Panchito in the Snowe
by digby
It’s a fierce competition these days for who is going to win the Joseph Kraft/David Broder chair at Village U, but clearly Frank Bruni is in the running:
BACK in 1999, when I covered Congress, I had a kind of crush on Olympia Snowe.
She moved, dressed and treated people — even reporters, and even when we hounded her through the hallways of the Capitol — with an unforced, uncommon graciousness. She spoke with intelligence and almost never with vitriol.
But those weren’t the main reasons we had such soft spots for her. We liked her best for her disobedience. Unlike the majority of her colleagues in the Senate, be they Democrats or, like her, Republicans, she dared to disagree with her party. Often. And she did it publicly, with her votes and her forthright explanations of them.
Even then, in times that were a bit less harshly partisan, this was unusual, and she had limited company, though it included Susan Collins, Maine’s other senator, also a Republican and also one of our heroes. Snowe and Collins offered proof and reassurance: just because you identified yourself principally with one side in the ceaseless fight, wearing an R or a D, it didn’t mean you signed on automatically to everything it championed, to each plank in its sprawling (and often suffocating) platform. These two senators validated the fact that a person’s values, philosophy and priorities are more complex than a political tribe’s often tyrannical orthodoxy. And that the tribe’s package of positions isn’t necessarily coherent, each fitting naturally with the others. Snowe and Collins made human sense. Their peers usually didn’t. Those dutiful foot soldiers marched in dreary lock step with their given generals, infrequently demonstrating any real individuality, any rebel spunk.
That was around the time Bruni was also following Bush around like a faithful hound running madly with his long ears flapping every time he whistled for Panchito. Here’s an example:
[Bush] not only slaps reporters’ backs but also rubs the tops of their heads and, in a few instances, pinches their cheeks. It is the tactile equivalent of the nicknames he doles out to many of them and belongs to a teasing style of interpersonal relationship that undoubtedly harks back to his fraternity days…Late one afternoon, a reporter who was trying to get some work done had to implore Mr. Bush to retreat to his seat in the first row of first class so the chatter would cease.Mr. Bush flashed a wounded expression, quickly replaced by a smile, and talked on, a reminder of the adage that when God is in a mood to punish, he simply answers people’s prayers.
Let’s just say he had a lot of crushes.
As for the column about Snowe, it’s a perfect example of Villager twaddle about bipartisanship and “independence” which always seems to come down to a couple of corporate shills getting together to thwart the will of the people of both parties. All it lacks is a reference to Tip and Ronnie getting shitfaced together on the White House lawn every night. (Or something like that …)
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