Monthly Archives: January 2010

Ailes v Huffington: No Match

Roger Ailes and Arriana Huffington went head to head on today’s edition of ABC’s “This Week”. Ailes decked Huffington in Round One. She struggled back to her corner, went after him again for Round Two, and he decked her again. She didn’t come out for a third round. Ailes was prepared. With predictable left-wing sanctimony, […]

The Big O meets the GOP

So I watched the president’s appearance before the GOP House caucus. It came, of course, two days after Mr. Obama delivered his State of the Union address. Drafting an SOU is generally a team effort. I have been on one of those teams (1988), penning the best received, per the pulse polling, section of that […]

SOU and “I”

Mr. Obama’s first State of the Union Address: good speech — and not so good. On one hand, the President can be extremely appealing. Numerous times in the evening, I found myself liking him — particularly when he seemed to break from text and, with a smile, remind both parties of their common duty to […]

Carrying On Without ED

One commenter — “Pedro” — suggested that Ed write under a pseudonym. I’m for it. I tried to persuade him to stay on as a contributor. I thought, well, some say WHWG is a kind of think tank as well as a communications and policy consulting firm — so why not create a WHWG Fellows […]

Last Call

During the holidays Clark called me and said, “Ed, you’re lookin’ like a fool with your pants on the ground.” And I said, “What?!?” And he said, “Oh, nevermind, it’s just something I’ve been working on with a client. It probably won’t go anywhere. “The real reason I’m calling is this….” He went on to […]

We Had a Bad Candidate, Redux

Hey kids, see if you can pick the correct line in tomorrow’s talking points for White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. Will it be” “Last night’s election was a fluke”?  Or? “It was indicative of nothing more than a single vote on a single night.” Or?  “It was a snapshot.” Or? “We had a bad […]

The Eternal Sunshine of the Speaker’s Mind

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said this Friday about the earthquake in Haiti: “From my own experience with earthquakes, being from San Francisco, I think that this can be an opportunity for a real boom economy in Haiti…. It can leapfrog all over its past challenges – economically, politically, and demographically in terms of the rich […]

Harry Qua Harry

As any PR flak knows, the best way to knock your client’s bad news off the front pages is for worse news to catch reporters’ attention. Less scrupulous hucksters will fabricate rumors and stories to help move the media. But sometimes events just fall into place. So it’s been for Harry Reid. When news broke […]

Hooray for Google!

When faced with intellectual theft or subversion by the regime in Beijing, many Fortune 500 have spines of Jello. This is bad enough when a company quietly allows its hard-earned competitive products to be lifted.  It is immoral when companies cooperate with Chinese authorities by helping them crack down on democratic dissidents. One company has […]

Michael Steele

Washington is getting a case of the vapors over Michael Steele’s new book, Right Now: A 12-Step Program for Defeating the Obama Agenda.  The Republican establishment heaped coals over Steele’s head in a front-page Washington Post article for getting the GOP off message in the face of what should be a historic midterm rebuke of […]

Newsflash: Presidents Work on Vacation

If there’s one storyline about President Bush I’ve never had any patience for, it’s the idea that he was on an endless holiday during his time in office. Reporters loved to bandy about the number of days the president spent at his ranch in Crawford or at Camp David. The “vacations” fed the notion that […]

Redefining Moments

As Ed’s piece (immediately below) on Nigel Lawson reflects, December saw the transformation of climate change discussion. By month’s end, dismissing so-called “deniers” was out. Honoring skepticism was in. Why? Two events, of course: the outcome (more aptly non-outcome) of the Copenhagen summit and the release of the University of East Anglia emails. Despite President […]