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The Best Notable Quotables of 1993:
The Sixth Annual Awards for the
Year’s Worst Reporting
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Media Hero Award |
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First
Place
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"What do you do for an encore after ending the Cold War and reversing the arms race? How about saving the planet? That's the latest assignment for Mikhail Gorbachev, having assumed the presidency of the International Green Cross, a new environmental organization...."
-- Time's "The Week" section, May 3. |
Runners-up: |
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"She restores a tradition of excellence at the Department of Health and Human Services. That agency has been headed by some of America's truly great human beings: Joe Califano, Pat Harris, and now Donna Shalala. She is an academic who is connected with the real needs of people. When it comes to being an effective advocate for those who have no voice, she has few equals, perhaps only one -- the other half of the dynamic duo here in Washington, that is the duo of Donna Shalala and Hillary Rodham Clinton."
-- ABC health reporter George Strait introducing Shalala to the National Minority AIDS Council on C-SPAN, Apr. 22.
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"In that instant, [Janet] Reno, who had already pretty much captivated Washington with one gutsy performance after another, achieved full-fledged folk-hero status....She was cheered on both sides of the aisle in Congress and in her own Justice Department, where a succession of 25-watt, responsibility-ducking Attorneys General had left morale lower than -- well, lower than an alligator's belly."
-- Time contributing editor and former Washington Bureau Chief Stanley Cloud, May 10.
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"Just last night on television I saw your opponent for Governor complaining about your record, saying how you had raised taxes, how it had cost 300,000 jobs. Are you afraid your politically courageous moves are in fact going to cost you the election?"
-- co-host Katie Couric to N.J. Gov. Jim Florio, May 24.
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The "Enhanced Contribution" and "Investment" Award
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First
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"Forty-five minutes into budget director Leon Panetta's briefing on the economy, it was clear that something was missing. After 12 years of Ronald Reagan's voodoo economics and George Bush's low-fat, decaffeinated, nondairy, sodium-free imitation voodoo economics, there was suddenly no ideology in the federal budget. Panetta talked like a cheerful, no-nonsense accountant trying to balance the books the hard way -- honestly."
-- New York Daily News Washington Bureau Chief Lars-Erik Nelson, March 15 column. |
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Runners-up: |
"Doesn't Clinton deserve some credit here for beginning to tackle the problem of getting people to pay taxes? I mean, for 12 years in this country, it's become patriotic not to pay taxes, to avoid paying taxes. And Clinton at least is trying to turn that around. Why isn't he getting more credit for that?"
-- Washington Post columnist and chief foreign correspondent Jim Hoagland on
Washington Week in Review, June 18. |
"Clinton has at least faced the facts squarely, which is more than his immediate predecessors ever did, and he is forthrightly taking the heat for the tax increases that serious deficit reduction demands. Simply to move the debate from whether the deficit should be tackled to how the red ink should be stemmed is the definition of courage in modern American politics. So give him that....Clinton's economic plan deserves to be known as a new New Deal, and Congress should pass it quickly."
-- Time Chief Political Correspondent Michael Kramer, March 1 issue.
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"It's one for one [tax hikes to spending cuts] and it's gutsier than any Republican President has done in 12 years of feel-goodism. This is going to be politically courageous and you're going to hear a lot of screaming."
-- Newsweek reporter Eleanor Clift on The McLaughlin
Group, February 13.
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"I think regardless of what you think of the specifics of the program, the President deserved great, great credit for having the courage to come forward with a plan to deal responsibly with the deficit. Yes, there are flaws....But I think that Bill Clinton really set the nation on a new course last night in trying to deal responsibly with our problems, and make the tough choices."
-- NBC's Lisa Myers on Today, February 18.
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The Bernie Sanders Socialist
Disneyland Award (for Sweden Envy)
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First
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"The free market. While the government helped build the trains and the roads to help bring the United States into the 20th century, the economic philosophy of this country has been laissez-faire. Germany and Japan, on the other hand, give industry broad government support. The Japanese government invests 58 percent more than the United States [government] in civilian research and development, Germany 42 percent. But American business has always fought a government-guided industrial strategy. They called it socialism. Now many are calling it 21st century economics."
-- Walter Cronkite on The Cronkite Report: Help Unwanted on The Discovery Channel, May 28.
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Runners-up:
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"There is no mystery in how [the deficit] can be brought down...the U.S. simply has to choose from a menu of unpalatable options that include deeper cuts in defense spending, tougher controls on medical services, higher taxes on federal pensions, and a broad-based tax on energy or consumption, preferrably both. We know how to do this. Impose measures already commonplace in other industrialized countries. The weapons are there. It's the will to use them that's the problem."
-- NBC commentator John Chancellor, February 16 Nightly News. |
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"Here in France, they have created a child care system that would amaze most Americans. Every child in this country, from the richest family down to the poorest, gets a chance at the same high standard of day care, preschool, and health care. Not only is it free, or at low cost to everyone, but the quality is better than what most youngsters get in the United States....Next fall, Benjamin will be able to leave the [government nursery] and move on to the next stage of the French government's child care system, the école maternelle, or preschool, which is totally free....There's one in virtually every neighborhood in the country, and almost every single three-to five-year-old French child goes all day -- for free."
-- CBS reporter Harold Dow on Street Stories, July 2.
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