Robert Maguire's Library tagged media →  View Popular

"Obama's
attitude was, this is an elderly gentleman in a country where this kind
of greeting is customary. It does not seem extraordinary to show this
kind of gesture to him. The Fox news poll said that 67% of
Americans thought it was a good thing for him to have done. When the
president heard that some people had complained, I'd characterize his
reaction as: The notion that the United States is somehow humbling or
humiliating itself by showing respect for a local custom, when it is
transparently the most powerful country in the world, leaves me
speechless."

"We
closed some of the gap but not all of the gap. The Chinese do not wish,
three weeks out of Copenhagen, to be seen working hand in glove with
the US to impose a "G2" solution to the G77. They have their own
reservations about how far things should go. But they also don't want
to be seen as the stumbling block or odd man out.

"We kept making the argument, We're the #1 and 2 emitters, so we
have a special responsibility, a special role. We got some movement.
They are taking substantial mitigating steps, which they didn't
enumerate but we know what they are. As best we can tell, they are
prepared to submit those as their "target" in Copenhagen, and of course
we want them to be "commitments" rather than targets. There is still a
stumbling block on the issue of accountability, which is always a hard
one with the Chinese. We'd like to have an independent peer review of
whether doing what you said you would do.  There are lots of different
ways to do that... But we haven't closed that part of the gap yet.

"Prime
Minister Rasmussen [Lars Loekke Rasmussen of Denmark, with obvious
involvement in the Copenhagen talks] has been saying that while a
binding legal treaty by this December is not possible, he has been
calling for a politically-binding accord at Copenhagen. Then there
would be the task of turning it into a treaty over the next year. The
Chinese have bought into that general framework. And we made a lot of
agreements with them on clean energy [details here]. So on climate change, there were no miracles, but we moved them out out of the position of being
blockers to being part of the game.

"I find that the Washington reporters tend to be typically the most subject to this instant scorekeeping. This is part of the game of Washington reporting. They're at the bleeding edge of this phenomenon that I think is distressing in terms of the approach of the press to serious questions. Everything is shot through this prism of short-term political calculation as opposed to thinking seriously about stuff. You can't be an expert on every question, and so you're part of the Washington press corps and if you're really good and really diligent, you're going to be expert maybe in a few things and one of those things might not be China."

The ADN's editor, Pat Dougherty, did not run a single story on this in the campaign. It was only after the campaign that the ADN attempted to do a follow-up to destroy for ever what editor Pat Dougherty believed was a nutty but weirdly resilient rumor. The ADN did not "know better," in other words, or else they wouldn't have tried to do a story (which never ran) at all. All they wanted was to dispel the rumors - long after the campaign was over - as a matter of house-keeping. But instead of Palin offering an easily found medical record or birth certificate or some such, she went off the wall with an email exchange with the editor that remains a high point of Palin drama and defensiveness:

[I]s your paper really still pursuing the sensational lie that I am not
Trig's mother? Is it true you have a reporter still bothering my state
office, my very busy doctor (who's already set the record straight for
you), and the school district, in pursuit of your ridiculous conspiracy?