NPR's Rudin said "I wish I hadn't" compared Clinton to Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction
SUMMARY: National Public Radio political director Ken Rudin wrote in an April 30 blog post: "[D]id I really say on CNN that Hillary Clinton reminded me of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction? I did. I wish I hadn't. It was a facile and dumb comparison." As Media Matters for America noted, while discussing the Democratic presidential primary race on the April 27 edition of CNN's Sunday Morning, Rudin said, "Hillary Clinton is Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction."
In an April 30 blog post, National Public Radio political director Ken Rudin wrote: "[D]id I really say on CNN that Hillary Clinton reminded me of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction? I did. I wish I hadn't. It was a facile and dumb comparison." As Media Matters for America previously documented, during a discussion about the Democratic presidential primary race on the April 27 edition of CNN's Sunday Morning, Rudin stated: "[L]et's be honest here, Hillary Clinton is Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. She's going to keep coming back, and they're not going to stop her."
In response, co-host T.J. Holmes said, "What, Ken?" Rudin replied, "Well, we'll figure that out, there's a lot of ways to imagine that." Rudin returned to the analogy later, stating of Clinton: "[T]here may be a lot of pressure on her from the party bigwigs, whoever they are, to say, look, it's time to go, but she'll say, look, I'm in it until the end. I expect her to be in until the end, as Glenn Close was."
At the conclusion of the interview, Holmes said to Rudin, "We know you were at the correspondents' dinner last night in D.C., where the president was, and hear you all had a pretty good time. But you look good this morning for partying all night." Rudin replied, "I'm faking it." Co-host Betty Nguyen added, "Maybe that explains the Glenn Close analogy, who knows?" Holmes then stated: "Fatal Attraction, we don't get that reference on this show a lot."
From the April 30 Political Junkie blog post:
Finally, did I really say on CNN that Hillary Clinton reminded me of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction? I did. I wish I hadn't. It was a facile and dumb comparison. And for all the people who took their marching orders from the Clinton campaign's e-mail blast instructing them to express their displeasure to me, rest assured, I have read every note. Some have been quite thoughtful, enough to establish some sort of dialogue. Others, regrettably, have contained an astonishing amount of vitriol and hate. It's distressing that many of those who complain the most about bigotry and ignorance exhibit it themselves.
The point that I was inartfully trying to make, as I wrote in one e-mail, is that I was mocking the "when-will-Hillary-drop-out?" conversations that have been going on since New Hampshire -- as in, well, if she loses N.H., she's finished. If she loses Ohio or Texas, she's gone. I wanted to make the point that she's not leaving the race any time soon, nor should she. She wins in Pennsylvania by nearly 10 points and people still want to know when she's getting out? Nonsense. I concede that I damaged my case by making the Glenn Close comparison, but I was trying to say sorry, you're not going to get rid of her. This is only the seventh inning. The race hasn't been going on "too long." In fact, these states -- Indiana, North Carolina, Oregon, etc. -- haven't been part of the conversation for decades. Let the people have their say and then we'll see who should drop out.
I've been on Hillary's email list for months, and do not believe I got an email blast from her campaign directing me to voice my displeasure on this subject, or any others. I think his explanation is very reasonable and he deserves the benefit of the doubt.
As a strong supporter of Senator Clinton, I am often taken aback and very disappointed at how some of the comments on the blog sites where her groupies gather use such violent and accusatory language to state their views. Those supporters are so quick to scream that they often attack people on their side and achieve permanent alienation of true supporters, and contributors.
Despite that, the only threats of violence against a candidate I've ever seen come from the Obama sites - including his own campaign site.
I trust Mr Rubin was able to toss the angry messages aside and not take them personally. This has been a challenging campaign and it's difficult to tell who people are really supporting on the boards, in emails, and in blogs. I've seen people claiming to support Hillary who are clearly trying to get hateful exchanges going, and in the end find out they are foreigners, Republicans, or Obama supporters just trying to create an image and/or chaos.
No, the Reagan Democrats are called that for a reason but they didn't just vote for Reagan they voted Republican as often or more than they voted for Democratic candidates so I'm sorry I have a real problem with this latest we got to get them because they're the regular folks crap and only “they ” the Clinton’s can get the regular folks while they cynically characterize the man that went to school on student loans and only recently paid them off as the elitist. I grew up in a working class family as well as did most of the people that I know but somehow we’re not regular folks. The truth is Bill Clinton's opponents got a larger percentage of the White vote than he did; and I'm sorry I expected better BEHAVIOR from the Clintons then this oh so subtle race baiting non-sense. They are disrespectful and disloyal but you're correct we all get to choose who we want to represent us and I'll do that.
My focus is going to be on what my vote (or lack of it) would do overall. McCain would mean a continuation of bellicose militarism, more right wing supreme court judges, unfair tax policy, and on and on.
My hope is that Obama will make significant gains in the next few weeks.
I like your passion Lynn...
But keep this in mind: Thirty-percent of the votes in 2008 will be cast of electronic (DRE) voting machines with no meaningful paper trail.
Will we really know who wins or loses? Which candidate do the corporations want?
The nuts and bolts of democracy are in the voting integrity movement. VoteTrustUSA.com.
Elegantly put, Lynn.
Threats of violence are one thing, but Rudin wasn't accusing Hillary supporters of threatening violence. He said something dumb and sexist, and then when called on it he accused the more vitriolic e-mailers of "bigotry and ignorance." This is a variation of the popular "you lefties are supposed to be progressive, so why are you being intolerant of my intolerance" argument that we see so often when someone gets called out for bigoted speech.
I'm sure he did get a lot of ignorant and hateful e-mails (as any public figure does), but his "astonish[ment]" and "distress" about angry e-mails is an absurd distraction from his apology. Oh, the shock and horror, people are using the e-mail to say mean things!
I think it was a pretty good apology, but that part you just mentioned struck me also. It is kind of like someone who just walks up to you and punches you in the face (as many took the insult to Clinton) and then when you fight back, they are all of the sudden "astonished" at your "illiberal" response.
'This is a variation of the popular "you lefties are supposed to be progressive, so why are you being intolerant of my intolerance" argument...' (Clamscasino)
Hi Clams, where you been?You're exactly right, it's the same transparent backpedalling. Throw out the BS, wait for the response, then climb up on that high horse as you've simultaneously put your smear out there, and allowed yourself the luxury of looking down on those who point out your BS.
And it apparently works on some, as evidenced below by the conservative poster who has been tricked into seeing "grace" in this response.
This is why I write to these people. It doesn't happen often, but once in a while you get a grudging acknowledgment that your point was taken. If he wrote e-mails to anyone, I wasn't one of them, but even this half-hearted, low-calorie version of remorse is a direct message to everyone who wrote. I'm always respectful and never vulgar or obscene, but I make my point. In this case, I just observed that comparing Senator Clinton to a mentally deranged character in a fictional movie is little more than mind-numbingly simplistic character assassination, on a par with comparing Dick Cheney to Frankenstein's monster because of all the electrical wiring, or comparing John McCain to Ebenezer Scrooge because of his age and his tax-cut frenzy.
Of course this isn't much of an apology: "I wish I hadn't. It was a facile and dumb comparison." Sort of like apologizing to you by saying, "I wish I hadn't put your hand in the blender before turning it on. That was rude." And of course he had to take a juvenile shot by suggesting that I wrote because Hillary Clinton told me to, but I understand that these are authoritarians who are not really capable of conceiving of someone doing something without being told to. He just doesn't realize that it says more about him than it does about anyone else. These few resentful little acknowledgments of cognitive dissonance make the other times when they ignore you worth it.
Well said.
I think there must be a Traditional Media Journalists' Manual that says, on page 153 or somewhere, that if you get a lot of email that expresses the same concern, this occurs because some website or interest group has put people up to it. It is not because a lot of people actually SHARE that concern, enough to write to you about it (whether they have been encouraged by someone else to write or not). It could not possibly have occurred because you have actually screwed up royally and that's why a lot of people see it that way and took the time to tell you so, either. I presume there must be such a manual, because I have seen the same whining about "the meanies at X put them up to this, so I can discount a lot of the email I have received" articulated by multiple journalists at the one print newspaper to which I subscribe, Washington Post - and I would therefore not be the least bit surprised if is common elsewhere. Criticism is painful, especially if it is accompanied by rude and unfair personal attacks which he is correct cannot be justified, but the impetus behind email is completely irrelevant to whether the criticism is valid. And if it's true, as one person who made the first reply pointed out, that Clinton's campaign did NOT orchestrate a protest as the NPR journalist alleged, and he has no evidence for making such an accusation, then he has something else to apologize for as well.
Like others here, I am glad he understands that some things were wrong in what he said, and that is certainly better than saying nothing, but I also agree he doesn't quite "get" how wrong he was, enough to issue a real apology, anyway. And I notice he is quite sensitive about perceived bigotry in the emails he received, but that he failed to see or acknowledge the sexist implications in comparing any female candidate to a female fictional villain. Presumably Clinton has at least as much in common with many other fictional characters, some of whom are male and some of whom are not villains, as with the Fatal Attraction violent nutcase. What's next, someone who draws parallels between Obama and OJ Simpson (because there aren't as many fictional villains who share some demographic characteristics with Obama)? Maybe this is why people get so enraged and engage in what he thinks is bigotry because he can't see that they have a point. He reminds me of the bully on the playground who gets punched back and is astonished at how badly other kids behave, then runs to the teacher to complain.
More evidence of that manual:
where did I hear that "inartful" euphemism before? Oh yes, Howard Kurtz at the WaPo, and his enabler, the ombudsperson, are fond of it. Coincidence? I think not :-):
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/washpostblog/2006/01/deborah_howell_responds.html
I have no clue if the Clinton campaign urged people to complain or not and if it did, I figure so what: It changes nothing about the original statement.
I did want to note that Rudin might have had reason to think it was the result of the Clinton campaign's urging. For one, maybe it was. Leaving that aside, there are ways he could have incorrectly concluded it was.
One sign of a coordinated effort is within a short period of time getting a slew of emails on the same topic that make the same arguments in essentially (or even exactly) the same words. Sometimes a bunch of the emails are identical; sometimes certain key phrases, particularly if they're put in a stiffly formal manner not natural to the usual free-flow nature of email (something like "I urgently request your carefully consideration of this matter," for example), are repeated in a way that suggests a cut'n'paste job of a pre-written letter.
Another hint something is a campaign rather than individual efforts is the order of arguments. For example, we can say here that Rudin's comparison was both sexist and a smear. If he got a large number of emails (a few score would be enough for this) and about half of them said it was 1. sexist and 2. a smear and about half said it was 1. a smear and 2. sexist, that's one thing. But if they all said it was 1. sexist and 2. a smear, that's sufficiently unlikely to make him legitimately suspicious. (Obviously, the greater the number of arguments, the stronger an indication their order could provide.)
Again, I don't know if Rudin was the target of an email campaign urged by the Clinton team or not and what's more, I don't care. I'm saying that his conclusion that it was may not have been unreasonable.
And you might consider this a lesson on how to make any email campaign in which you do participate look less like one: Rephrase, rewrite, reorder. :-)
Lol..
As an Obama supporter who is flirting with the idea of voting for ralph nader in November I applaud Ken Rudin for his apology.
You might want to reconsider if your applause is deserved, since there isn't an appology anywhere in his statement.
I assume you're being sarcastic, since there is no apology in his statement. It always floors me when people just can't bring themselves to say these simple words: "I'm sorry." After all, it is THE LEAST one can do.
I agree JJ. His was yet another example of an "non-apology." To say "I regret saying. . ." is as weak as it gets. Personally, I regret that GWB is our President, I regret gaining that weight over Christmas, I regret things that I've said at times. However, to wish I hadn't said it, and to express an apology are two different things.
The best thing about his statement is that we kow he got our message.
POV,
Strangely enough, I agree with you. Showing regret is good enough for me. I don't know why people are so demanding these days. I think people get a little crazy during the political season - especially the more closely they are aligned with a particular candidate.
"I wish I hadn't. It was a facile and dumb comparison. And for all the people who took their marching orders from the Clinton campaign's e-mail blast instructing them to express their displeasure to me, rest assured, I have read every note. Some have been quite thoughtful, enough to establish some sort of dialogue. Others, regrettably, have contained an astonishing amount of vitriol and hate. It's distressing that many of those who complain the most about bigotry and ignorance exhibit it themselves."
Isn't it interesting how he concedes that what he said was dumb, but at the same time that anyone who calls him on it must be taking "marching orders" from the Clinton campaign?
I'm also curious what "bigotry and ignorance" was displayed in these emails. Were people making sexist slurs against him? What "ignorance" would be displayed, considering that he claims he was trying to say Clinton shouldn't drop out of the race while comparing it to a movie villain that a viewer wants to see die? As he said, the comparison damaged his case, so any misunderstanding is his fault by admission.
He can say that some of the messages were excessive and crude, certainly, but it seems like he's being inconsistent by questioning the legitimacy of their point while admitting they have a point at the same time. If he just left out most of the pasted passage, his apology and clarification would be a lot easier to swallow.
And for all the people who took their marching orders from the Clinton campaign's e-mail blast instructing them to express their displeasure to me...
Translation: I'm going to label you all as a bunch of robots goose-stepping across the internet because I refuse to entertain the notion that my "facile and dumb comparison" would actually be construed as a "facile and dumb comparison" without the prodding of partisan interests.
It's a major distraction and does nothing to advance our understanding of what the candidates would do if elected.
Vitriol and hate. Hmmm. Did he mean like the Vince Forster fiasco, or Whitewater, or Swift Boat, that kind of vitriol and hate? Perhaps if his comment didn't sound like it came right out of the GOP's playbook, out of the mouth of the Great Right Wing Conspiracy, it wouldn't have stung as much. We expect much better from NPR. That's why we listen so avidly.
Sounds like misogyny to me.
Mr Rudin, maybe you should learn from your associate Eric Boehlert when he says journalist have double standards when it comes to Hillary Clinton.
See below the article he wrote this week.
"Looking back at history, it's hard to find evidence of the same media response to Ronald Reagan's failed 1976 presidential campaign. Taking on President Gerald Ford, Reagan lost more primaries than he won, and Ford won a plurality of the popular vote, but neither man had enough delegates to secure the nomination. So the campaign went to the GOP convention, where Ford prevailed. The bitter battle did nothing to damage Reagan's reputation (in fact, it did quite the opposite), in part because the media did not collectively suggest the candidate was acting selfishly or irrationally. Instead, Reagan walked away with a reputation as a resilient fighter who stood up for his conservative values.
And what about Sen. Ted Kennedy's doomed run in 1980? He trailed President Jimmy Carter by more than 750 delegates at the end of the primary season and insisted on fighting all the way to the convention, where he tried to get committed Carter delegates to switch their allegiance. The press did not spend months during the primary season ridiculing Kennedy, in a deeply personal tone, for remaining in the race.
And what about Gary Hart in 1984? He and Walter Mondale split the season's primaries and caucuses evenly, and neither had the 2,023 delegates needed to secure the nomination. Superdelegates eventually determined the winner. (Sound familiar?) Mondale had many of them locked up even before the campaign season began, so after the final primary between Mondale and Hart was complete, it was obvious that Mondale was going to be the nominee because Hart could not persuade enough superdelegates to change their mind and support him.
When Hart took his crusade all the way to the convention, the media did not form a posse and decide it was their job to get Hart to quit for the good of the party. (And the press certainly didn't form a posse in March to start pushing Hart out of the race.) Nor did the press collectively suggest that Hart had an oversized ego that had turned him into a political monster.
That new media standard has been created exclusively for Hillary Clinton.
And where were the catcalls in 1988 for Jesse Jackson to ditch his quixotic run before all the primary votes had been tallied? He finished with 1,200 delegates, nearly 1,400 behind Michael Dukakis, yet soldiered on all the way to the convention without having a prayer of winning the nomination. There were few if any media drum sections trying to pound him out of the race.
Or Jerry Brown in 1992? He continued his campaign against Bill Clinton through June despite the fact he tallied fewer than 600 delegates. (By contrast, Hillary Clinton has won approximately 1,600 delegates so far.) Brown's attacks at the time were far more personal and bruising than anything we've seen this cycle. As The New York Times reported on June 2, 1992, Brown "put his party on notice that he intends to carry his politics-is-corrupt, Clinton-is-unelectable message to the Democratic National Convention in New York in July, and beyond." Brown also told the Times that voting for Clinton was like buying a ticket on the Titanic.
At the time, Clinton was actually polling in third place nationally, behind President George H.W. Bush and independent candidate Ross Perot, so why wasn't the press in a frenzy demanding that Brown drop out of the race because he was hurting his party's chances in November?
If you look at Reagan and Kennedy and Hart and Jackson and Brown, those men all ran competitive races. But toward the end of the primary season it was clear most of them had no mathematical chance of winning the nomination. (Reagan was the exception.) Yet none of them was told collectively by the press to go home. Nor were they routinely depicted in the media as being self-absorbed.
Today, Clinton does have a chance to win. Yet she has been told by the press to go home and to get over herself.
It's unprecedented."