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The Best Notable Quotables of 1993:
The Sixth Annual Awards for the
Year’s Worst Reporting
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The I Am Woman Award
(for Hillary Rodham Hero Worshipping) |
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First
Place
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"As the icon of American womanhood, she is the medium through which the remaining anxieties over feminism are being played out....Perhaps in addition to the other items on her agenda, Hillary Rodham Clinton will define for women that magical spot where the important work of the world and love and children and an inner life all come together. Like Ginger Rogers, she will do everything her partner does, only backward and in high heels, and with what was missing in [Lee] Atwater -- a lot of heart."
-- Time White House correspondent Margaret Carlson, May 10. |
Runners-up: |
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"I saw a Hillary Clinton that I'd never seen before. She was funny, charming, sexy -- yes, gang, sexy. We are both Scorpios, which tells you a lot. She's informal -- called me `Larry' and told me to call her by her first name...Meanwhile, she's earned the respect of everyone (except the wackos) with her handling of the health care issue. Indeed, she has gotten everyone (except the wackos) to agree that we need health care for everyone. This is a very formidable idea, ladies and gentlemen."
-- CNN/Mutual Broadcasting talk show host Larry King on his October 2 interview with the First Lady. October 4
USA Today column.
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"She's ecumenical but prefers Italian and Mexican. The President fixes her eggs with jalapeño peppers on the weekends. One Christmas she served black beans and chili as part of a buffet. She carries Tabasco sauce wherever she goes....Valentine's Day at the Red Sage restaurant. Even at a romantic outing, the President can be the date from hell, talking to everyone but the girl he brung....Finally alone, they have `painted soup' and the lamb baked in herbed bread. They exchange gifts and touch each other more in two hours than the Bushes did in four years."
-- Time reporter Margaret Carlson in the June Vanity
Fair.
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"In the midst of redesigning America's health care system and replacing Madonna as our leading cult figure, the new First Lady has already begun working on her next project, far more metaphysical and uplifting... She is both impersonal and poignant, with much more depth, intellect and spirituality than we are used to in a politician...She has goals, but they appear to be so huge and far off -- grand and noble things twinkling in the distance-- that it's hard to see what she sees."
-- Washington Post's Martha Sherrill, May 4.
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"You've been working hard already to introduce this plan to people, sell this plan to people. Are you having any fun with this or is it all just hard work? It looks to be very hard work." "I hear you talking, and as I have before on this subject, I don't know of anybody, friend or foe, who isn't impressed by your grasp of the details of this plan. I'm not surprised because you have been working on it so long and listened to so many
people..."
-- Dan Rather to Hillary Clinton, after Sept. 22 health speech.
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Courage to Change Award
(for Presidential Puffery)
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First
Place |
"If we could be one-hundredth as great as you and Hillary Rodham Clinton have been in the White House, we'd take it right now and walk away winners...Thank you very much and tell Mrs. Clinton we respect her and we're pulling for her."
-- Dan Rather at a May 27 CBS affiliates meeting talking via satellite to President Clinton about his new on-air partnership with Connie Chung. |
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Runners-up: |
"Clinton's campaign, conducted with dignity, with earnest attention to issues and with an impressive display of self-possession under fire, served to rehabilitate and restore the legitimacy of American politics and thus, prospectively, of government itself. He vindicated (at least for a while) the honor of a system that has been sinking fast. A victory by George Bush would, among other things, have given a two-victory presidential validation (1988 and 1992) to hot-button, mad-dog politics -- campaigning on irrelevant or inflammatory issues (Willie Horton, the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance, Murphy Brown's out-of-wedlock nonexistent child) or dirty tricks and innuendo (searching passport files, implying that Clinton was tied up with the KGB as a student)."
-- Time Senior Writer Lance Morrow in Man of the Year cover story, Jan. 4 issue. |
"There's no doubting that the nation is about to be led by its first sensitive male chief executive. He's the first President to have attended both Lamaze classes and family therapy (as part of his brother's drug rehabilitation). He can speak in the rhythms and rhetoric of pop psychology and self-actualization. He can search for the inner self while seeking connectedness with the greater whole."
-- Newsweek Washington reporter Howard Fineman, January 25 news story.
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Without running the risk of being considered `touchy-feely,' Clinton is known as a hugger of men and women. Simple handshakes aren't enough for this man whose theme song easily could be borrowed from the cotton industry's `the touch, the feel, the fabric of our lives'....What one does with hands, lips, arms, trunks, and legs carries far more weight that a barrage of insults, eloquent speeches, or sweet poetry whispered in the ear. The problem is that many of us, unlike Clinton, have lost touch with touch."
-- "Style Plus" article in the December 14, 1992 Washington
Post.
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"[Clinton] pointed out the Andrew Jackson magnolia tree. He's a very good historian. Harry, I think if you had been in the room, any viewer-listener who had been in that room, would have been impressed with the breadth of his knowledge. I mean he talked about the Oscars. He talked very knowingly about Clint Eastwood and his new movie Unforgiven, Jack Nicholson's role in A Few Good Men, and then switched very quickly to a knowledgeable analysis of Arkansas's chances against North Carolina in the big basketball game tomorrow night."
-- Dan Rather to CBS This Morning's Harry Smith, after March 25 Clinton interview.
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The Gordon Gekko Greed is Good Award
(for '80s Hate)
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First
Place |
"In the plague years of the 1980s -- that low decade of denial, indifference, hostility, opportunism, and idiocy -- government fiddled, medicine diddled, and the media were silent or hysterical. A gerontocratic Ronald Reagan took this [AIDS] plague less seriously than Gerald Ford had taken swine flu. After all, he didn't need the ghettos and he didn't want the gays."
-- CBS Sunday Morning TV critic John Leonard, Sept. 5.
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Runners-up:
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"Florio will win substantially. Whitman's offer of a 30 percent tax cut, she lost all credibility. Last year's hustle doesn't work. Supply-side economics is dead."
-- Newsweek's Eleanor Clift, Oct.16 McLaughlin Group. |
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"In the greedy excesses of the Reagan years, the mean income of the average physician nearly doubled, from $88,000 to $170,000. Was that warranted?"
-- Bryant Gumbel to Dr. Richard Corlin of the American Medical Association, March 31
Today.
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"[Christie] Whitman tried a Ronald Reagan rerun and proposed a 30 percent tax cut. The lost revenue could be made up by cost-saving devices, such as no longer giving free Adidas sneakers to prison inmates. A decade after Reagan, New Jersey's voters aren't buying government by apocryphal anecdote."
-- Eleanor Clift before Whitman won New Jersey gubernatorial race, October 25
Newsweek story. |
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