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Garrigus - 2004-02-04 12:46:59
It seems that Muskie's "tears" may well have been melting snow. Hm. That alone made that very, very weird site worth checking out.
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nothin' but a waitress in the sky, except I'm not a waitress, and I'm not in the sky - 2004-02-04 15:04:42
What's weirder than referring to passengers as "customers" is that customers can't be customers anymore - now they're "guests." If I'm a "guest" at Target, can I help myself to a soda from the fridge then? I'll have to ask an emplo...oops, I mean "associate" - and while I'm at it, I'll ask that associate how great it is that as an "associate," they benefit directly from the company's profits. Right?
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Miles - 2004-02-05 18:10:12
Paula, I don't know what your feelings are about Hunter S. Thompson, but for my money his best book is Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, which goes into the Muskie incident in detail. HST even claims to have lent his press pass to the heckler that drove Ed to tears, though I suspect Hunter is fudging a bit with that particular detail. :-) No other book has ever captured the fried-out weirdness of political campaigns like that one...
I not only remember the '72 campaign (I always bumfuzzle people by telling them I voted for McGovern -- I was 5, and my mom took me to the voting machine and let me pull the lever!), but I remember seeing Muskie a lot in '76, when I think he wasn't running but was actually leading in the polls before Carter got momentum in the primaries. Ah, sweet Muskie days of yore...
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Michael - 2005-12-14 22:36:44
The scoop on Muskie is that it was assumed that he'd be the nominee in '72. The smart speculation is that someone slipped him some acid, prompting the onstage breakdown, which is anything but as ridiculous as it may initially sound. The thing he had in common with Dean, as it turns out, is that he would've made the strongest candidate and so it behooved the Republicans to knock him off fast, one way or the other (Kennedy, the truly unbeatable candidate, had been destroyed by Chappaquiddick). In Dean's case, it was via a little trickery with recordings, isolating his "scream" into his microphone while deleting the sound of the background crowd that he was actually shouting with, then playing it endlessly on television. In Muskie's case, it may well have been something even more insidious. At the time, people were making much of his "Lincolnesque" appearance and he had emerged from running as Humphrey's vice-presidential candidate in '68 with a lot of support. The weeping bout permanently finished him with the same finality that the scream apparently permanently finished Dean as a presidential candidate. I think Dean was the Democratic Party's last shot at regaining the White House. I do not believe that it'll happen again in our lifetimes, barring some calamity we wouldn't want to live through (unless at some point they put in a "Democratic" Republican puppet to foster the idea that some change actually occurred, which is quite possible: in any case, the Republicans own the United States now). This concludes tonight's Easter Egg Hunt Blog Post.
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