Assembling a panel to discuss how the presidential contenders' marital histories may affect their candidacies, "Today" resorted to one of its favorite tricks this morning -- faux balance, in which a loyal Dem is which is matched with a renegade former Republican. Former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers was paired with Bay Buchanan, who served as her brother Pat's campaign manager when he left the GOP and ran against George W. Bush as a third-party candidate in 2000.
The strategy paid dividends from NBC's perspective, as two of the roughest shots at the Republicans were taken by Bay. Consider these two bombs Bay dropped.
Regarding Rudy: "If they [responding to a question about Rudy] will treat their wives this way, with such disregard, their children, allow this kind of marriage to collapse in a public way, the voters don't have a prayer of a chance. You can't believe a word the man says."
Regarding Newt: "His first marriage, divorce, is going to be very critical, he delivered the divorce papers to his wife who was in a hospital bed being diagnosed with breast cancer. I can't find a lot of women who are going to vote for a man who did something like that."
View video here.
Not that Bay was alone. Meredith aunched an anti-Rudy bomb of her own. Here's Vieira's comment-in-the-guise-of-a-question that elicted Bay's answer set forth above: "If Giuliani can't keep his family together, how will he keep the country together?"
That's odd. When Bill Clinton was lying to his family, to the country and while under oath about his extramarital activities, wasn't the official Dem/MSM line that "lying about sex doesn't count"? But suddenly, in MSM eyes, a man's marital peccadilloes call into his question his fitness to lead. Let's see, what's changed?
Aside: Bay did also speculate as to whether Bill Clinton could keep himself "clean" over the course of the campaign, and how new "bimbo eruptions" could hurt Hillary's chances. She pointed out that Dems have been thinking the same thing. We know that Chris Matthews has worried long and hard along those lines.
