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The Best Notable Quotables of 1998:
The Eleventh Annual Awards for the
Year’s Worst Reporting
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Carve Clinton into Mt. Rushmore Award |
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First
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"He invited his exhausted audience to take a holiday from Lewinsky and spend a refreshing hour and 12 minutes feeling like a country again. For once the talk on the screen was not of oral sex, but of our lives and fortunes and sacred happiness. He had become all human nature, the best and the worst, standing there naked in a sharp, dark suit, behind the TelePrompTer. That which does not kill him only makes him stronger, and his poll numbers went through the roof....That may have been a miracle, but it was no accident: Americans are less puritanical and more forgiving than the cartoon version suggests, and this President is never better than in his worst moments."
— Time magazine Senior Editor Nancy Gibbs, February 9 issue. [104 points] |
Runners-up: |
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"The White House looks at this with such great irony. As the impeachment hearings grind on could you have a situation where next year the President cannot go to the Judiciary Committee on a particular day because he’s receiving the Nobel Peace Prize? That’s the kind of irony the White House looks at as they look at the success of President Clinton on this day."
— NBC News Washington Bureau Chief Tim Russert to Sara James on the October 23
Today hours before the signing in the White House of the Israel-PLO peace deal. [53]
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Dan Rather: "With the economy humming, CBS’s White House correspondent Scott Pelley reports, President Clinton was singing his own praises, this time with the facts and figures to back him up."
Scott Pelley: "The recovery began before Mr. Clinton took office. The fact that it’s run so long is credited to what some call the great odd couple — Mr. Clinton and Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve Chairman. Simply put, when Mr. Clinton made deficit reduction his top priority, Greenspan felt confident driving interest rates down. America did the rest. If the recovery continues to December, it will be the longest peacetime recovery in history."
— March 6 CBS Evening News. [33]
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Dan Rather: "President Clinton today proposed a centerpiece of his policy agenda: federal help for working parents who need safe and affordable child care...."
Scott Pelley: "The President was raised by a single mother who left him with his grandparents when she went off to school. Today, Mr. Clinton proposed what may be the largest increase in child care funding in the nation’s history."
— Opening of a January 7 CBS Evening News story (though Clinton survived unregulated care by a relative.) [32]
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"Medicare, the health care program that has been a godsend to the elderly in this country, even with all its financial difficulties. Tonight the President wants to dramatically expand its coverage to millions more."
— NBC’s Tom Brokaw introducing a January 6 Nightly News story. [30]
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Too Late For Our Judging, But
Year-End "Best of NQ" Worthy
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First
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"I would not be astonished to see Hillary Clinton be the Democratic nominee in 2000....Hillary Clinton, as far as I’m concerned, she’s the Person of the Year, if Time magazine doesn’t put her on the cover, they may put Mike, Mark McGwire, or Alan Greenspan, or somebody, but Hillary Clinton is the Person of the Year in that, you talk about a comeback kid — she makes her husband look like Ned in knee pants in terms of comeback from where she was early in the Clinton administration. You know, you add it all up, and you can make a case that Hillary Clinton might, might — mark the word — be the strongest candidate for the Democrats."
— CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather on CNN’s Larry King
Live, December 3. |
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Dan Rather: "If you’re Al Gore — listen he’s been a loyal Vice President. He is the odds-on favorite for the nomination. If you were Al Gore, what would you do?"
Larry King: "Make her, ask her to be Vice President. Is that what you think? Is that where you’re leading me?"
Rather: "No, I think maybe I would say, ‘You know, we want the goals of the Clinton administration to be achieved and to go forward. I need your help, First Lady, friend of mine, Hillary Clinton, and if I’m elected President, I will make you the next Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.’ That’s what I’d do, but Al Gore is a better man than I am and I doubt that he’d do it."
— CNN’s Larry King Live, December 3.
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Announcer: "Did Kenneth Starr go too far?"
Diane Sawyer to Starr: "I think there were 62 mentions of the word ‘breast,’ 23 of ‘cigar,’ 19 of ‘semen.’ This has been called demented pornography, pornography for Puritans. Were there mistakes made in including some of this?"
Announcer: "The tables are turned. Now it’s the prosecutor’s turn to be grilled, when 20/20 Wednesday continues after this from our ABC stations."
— Plug during 20/20 interview with Ken Starr, November 25.
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Sawyer: "Which brings us to Linda Tripp, the woman people love to hate, and the accusation that Ken Starr was not what he had seemed. Are you part of a right-wing conspiracy?"
Starr: "No. I don’t know that there is one."
Sawyer: "His key witness, Linda Tripp, is now a recognized soldier in the army of Clinton haters — among them Tripp’s friend and svengali, Lucianne Goldberg. Among them, the lawyers for Paula Jones. Before he became independent counsel, Starr gave them advice. And among them, millionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, who hired people to dig up dirt on Bill Clinton and funded a chair at Pepperdine University for Ken Starr...."
"Driving to the White House that day, for what was — for all intents and purposes — a lot of people think your trial, the only trial you were going to get. Did you think to yourself, here is a man who has to deal with Saddam Hussein and bin Laden and what’s going on in Russia, and we’re putting him through this?"
— Some of Diane Sawyer’s questions to Starr, November 25.
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Quote of the Year
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First
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"I would be happy to give him [Clinton] a blow job just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs."
— Time contributor and former reporter Nina Burleigh recalling what she told the
Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz about her feeling toward Bill Clinton, as recounted by Burleigh in the July 20
New York Observer. [121 points]
(On CNBC's Hardball on October 15th Nina Burleigh discusses playing cards with Clinton.)
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Runners-up:
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"Mr. President, we love you. I want to hug you, I want to hug you, please do the right thing. This is nothing, this is nothing. Thomas Jefferson did not have this in mind, I swear to God....I would give Ken Starr the Nobel Peace Prize were he to be man enough not to refer a sex lie to the House for impeachment."
— Geraldo Rivera urging Clinton not to cooperate, August 6 edition of
Rivera Live on CNBC. [66 points] |
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Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz: "It’s interesting to watch them, Ann Lewis and others, dutifully drag themselves before the cameras yesterday and saying, ‘I know I’ve been telling you for months that this didn’t happen. Well it did happen, but no one cares and lets move on.’ So their own credibility has taken a hit."
Co-host Lisa McRee: "But it’s also courageous professionalism, some would say."
— Exchange from ABC’s Good Morning America, August 19, just after Clinton admitted he misled his staff. [39 points]
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"But, do you give the President at least a little, not credit, but a little sympathy, when you read details like snapping the straps of a thong underwear, her thong underwear to entice him, asking for a job. Do you think that it mitigates our view of the President in any way?"
— Good Morning America co-host Lisa McRee describing Monica Lewinsky’s testimony to conservative columnist Betsy Hart, September 17. [33 points]
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