By Steve Rhodes
Page overheard at O’Hare: “Client 10, please pick up the white courtesy whore.”
Coffee Whores
“Starbucks did a great job of letting consumers know it was closing for three hours last month, but it failed to communicate the most important part – why. At least that’s the conclusion of one new study,” Ad Age reports.
Ad Age previously noted the “hundreds of millions of dollars worth of media coverage” generated by the shutdown in “News Outlets Fixate on Starbucks’ No-Joe Play Media Attention Over Coffee Chain’s Three-Hour Closure Helped Publicize Howard Schultz’s Turnaround Message.”
Jackie No
Today’s media story du jour is wonderment over why political wives stay with their straying husbands. Let’s take a look.
* “Why Stand By These Men?” the Tribune asks on its front page, along with photos of the McGreeveys, the Craigs, the Kilpatricks, and the Spitzers.
No doubt the paper decided it wouldn’t be fair during an election to include the Clintons, even though Hillary is usually thought of as Ground Zero in the exercise.
Maybe it’s also because, as the Trib notes, “she did not appear at her husband’s side during the live televised address in which he confessed to an inappropriate relationship with Monica Lewinsky.”
But Hillary Clinton is conspicuous by her absence from the photo gallery. She can’t win.
* John Kass manages to shoehorn the obligatory Clinton swipe in a column that otherwise chides Eliot Spitzer for “drag[ging]” is wife “like some prop” in front of the cameras the other day. Question: Do you think Silda Spitzer had any say in the matter? She reportedly was among the strongest voices among Spitzer’s aides pressing him to not resign. And she reportedly has a brain and a will of her own, too.
* Kass writes that “Hillary Clinton stood by her husband, and she got her payoff, a New York Senate seat and now a presidential campaign.” Because, you know, Hillary Clinton only got to where she is by marrying well. It’s not even remotely possible that a woman who’s pre-Bill commencement speech at Wellesley resulted in a Life magazine article or a woman who was advising the U.S. House Judiciary Committee during its Watergate hearings when she was 27 could possibly have had a successful political career on her own. I’m not sure if she’s done much since then, though.
* Mara Tapp writes on the Tribune Op-Ed page that Hillary “set the standard for long-suffering spousal silence.”
To the contrary, if anything, Hillary Clinton (for better and worse) set the standard for going public in that infamous 60 Minutes interview after the media had decided the affairs of politicians were public business.
If anyone set the standard for long-suffering spousal silence, it was Jackie Kennedy, the most cheated upon First Lady in history. Funny how no one asks why she stayed with her husband.
* Jackie, in fact, does make an unironic, a-historical and myth-embellishing appearance at the bottom of the Tribune story:
“[Dina] McGreevey, who listened with an incongruous smile on her face as her husband announced that he was gay, later told Winfrey, ‘I smiled because I didn’t want to break down. But, as his world was falling apart, he was still choreographing the entire day and how everything would play out. [He] told me when to smile, what to say if I was asked a question by reporters.
“‘He was telling me what to do, and he said, You have to be Jackie Kennedy today. And I’m thinking, Jackie Kennedy – her husband was murdered. You lied and cheated on me, and I have to be Jackie Kennedy?'”
* Sun-Times editorial writer Deborah Douglas also weighs in, writing “In some quarters of the female universe, Hillary Clinton still suffers from a whiff of disrespect for not dumping Bill Clinton when his infidelities with White House intern Monica Lewinsky were publicly aired.”
Douglas, though, is on the other side of the argument. “These women stand by because that’s what they signed on for. They should be uplifted and supported, not denigrated and second-guessed.”
I find that line of thinking equally incomprehensible. Outside of the part that is the public’s business – the part where Eliot Spitzer allegedly participated in a crime he had sent others to jail for and secretly moved funds between shell business accounts to hide it – the rest is eally none of our business. Particularly the part about what goes on between spouses.
Client 9 From Outer Space
* I’m not endorsing the sentiments, just passing this on.
* Why is prostitution illegal?
* Is Silda Spitzer the Ghost of Jennifer Aniston Future? And I mean that in an entirely good way.
Sufferin’ Suffredin
Methinks Larry Suffredin’s career as a political reformer is over.
Schmoozing Sneed
“Hmmm: Despite Mayor Daley’s furor over drunken cops behaving badly (criminally), police spokeswoman Monique Bond claims Sneed’s item stating new top cop Jody Weis may have ordered roadblocks to target drunken cops in neighborhoods where a preponderance of police officers live . . . is ‘absolutely not true. It’s just wrong, emphatically wrong,'” Sneed writes. “How many more times, Monique, do I have to request a meeting with Weis?”
A. As many times as you print false rumors.
B. Until Weis realizes your column is the Emperor’s Club of Chicago journalism and he can be Client 9.
C. Approximately a hundred more times than your paper’s real reporters.
The Beachwood Tip Line: Where emperors are penguins.
Posted on March 12, 2008