Carol Felsenthal

In fits and starts over Thanksgiving weekend I read pieces of All In: The Education of General David Petraeus. As a nonfiction author who checked her Amazon page in the tense days after pub date, I looked at Broadwell’s soaring “best-sellers rank” when the story was in the headlines (110), but as it faded, I returned just now to Amazon to find the book with a decent — I’d love to have it — ranking of 3,952; decent but not best-selling.

Pat Caddell is a fixture on Fox News and routinely presented as a Democrat who cut his teeth doing polling for Jimmy Carter, before that George McGovern; and, after that, Walter Mondale, Gary Hart and Joe Biden; in other words, Caddell’s resume puts him solidly left of center. 

I’ve watched him scores of times on Sean Hannity’s show, and he agrees with Hannity almost all the time.

Caddell is back in the news as one of the lead people behind a group called SecureAmericaNow, which is running an ad in Florida, targeted at Jewish voters, and featuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warning that the world sleeps as Iran develops nuclear weapons. “The world tells Israel, 'Wait. There’s still time.’ And I say, 'Wait for what? Wait until when?' ... The world needs American strength, not apologies.”

The speeches by Ann Romney and Michelle Obama have been crowned as the best of their respective conventions.

These speeches had one purpose — to erase the aloof image that diminishes the likability factor for each husband. And the women achieved their goal, though not without a touch of disingenuousness.
 
In Ann Romney’s case, it infuses her description of young married life while attending college — eating pasta and tuna in a $62-a-month basement apartment, using an ironing board as a table and throwing patchwork rugs on concrete floors. (Turns out ironing boards are a motif in Mitt’s life; he claims even today to iron his own shirts.)

Hillary Clinton’s brothers, Tony and Hugh, were often entertaining, sometimes alarming White House presences, but they had largely disappeared from public view as their brother-in-law left the White House and their older sister became U.S. senator and then secretary of State.

So I took note when I read Mark Leibovich’s admiring, even loving, profile of Bill Clinton’s best buddy, the irrepressible Terry McAuliffe. (The long profile of the former president’s fundraiser/rescuer extraordinaire appears in next Sunday’s New York Times magazine but is available online).

Yesterday’s Chicago Tribune story about the queasiness of public officials revealing hospitalizations sent an alarm off in my head. Katherine Skiba and Todd Lighty, in a story prompted by Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.’s (D-Ill.) weird disappearance and the silence in its aftermath, focused also on Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who, they write, experiencing dizziness and numbness, checked himself into Lake Forest Hospital last Jan. 21 under the assumed name Hillel Underwood.

Skiba and Lighty quote doctors and others saying that using a fake name is done, although not often.

When I was writing a book about Bill Clinton’s post-presidency, I tracked down every artist I could find who painted Bill. One of them was Simmie Knox, son of a sharecropper and the first African-American commissioned to paint the official White House portrait of a president. Knox told me about his boyhood on a plantation/farm and the segregated schools he attended.

In June 2004 in the East Room at the Bush White House — like now, the country in the midst of a mean reelection campaign — Knox’s portraits of Bill and Hillary, then U.S. senator from New York, were unveiled. I wrote in my book that President Bush won over the Clintons with his greeting, “Welcome home,” and reminded the assembled that he and his father call each other “41” and “43.” Turing to Clinton, Bush said, “We’re glad you’re here, 42.” That was the start of a thaw that produced a genuine and continuing friendship between 41 and 42. When the then-president mentioned Clinton’s mother, Virginia Kelley, and “the incredible pride” she would have felt that morning — she had died in 1994 — he brought the former president to tears.

When the Obama team blungeoned Mitt Romney with a statement he made in 2007 about Osama bin Laden — that it was "not worth moving heaven and earth and spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person” — Romney shot back that of course he too would have tried to take out bin Laden. In an exasperated tone, Romney added, “Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order.”

I’m not a particular fan of Carter’s, but still ... Romney’s gratuitous putdown has an ugly, bullying quality to it. Why say it? Especially given that in the spring of 1980 Carter did order a high-risk attempt to rescue the American hostages in Iran. The fact that helicopter equipment malfunction rendered it a failed mission — eight people died — doesn’t change the fact that Carter had the guts to give it a go.

I have interviewed Joel Pollak, 34, several times since he ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2010 against Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D) in the 9th district of Illinois. I’ve kept in touch with him and talked to him as he left his boyhood roots in Skokie and moved to L.A. to go to work for Andrew Breitbart.

I had spoken to him last Thursday, the day the 43-year-old Breitbart died, and again late Monday. (Breitbart’s funeral is today.)

Without saying so explicitly, Pollak indicated that his boss had died of natural causes. As to the reports of previous heart problems, he said, “Andrew was the picture of health. I had a conversation with someone who had been with Andrew on the day before he died and this person told me, 'Andrew looked so good.' He went to the gym the day he died, he was losing weight, he was healthy and robust.”

Will Newt be able to do tonight in Tampa to Brian Williams what he did to Juan and John last week in the run-up to the South Carolina primary?

Williams — Brian, that is — ranks as the king of the evening news anchors, as smooth and seemingly seasoned and confident as they come, and he’s moderating tonight’s GOP debate in Tampa at the University of South Florida. The supporting cast features the Tampa Bay Times’s political reporter Adam Smith and the National Journal’s Beth Reinhard.

I just listened to an interview with ABC’s Brian Ross on Washington’s WMAL about his interview with New Gingrich’s second ex-wife, Marianne, scheduled to air tonight on "Nightline." It doesn’t sound like it warrants the Matt Drudge siren of yesterday, like there’s anything in it that we didn’t already know about Newt’s chaotic private and public lives.

Especially if we read in the summer of 2010 John Richardson’s long (eight pages in the online version) and mesmerizing Esquire story on Gingrich. Romney and his aides must have missed it.

If the biggest shocker in the Brian Ross interview is that Newt asked Marianne, to whom he had been married for 18 years, for an “open marriage,” that’s there in the year-and-a-half-old piece. In Richardson’s words: “He asked her to just tolerate the affair [with current wife Callista Bisek], an offer she refused.” Also, there is Newt calling Marianne to ask for a divorce shortly after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, having installed Callista, 23 years his junior and a congressional aide, in their Washington apartment and in their bed.