Embattled Clinton Democrats, like FCC Chairman Bill Kennard and the First Family itself, know they’ve got a friend in Cape Cod and the islands, where I just returned from vacation with my family.
There, you can see bumper stickers that read, `Friends of WFCC’-it’s an FM radio station that plays classical music.
In Centerville, former FCC wireless wonk David Siddall is legend for superlative speech skills (just ask his former teacher and 4 Seas Ice Cream owner Dick Warren) that made him Massachusetts champ before coming to Washington.
In his new life, Siddall speaks for telecom clients at Verner Liipfert’s D.C., law offices, alum club of ex-pols Dole, Bentsen, Richards, Mitchell, etc.
The Clintons, for their part, got a warm reception upon arriving last week at the Vineyard, home of Mad Martha’s Ice Cream, the Black Dog store (where the prez bought gifts for Monica and friends) and other trendy shops.
On the Friday before Clinton’s testimony to the Starr Chamber, we spotted an NBC satellite truck that had gained a beachhead in Oak Bluffs. Our bus driver, “Teacher Bob,” could only lament, “They’re here already.”
Now, you’d think here on the Vineyard-summer playground of the Eastern liberal establishment elite and a favorite Carly Simon hangout-Clinton would have safe haven from vast right-wing conspirators.
Not so. Vacationing just a ferry-boat ride away, on Nantucket, is none other than right-wing don and Pittsburgh billionaire, Richard Mellon Scaife. Scaife, writes Joe Conason in July’s Boston Magazine, poured $2.4 million into the anti-Clinton `Arkansas Project,’ and has bankrolled various conservative organizations to the tune of $300 million.
But wait. Hillary now blames Arkansas haters for Bimbroglio, prompting a Republican operative to crack that first it was a `vast right-wing conspiracy’ and now a `chicken-wing conspiracy’ that is to blame for all the lurid allegations about an Oval Office relationship with a star-struck, 20-something-year-old White House intern that blossomed during the fall 1995,-budget-battle-induced government shutdown.
The Vineyard’s reassuring embrace of the Clintons was matched only by Vice President Gore’s stiff show of solidarity 5,000 miles away in Hawaii.
Back in the saddle again here in the nation’s capital, skeptics say Alpha Male’s brutish TV performance was no more a mea culpa than it was a Mia Farrow.
The Big He told a Big Lie. Long live the Lying King.