President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

I blame all of it.
And now we have a football format Jeff Fisher can't even go 8-8 in.

 

Has the Republican Party gone too far to the right?

 

Dumbass nation: Our biggest national security problem is America's "vast and militant ignorance"

 

Kills me to point this out, because Trump is a goddamn malignancy but I was at Fenway in the 90s when they introduced former president GHWB to the crowd. Of course they didn’t give him a suite (W was a Rangers partner at the time, they’d probably been in Kenenbunkport while the Sox were playing Texas and they were sitting in the stands), it wasn’t a World Series game and they didn’t publicize it ahead of time. The crowd also wasn’t universally respectful (it was a few years before 41’s general public image morphed from peevish, entitled, out of touch rich guy to gentleman/statesman/war hero).

 

Then-First Lady Clinton spoke at my class’s graduation in Michigan Stadium in ‘93 but I don’t recall any unusual security arrangements or having to arrive particularly early (I was just in the crowd, however, for my now thankfully ex-GF’s graduation - I had actually graduated a few months earlier in January in Crisler Arena - our speaker Elie Wiesel got snowed out and we had the ancient founder of Walgreens step in instead)

 

"He'd had learned early that there was no worse a penalty for a big lie than a for a little one, but that only the big ones drew a crowd....."
--Larry Tye, Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow Of Senator Joe McCarthy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020)

 

I was at the Bama-LSU game where Trump attended. Even had a view into his open box on the opposite sideline. I expected an impossible wait to get in but it wasn’t too bad, maybe 15-20 minutes. It helped that (1) my buddy with the tickets is fanatical about being there when the gates open and (2) the area around Bryant-Denny already gets treated like they expect a combination of terrorist cells and a tank column to come rolling down the block, whether the POTUS is coming or it is just another depantsing of Western Carolina.

 

Hillary spoke at my college my junior year and there were no special precautions either.

But Bush’s speech at Ohio State was in spring 2002….six months after 9/11.

 

One of my first jobs in journalism was 'covering'* the Carter-Mondale campaign in '76.

I am one thousand years old.


(*I was a cable-puller, and carried a BVU-50 tape deck back when shooting video required two people.)

 

Saw LBJ campaign for Democrats in 1966 in my hometown. Covered a Reagan appearance at a high-tech company in suburban Boston in 1983. Saw GHW Bush at spring training in his first months as an ex-President. Saw Clinton campaign in
Florida in spring training 1992. Saw Jimmy Carter at Manuel's in Atlanta during '96 Olympics.

 

Visiting family in Miami in '72, looking for a place for breakfast. We walk to the Americana just as a motorcade screams up. It was Nixon, meeting with the AFL-CIO. Little me rushes to the cordon to shake his hand, but was blocked by two fat asses. Everyone was saying "God bless you," though he didn't seem to sneeze.

 

Drove press pool in the motorcade in the fall of '93 when Clinton came to Boston in his NAFTA push (a friend of mine was on the standing advance team and got me in. I drove a minivan of NBC correspondents and crew -- Andrea Mitchell in the am, Jim Mikleszewski in the pm). Shook Clinton's hand after his jog along the Esplanade and again on the tarmac that night before he boarded AF1. He was a very large and commanding individual in person. You want to give the president a firm handshake (even if you're not a huge fan) and his hand was enormous.

Edit: Also, the previous fall, when I was still in Ann Arbor, we went to see "Last of the Mohicans" and a couple rows of seats were roped off. Turned out that Bill and Hillary were staying in A2 while he was prepping for the debate in East Lansing and they took a break to see the movie that night. Afterward, they went right by us, waving out the back window to the small crowd, as they were being driven back to the hotel.

And I met Trump in 1989. My second cousin is the late 1010 WINS reporter Stan Brooks and when I was a teenager and college student interested in journalism, he'd take me around with him when I was visiting NY. I'd run little errands for him and watch him do his job. He was covering a press conference at the Trump Plaza where Trump was unveiling the logo for the Trump Shuttle. He fed the press lobster salad sandwiches -- they were delicious. I shook his hand afterward. He was clearly an egomaniac but he was friendly and engaging enough at the time. That afternoon, we went to Harlem where Rudy Giuliani -- who was running for mayor the first time, when he lost -- was giving a stump speech at a drug house that had been seized by the feds. I was standing very close to him and got a very unpleasant, chilling vibe from him, just a sense of "This is NOT a good guy." Trump did not give me the same vibe.