His performance did create the kind of uncomfortable feeling you experienced when your crusty uncle Fred got drunk at your graduation party and tried to sing “My Way.” But I bet not a single person watching DeLay slide across the floor on his rhinestone-encrusted knees with that manic grin on his face was thinking: “Gee, I wonder how that money-laundering indictment is working out for him?”
And look at Sarah Palin. Everybody thought that she was a desperately uninformed goofball whom the Republican Party might, nevertheless, someday nominate for president in an effort to cement its reputation as worst major American political organization since the Know-Nothings. Then this week she went off to Hong Kong and gave an 80-minute, closed-door speech to financial fund managers, for which she was paid an undisclosed but indisputably vast sum of money. The early reviews from people exiting the ballroom ranged from “well prepared” to “boring.”
Given that she started the day as a celebrity whose deepest recorded thought was how only dead fish go with the flow, this was quite a triumph. If Palin can arrange to make all her future speeches in Asia, with no reporters present and tons of money falling out of the ceiling at every stop, I think she has a real shot at rehabilitation.
For those in need of a life change without a six-figure speech in the offing, consider the advice given by the heroine of “The Good Wife,” the new TV series about the wife of a disgraced politician: Just keep trudging along. “It’s the superficial things that matter most right now,” said Alicia Florrick, the lead character, as she extolled the virtues of fixing your makeup and getting a good haircut.
This worked great for Alicia. Her hair looked great even while she was visiting her husband in the clink. And by the end of the first episode, she had managed to restart the legal career she abandoned in her youth, win her first case, free a second-grade teacher unjustly charged with murder and reconnect with a hunky former law school classmate. Just by taking it one day at a time. And not all that many days, at that.
Sometimes, friends can show you the way. Barack Obama has been trying to put his pal David Paterson on a more fulfilling path than Paterson’s current one, which involves being governor of New York and dragging down the entire Democratic slate in the 2010 elections. So far, the White House’s efforts have not gotten a particularly warm reception.
But perhaps that was because until now, New York didn’t have a lieutenant governor. If Paterson had left Albany to be, say, chief of an exciting new think tank located in a really excellent office in Manhattan, control of the state would have fallen to ... well, hard to say. Probably whichever state senator could do the best impression of a junior high school delinquent shaking down the third-graders for their milk money.
But this week, the state’s highest court ruled that Paterson’s desperate attempt to swear in Richard Ravitch as lieutenant governor while Ravitch was dining at a steakhouse in Brooklyn was actually legal. Who’d have thought? Despite his peculiar initiation, Ravitch is an eminently respectable guy who has held almost every appointive office in the state except Grand Marshal of the Columbus Day Parade. If Paterson decides he needs a life makeover, it’s clear sailing.
Here is the exciting part. Then there would be an opening for another new lieutenant governor! And I think I would be a really excellent candidate.
I am totally up for an exciting new challenge, but preferably one that does not involve mouthing “Wild Thing” while attempting to ballroom dance. And it would have to be something that would not force me to quit my current job, which I really like. So lieutenant governor would be perfect. Nothing ever gets done in Albany, and I could just sit in my shiny leather chair and work on my laptop all day.
New York has lost an uncommon number of elected officials over the last few years. So they’re probably starting to run out of people to plug up the holes. And I have good qualities that set me apart from many other possible contenders. For instance, I am not currently under indictment. And I have been very active in New York politics, in the sense that I have voted in all the elections, including that one for public advocate the other week in which only about 10 people took part.
If this doesn’t work out, there’s still the haircut.
Gail Collins writes for The New York Times.
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