By Michael Miner
Stump’s dispatch tells how he made a phone call and found out that accepting the nomination to the advisory board would cost him $5,000, with other substantial expenses to follow–such as $1,000 to attend the Republican Convention Gala. “A real bargain, a sort of political one-cent sale on clout,” reports Stump, given that “Clinton’s President’s Advisory Council charges $50,000 and up.”
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Jacobs scotched rumors that Stump Connolly is totally sedentary. His “Send Stump to San Diego” campaign is asking for $5,000 contributions, Haley Barbour having made it seem that “the fate of the nation” hinges on Stump’s making the trip. And when Ross Perot came to Chicago for the American Booksellers convention Stump was there cocking an eye and taking notes. But no, he doesn’t wander far from his chair very often.
Jacobs, a friend going back to our years together at the Sun-Times, is a video documentarian who watched the ’92 campaigns from behind a camera. And he runs a business called Independent Programming Associates (IPA), which among other things designs Web sites for clients. “I believe good Web sites require changing contents to get people to come back and look at them. I wanted to demonstrate that, and the only way I could think of was to write something new and put it on our own site every week.” This was during last winter’s primaries, when Jacobs assumed mere punditry could ride the political wave for months to come. But within weeks the nominations were wrapped up. “So I had to broaden my approach and do a little research, which I always hated as a reporter.”
This one I actually wrote,” Jacob Weisberg was saying. “That was a pretty cheap excuse for a book.”
He went on, “There was a theory a few years ago when publishers were very infatuated with these doorstop books. They thought people liked buying big books. But now it’s swimming the other way a little bit.”
Weisberg’s decent to Clinton, though his book does call the president’s attempts to explain himself philosophically “less than lucid.” There won’t be a friendly note from Lamar Alexander, whom you might still be able to remember as a Republican candidate for president. “His futile conversion from moderate Republican insider to a populist Beltway-basher in a lumberjack shirt,” writes Weisberg, “was one of the more amusing episodes in the early presidential jockeying.” A second dismissive reference seizes on a recent essay by Alexander denouncing “governmentalism.” Weisberg comments, “It may be worth pointing out that Alexander himself was no stranger to such an inclination before the antigovernment bug hit the Republican water supply.”
