A Chappaquiddick comparison
Vice President Cheney's delay in reporting last week's hunting accident to the public drew comparisons from commentators to Senator Edward M. Kennedy's delay in reporting his 1969 Chappaquiddick car accident to the police. The outlines of that event by now are part of political legend: Capitol Hill secretary Mary Jo Kopechne was inside Kennedy's car when it tumbled off a narrow bridge and into the water. Kennedy waited eight hours to contact police, an action he later described as ''indefensible" and prompted by ''panic, confusion, and shock." The tragedy, along with speculation that Kopechne might have lived had Kennedy reported the accident earlier, has seeded a thriving industry of Ted Kennedy haters.
While no one died in the Cheney accident -- Harry Whittington was whisked to the hospital and the local police were called -- at least one TV talking head dubbed the affair ''Cheney's Chappaquiddick." Both incidents, wrote
When asked for a comment on Cheney's handling of the incident, Kennedy's office issued this statement: ''Whether it's covering up the absence of WMD [weapons of mass destruction] in Iraq, clandestine energy meetings with oil executives, or failing to own up to who was involved in the Plame case, this is the most secretive White House since the Nixon administration. The way they handled the vice president's shooting accident has only bolstered their cover-up reputation. This time it didn't work."
Asked about comparisons to Chappaquiddick, Kennedy spokeswoman Laura Capps would say only this: ''The White House is in crisis, and rule number one is to try to defuse a scandal by dragging others into it. But these campaign tactics aren't going to work and won't cover up their six-year record of abusing power and hiding the truth."
McClellan's stoicism started early
Scott McClellan's week wasn't much better than Cheney's. The White House spokesman was pummeled by reporters Monday even as he admitted that he was cut out of the loop on Cheney's decision to delay a public accounting of the event. On Valentine's Day, McClellan's 38th birthday, reporters heatedly accused him of evasion and nonanswers.
Anxiously watching her youngest son on C-SPAN from Texas -- a state she hopes to be governing when the polls close in November -- was McClellan's mother, a woman who calls herself ''One Tough Grandma." Carole Keeton Strayhorn, the state's comptroller who was the first female mayor of Austin, could relate to her son's sense of siege: Since formally announcing plans to ditch her party and launch an independent bid against the sitting governor -- Bush ally Rick Perry -- Strayhorn has been a GOP target.
So she scanned her son's face on TV for signs of stress and concluded he was holding up, probably a remnant of a childhood in which three big brothers -- Mark, now the nation's Medicare chief, and twins Dudley and Brad, now both lawyers -- ruthlessly riled the blond, curly-haired Scott with that timeless brotherly taunt: ''Only babies cry!"
Scott McClellan had stitches eight times by the time he was 2, and Strayhorn claimed her son never cried. He didn't cry when his brothers teased him for being born on Valentine's Day. Neither did he cry when local voters laughed at him as he stood on the back of the sound truck during his mother's mayoral campaign, asking them to ''Vote for my mudder" because he couldn't pronounce ''th" due to a childhood speech impediment.
''He's very calm, not like me. I'm more bombastic and in your face," says Strayhorn, a fast-talking Texas pol (picture a Republican version of former governor Ann Richards) who raised her brood of boys as a divorced single mother as she climbed the Texas political ladder.
Brad McClellan, who is managing his mother's campaign, says angry reporters aren't his baby brother's only source of conflict these days: ''Right now, he's having to part from his boss in a race in Texas," Brad notes, before offering up one of his mother's life philosophies: ''If you don't have somebody mad at you, you probably haven't done anything."
And, his mother likes Bush's style
Down in Texas, Strayhorn is enjoying some early success -- one poll put her 9 points behind the governor. But her campaign threads some narrow needles: Strayhorn accuses Perry of ''politically fracturing" Austin politics and creating an atmosphere of ''mean-spiritedness." (He accuses her of failing to collect taxes on ''deadbeats and tax cheats.") And she says she wants to run Texas in the style of George W. Bush.
By this, she means in a genial, bipartisan manner, seeking consensus rather than imposing an ideological agenda. But Bush, of course, stands accused by critics of fostering nasty political divisions in Washington.
Asked about this, Strayhorn would only say: ''I know what George W. Bush did in the state of Texas. He worked across partisan lines and got things done."
