limited to the Western end of Pennsylvania Avenue. In the early '70's the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Wilbur Mills, drove his car into the Tidal Basin overlooking the Jefferson Memorial in the company of a stripper named, Fanny Foxx who, as if having a name like Fanny Foxx was not enough, was also billed as the "Argentine Firecracker."

Mills, interestingly, was a Congressman from Arkansas.

FDR, Eisenhower, and even the much beloved Grover Cleveland (whose out-of-wedlock child fueled a political game of Marco Polo in which the opposition chanted: "Ma, Ma where's my Pa?" and the Cleveland supporters responded, "Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha") were rumored to have had on-going, if age-appropriate liaisons.

Since the AP published the excerpts from Hillary's book about the breathing and the gulping and the crying and the yelling; the Ladies of the Upper West Side have been busily telling each other, as Barbara Walters did on ABC's "This Week" yesterday, that "At least this book clears up a lot of things that she won't have to face in a campaign."

In the words of about five million New Yorkers, "Yeah. Right."

A poll of New Yorkers by Marist College, released just last week, showed Hillary's job approval at 47% Excellent or Good; and 49% only Fair or Poor. Her colleague, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer's rating in that same poll was 52-35.

That Hillary's job approval in under water is modestly surprising. What is shocking about that poll is that only FOUR PERCENT of New Yorkers didn't have an opinion!

At the risk of irritating both of them, Hillary Clinton is the Newt Gingrich of the Democratic Party. They generate massive emotional responses on both sides.

Years ago, comedian Buddy Hackett, speaking about Don Rickles, said: "There are two points of view: Some people hate him like poison, and some people just hate him regular." That's the way Republicans feel about Hillary and Democrats about Newt.

The bookstore on the main drag here in the People's Republic of Old Town Alexandria, Virginia had a sign up over the weekend which proclaimed they would be open at 12:01 this morning to allow people to rush in so they could be the first one on their block to buy Hillary's book.

I suspect, in a couple of weeks, they will do the same thing when the new Harry Potter book comes out.

Harry Potter has a better chance of becoming President of the United States than Hillary Rodham Clinton Rodham.

He can use magic. She will have to depend on muggles.

On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: The third (and final) chapter of the Paris Travelogue (which has almost nothing to do with Paris); a short blurb about Grover Cleveland; a link to the Marist College poll; and a life-threatening Mullfoto of the Day!

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