A DISTRACTOR STORY. E.J. Dionne's column this morning on the Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama-David Geffen throw-down over who dissed who to whom made me really wonder about where this campaign season is heading. The whole flap is completely uninteresting and will, in six months, be as long forgotten as the Edwards blogger controversy, which I've been amused to find has gone unnoted by many even inside Washington, where we political obsessives do not, contrary to popular myth, make up the whole town.
I have almost nothing to add to the Geffen-gate commentary, except for a completely gratuitous story about hanging out at the pool of Geffen's beach house on Fire Island one afternoon 16 years ago. Based on the conversation that afternoon, where a friend with whom Geffen was flirting was trying to convince him to a) come out of the closet publicly and b) commit money to AIDS groups -- both of which Geffen ultimately did, becoming one of the nation's leading AIDS philanthropists and an out gay man at a time when Hollywood was far less gay-friendly than it is today -- I think it's fair to say that Geffen is a very direct and up-front speaker, and perfectly comfortable talking smack in ways that would make us prim Washington types blush. Maureen Dowd didn't get Geffen to open up -- she had a conversation with a gruff, charming, blunt, opinionated man who, you'll learn if you Google around, is well-know for his disarmingly pointed and personal statements. (Best denial ever: " 'I never thought he was an anti-Semite!' Geffen later fumed [about Ahmet Ertegun]. 'I think he's a prick. It's a very different thing.'")
In terms of the win-loss on this fight, I'd say Clinton and Obama were both equally damaged (which is to say, neither really was). Again, no one outside the political obsessive class is paying attention, and even then, who cares? The two most damaging things to come out of this were that a) Clinton looked a little thin-skinned, as Joel Achenbach noted on his always amusing Achenblog, and b) Jerome Armstrong dredged up Obama communications director Robert Gibbs' role in an extremely nasty 2004 anti-Howard Dean television spot. Of the two hits, I'd say the Gibbs reminder is going to have longer legs. One day, I will write the story of how every fight in contemporary Democratic politics can be traced back to something that happened during the Dean campaign. But for now, I'll just say that Armstrong's reminder about Gibbs has much more sullying potential than did Howard Wolfson's jabs.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
