Paul Tsongas was cast as the one you could trust!

TUESDAY, JANUARY 23, 2024

Granite State recollections: By all accounts, Paul Tsongas (D-Mass.) was a good, decent person.

He'd been a (one-term) senator from Massachusetts. He had grown up in Lowell, Mass., up near the New Hampshire line.

It was Tsongas who won the 1992 New Hampshire Democratic primary—the primary in which Bill Clinton became "the Comeback Kid" by fighting back from Gennifer Flowers and Howard Stern to finish a surprising second.

In that early race, Tsongas had defeated the more charismatic Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.) along with Bill Clinton, who was universally understood to be the next big thing. Briefly, Tsongas seemed to be in the lead for the nomination.

One day, we had gone to see him speak at the workplace of our sister, who was then a New Hampshire resident. 

He seemed like a good and decent person. On another night that week, we went to see Clinton speak, literally in a New Hampshire town hall, and it was obvious, just as soon as he entered the room, that The Big Guy, The Real Thing, had arrived.

(Star power can be like that. An NBA team looks amazing and huge as they all walk off the bus.)

As the leading authority recalls, Tsongas had left the Senate in 1985, at the end of his one term, because he's been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Now, he went through various steps to demonstrate that he was ready to return to political office after having undergone a successful bone marrow transplant.

Quite literally, he put on his Speedo and he swam laps to show us voters how healthy he was. In a genuine loss to the world, he died on January 18, 1997—two days short of the end of the presidential term he had sought.

In the mainstream press, Tsongas was cast as the honest Democratic candidate that year. Clinton was cast as the slippery guy you couldn't trust.

Starting in March 1999, the mainstream press cast Bill Bradley as the honest player in the race for the 2000 Democratic nomination. Al Gore was relentlessly cast as the post-Clinton slightly cracked big liar. Right up to the Sunday before the November election, Maureen Dowd just wouldn't stop writing about his deeply troubling bald spot.

These themes came from within our blue tribe press. On the whole, they didn't come from the right-wing machine. 

Gore won every primary that year, but the never-ending war against his alleged dishonesty eventually sent Bush to the White House. In that sense, it also sent the U.S. army into Iraq for an extended stay. 

The people who savaged Gore most crazily are still active in the blue tribe press. We saw Chris Matthews, who behaved like a lunatic for two solid years with respect to the girly-man Gore, on Morning Joe just last week. For the record, GE's Jack Welch ran NBC at the time.

Everyone knew what Chris was doing. No one ever spoke up about it.  He was too big a deal at the time.

These people have failed you again and again. They're ready to do so again, and of the course they're very well paid for keeping us barefoot and well entertained.

Life is still good when you're rolling in dough! We've been failed by these people again and again and we always go right back for more.

One additional question: By now, does anyone doubt who told Maureen Dowd about Beau Biden's alleged dying words during the 2016 campaign? 

The column, which was never sourced, savaged Hillary Clinton. It then became the basis for an otherwise unsourced New York Times front-page "news report."

Very few people could have been accepted as a source for those (alleged) dying words—for the alleged words which helped send Donald J. Trump to the White House. For ourselves, we didn't know about Hunter Biden's deep addiction and crazy behavior at that point in time.

These people have failed you again and again. Under the long-standing rules of the game, what happens in the mainstream press corps stays there forever and ever. 

Under the rules of that same game, we keep coming back for more.

One more Manchester moment: We met the late Tim Russert, just one time, at the journalist / comedian comedy show during the (we think) 2004 New Hampshire primary. He buttered us up real good that night, and we don't mean that as a criticism.

Star power and charisma can be like that. As we saw first-hand on that one occasion, Tim had those traits in spades.