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What Happened to 2007? Philip V. Brennan Will somebody please reassure me that this is still 2007? I seem to be living in a time warp of some kind what with the media awash in stories about an election that's more than a year and a half away. Could it be that they are rushing things just a bit? Don't we have a year to go before the first primaries? Could it be that I have somehow lost all of 2007 and have been unceremoniously planted in 2008? If you take a careful look at the media's exertions you couldn't help but believe that the 2008 primaries are breathing down the necks of the candidates even though they are more than a year away. Now I recognize the fact that the media feels somehow constrained to pick the putative front-runner but picking one in February 2007 is just a bit much. For all we know many of the declared candidates won't be in the running a year from now. Already one of them, the easily forgettable Tom Vilsack has dropped out and before long he'll be joined by others who are suddenly struck by the saddening realization that their candidacies are rooted in fantasy and that indulging their inflamed egos is just too damned expensive in both time and money. According to the current wisdom as divined by the media Mrs. Hillary Clinton has been long been seen as the front-runner whose ascension to the party's presidential nomination was all but certain. But stop the presses! Out of nowhere has come a contender suddenly unearthed by that segment of the media that has either become disenchanted with the lady or are simply itching to stir up a nice juicy fight among the Democratic candidates. Story Continues Below
The latter got their wish. Over the past week or so, a nasty little spat between two of the alleged front-runners has dominated the headlines, with the media breathlessly chronicling the minute-to-minute reactions of Mrs. Clinton and her newly anointed rival for front-runner status, freshman Sen. Barack Hussein Obama to the remarks of a multibillionaire Hollywood mogul right out of the "What Makes Sammy Run?" mold. One has to wonder if the sudden nuking of New York or L.A. would have attracted the coverage allotted to this controversy — it even managed to dwarf the coverage of such crucially important matters as to where to bury the late Miss Anna Nicole Smith and the head shaving antics of poor bald Britney Spears. It seems that Mr. David Geffen, a former slavish acolyte and generous giver to the Clintons, has not only deserted his former Lincoln bedroom hosts, but embraced Mama Clinton's rival, the aforesaid Sen. Obama. He chose as his conduit, The New York Times' gossipy Maureen Dowd, a rebellious Mick now sliding reluctantly into the old maidish phase of her life and spewing her resentment over never finding Mr. Right by writing catty columns about her rich and powerful targets, in this case Mrs. Clinton. Much has been made of Mr. Geffen's motives in savaging his former friends, with his backsliding being attributed to his resentment over Bill Clinton's pardon of the despicable Marc Rich — not because it was inexcusable, but because he failed to pardon one Leonard Peltier, a professional American Indian who seems to have earned Mr. Geffen's sympathy by murdering two FBI agents. Nobody, however, has dared to note that Mr. Geffen's preference for Barack Obama over Mrs. Clinton might well have been the fact that he finds Obama prettier than Hillary. He is not, he readily admits, given to romantic fantasies over the fairer sex. His romantic interests lie elsewhere. And Obama is not only "clean," in the words of Sen. Biden, he's devilishly handsome. In the normal course of events this sensation would fade away after a day or two, but the ladies and gentlemen of the media just won't let it go. For good reason. It provides them with grist for their rumor mill — even if the primaries are a year away, they need something to keep the fires burning and at the moment l'affaire Geffen is all they've got. Hopefully something else will come up — Obama might stir things up by weighing in on where Miss Smith should be interred — Cook County, Illinois, for example — where she can be re-animated long enough to vote Democratic every election day, or Hillary will come to the defense of Britney Spears by advocating federal subsidies to provide wigs to those women given to denuding their scalps. Or Mr. Geffen will issue a new blast at the Billary and the media can keep the thing going. There isn't much of interest in the question of who the Republican nominee might be. In the media's eye they're a pretty boring bunch, unlikely to catch the eye of Mr. Geffen and thus unworthy of notice. About the only possibility for a media firestorm would be if Mitt Romney were to suddenly advocate multiple marriage, and grab a couple of extra wives, or if Rudy Giuliani were to suddenly denounce divorce and abortion and demand the arming of felons. Otherwise . . . yawn. In the meantime, keep in mind that this is 2007 and we're going to have to put up with this nonsense for another year. Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor and publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is also a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association For Intelligence Officers. He can be reached at pvb@pvbr.com.
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