Mullings by Rich Galen | Issue for November 1, 1999

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Can I Set My Body Clock Back One Decade?

Monday, November 1, 1999

In a front pager in the L.A. Times yesterday, Edwin Chen has Al "I-Know-I-Was-A-Toady-But-That-Was-Before-These-New-Polls" Gore proclaiming Oct 31, 1999 as Independence from Bill Clinton Day.

Gore is quoted as saying he is putting his campaign ahead of Administration policy by saying, "For seven years, I paused a split second to ask myself: 'OK, how's this going to help the administration? How's this going to help the president? What's the administration's policy? And how can I make sure that it's reconciled with what I think about this?'" Gore repeated that line almost to the word on This Week with Sam & Cokie calling into doubt the spontaneity of even this new Al Gore.

What Gore is really saying is he has finally learned the most important lesson from Bill Clinton: the ONLY question which needs to be answered in that split second is: "Is this good for me, me, me?"

I know my friends in the GOP will argue that if Gore really wants to escape the trap of the Vice Presidency he should give up the trappings of the Vice Presidency. First among those should be Air Force II. But that's silly. He is the Vice President. He gets the plane and the house. And for the price of it he also gets Bill Clinton. Close call all around.

Pat Buchanan said on Meet the Press yesterday that, as President, he would build a government of "national unity." This, after using his announcement remarks earlier last week to criticize the Republican and Democratic parties as being too similar one to the other.

Buchanan can't even build unity in the Reform party in New Hampshire. According to the AP, Buchanan's people are bolting the existing N.H. Reform party which has existed for eight years. It seems after Buchanan supporters threatened to stack the state party convention, the existing Reform party people wanted to give Donald Trump a fair shot by requiring Reform party membership for at least 30 days before being able to vote. Does this make Buchanan a fourth party candidate in New Hampshire?

A book with the non-marquee title, "The Sword and The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB." by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin was reviewed in the NY Times yesterday by historian Joseph Perscico. In the middle of the 1,300-or-so word review was the revelation that the KGB, at one time, bugged the Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting room.

Can you imagine the panic inside the KGB if they were dialed into Chairman Jesse Helms today? "The Americans, Comrades, must have discovered our listening devices. They have invented a new language."

In our "Shape of Things to .Com" Department, Levi Strauss has announced it will no longer sell items directly from its web sites over the Internet. Instead, they will defer to their huge distributors' web sites like JC Penney and Macy's. One reason is the problem of returns. People return products purchased over the internet (or received as a present by someone who did) to a real store in a real mall.

Retailers risk alienating good customers by refusing the return of a product they obviously sell because it was e-purchased. With on-line buying moving into the billion-dollar range, inventory-shift concerns are now very real. Levis' strategy may be adopted widely in anticipation of the coming holiday buying season.

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