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Move over, Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Tom Tancredo’s rumbling in.
The Colorado Republican congressman charmingly calls his Heritage Softail an “old-fart Harley.” The seat, he explains, is bigger, and the suspension is softer on his 61-year-old frame, than other models.
Sadly, our dreams of a delegation-wide motorcycle gang were not to be, as Tancredo told us Tuesday that he never rode with that other famous Hog-lovin’ Republican from Colorado. Tancredo attributes it to two-wheeler snobbery. Back when Campbell was in office, Tancredo had an old Suzuki 650, and Tancredo figures a Harley rider wouldn’t want to roll next to a Japanese bike.
A couple of years ago, he started hankering for a Hog, which sparked a “year-long argument with my wife.”
“She said, ‘You already have a bike and you never ride it.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but it’s not a Harley,’ ” Tancredo recalled. “Then it was, ‘How much?’ ”
She also started showing him articles about retirees reliving their youth on motorcycles — and killing themselves in droves. “She’d put them on my breakfast plate,” Tancredo said.
Finally, he just went out and bought it. Apparently, that’s how things tend to go in the Tancredo household.
“I told her, ‘You were right — you said you knew I was just going to go do it,’ ” he said.
Clinton looms among GOP’s worst nightmares String the fake cobwebs around campaign headquarters; cue the soundtrack with moaning wind and blood-curdling screams. Republicans agree on this season’s scariest monster. It’s Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). She’s baaaaack, and well on her way to winning the Democratic nomination — just in time for Halloween.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) this week kicked off its Scariest Democrat Halloween Contest, an online survey in which participants can choose between Clinton and the rest of the Democratic presidential field.
As it turns out, Clinton’s lead among Republicans is even more overwhelming than among primary voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Clinton leads her rival, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), by five points and 20 points in the Hawkeye and Granite states, respectively. But a whopping 91 percent of voters in the RNC’s poll voted her Scariest Democrat. The next scariest, Obama, scored a paltry 5 percent.
“It’s not a surprise considering Sen. Clinton is beating all the leding Republican candidates in the polls,” said Clinton spokesman Phil Singer.
Clinton may owe her crushing lead in part to Republican opposition researchers who reached deep into their file of unflattering Clinton photos to fish out a snapshot that makes her look especially maniacal.
Of course, that’s a dangerous game to play — the GOP field for the 2008 nomination hasn’t won any contests for being photogenic (except for Mitt Romney).
Rights organization GLAAD to provide a quick vocab lesson
A gay advocacy group issued helpful guidelines last week on how news organizations should cover Sen. Larry Craig’s (R-Idaho) legal and personal troubles resulting from his arrest in a gay sex sting.
The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation notes that the preferred terminology for sexual orientation is “gay, gay man, or lesbian,” as the word “homosexual” “has been adopted by anti-gay extremists to suggest that lesbians and gay me are somehow diseased or psychologically/emotionally disordered.”
It might seem a little late to issue the recommendations — the Craig story broke in August — but the press release notes that the organization’s efforts to guide coverage from behind the scenes simply wasn’t working.
“We are distributing recommendations based upon the pattern of problematic trends in coverage emerging as the story continues to develop,” the release reads.
We wonder if Craig would like to issue some additional recommendations of his own. Judging from his press statements, we suspect that his preferred terminology would be “not gay,” “never have been gay,” “not bisexual” and, perhaps, “wide stance.”
Reid’s public radio donation may not have been worth it
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) appears to have taken a new approach to getting some good ink for his causes: old-fashioned bribery.
Historically, the politicians are the ones who are accused of taking bribes. Reid changed it up on Monday, though, when he interrupted a reporter from National Public Radio — a man who clearly just wanted to ask a question about war funding.
“Public radio — I won’t tell you how much I sent in, but I sent some money in,” Reid said, proving himself by then rattling off the phone number to WAMU 88.5 FM.
The reporter eventually did get to pose his whole question, but not before Reid jokingly asked for a little gratitude (“Couldn’t you at least say thanks?”) and issued a reminder of the importance of donations to public radio (“That’s your pay, you know.”).
Freshmen keep falling for the ritual deemed ‘Golden Gavel’ Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) on Tuesday became the fourth freshman senator to win the Golden Gavel.
The award — described by Reid on the Senate floor as “a, well, a golden gavel in a nice case” — indicates that McCaskill has spent the equivalent of four full days presiding over a nearly empty chamber as colleagues address C-SPAN cameras.
The Golden Gavel was created in the late 1960s to encourage freshmen to preside over the chamber, where they can learn the most about Senate procedure.
And by “gold,” by the way, Reid means yellowish. The award is made of painted wood.
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