ABC announced that Georgie is out
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Clearly, Georgie is a rightie.
POLITICO
For years, Rahm Emanuel, James Carville, Paul Begala and George Stephanopoulos have spoken on the telephone almost every workday.Illustration by Matt Wuerker
The conversations don’t begin with hello. They don’t end with goodbye. Most often they pick up with a low, drawling voice uttering something between a sentence and a grunt.
“Wahzgoanawn?”
For those accustomed to hearing James Carville only when he is trying to enunciate more clearly for television, that translates to: "What's going on?"
So begins another morning in what may count as Washington’s longest-running conversation — a street-corner bull session between four old friends who suddenly find themselves standing once more at the busiest intersection of politics and media in Washington.
Carville calls White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.
Emanuel calls ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent George Stephanopoulos.
A bit later, CNN commentator Paul Begala, who is not quite the early bird that his friends are, will complete the circle with a rapid set of calls to all three.
Different versions of this round-robin chatter have been taking place, with few interruptions, every workday for nearly a generation.
“I refer to it as the 17-year-long conference call,” said Emanuel, who starts calling his friends at 6 a.m. “You can tap into it anytime you want.”
Everyone likes to deride the “conventional wisdom.” In fairness, though, the wisdom is not yet conventional at the moment it is hatched.
And in any given news cycle, it is quite likely that Washington’s prevailing political and media interpretation — at least on the Democratic side — is being hatched on these calls.
The process happens not by design but as the byproduct of pre-dawn badinage — a smart-set take on the world that gets amplified by the prominent platforms all of them hold and by the dozens of later calls and lunches and rants that they will carry on with others throughout the day.
In that sense, the morning calls — no single one of which usually lasts more than a few minutes — among this gang of four is the headwaters of at least one major tributary of Washington politics.
Under other circumstances, the morning calls between Emanuel, Carville, Stephanopoulos and Begala — pollster Stan Greenberg is another frequent member of the core group, a kind of “fifth Beatle” — might be a Society of Has-Beens, reliving ancient glories from the Little Rock “War Room.”
It was Emanuel’s ascension into Barack Obama’s inner circle — even as Carville and Begala remained closely linked with the defeated Clinton political machine — that saved the group from irrelevance.
The calls “are about what’s happening, what the implications are of what’s happening and what’s going on,” said Emanuel.
Mary Matalin, who as Carville’s wife has overheard probably thousands of the group’s calls, describes the conversation as more profane, more sports-centric versions of a knitting club.
“They talk like they are girls,” she said. “The conversations start in the middle and they end in the middle, and if they talk at night, they’ll start in the morning with no break in the flow.”
“To me, the first purpose is friendship,” said Matalin, “and the second purpose is information-sharing.”
According to Begala, the expectation of a daily call is so great that Emanuel will sometimes call him and shout impatiently, “I can’t talk right now!” and then hang up.
While the rapid succession of conversations creates the effect of a single conference call, that is not actually the case. Carville described himself as an antediluvian who does not do e-mail or own a BlackBerry and has been on only a few actual conference calls.
But he said he has come to rely on the calls as his daily fixture.
When one of the callers is traveling, he says, his reaction is, “Where’s my coffee, where’s my glasses ... Goddamn, where you been?”
Begala offers the most academic interpretation of the calls and their daily survey of political news.
Emanuel is the most likely to be talking policy, usually some program Democrats can use to score points in the daily partisan brawl with Republicans.
POLITICO
For years, Rahm Emanuel, James Carville, Paul Begala and George Stephanopoulos have spoken on the telephone almost every workday.Illustration by Matt Wuerker
The conversations don’t begin with hello. They don’t end with goodbye. Most often they pick up with a low, drawling voice uttering something between a sentence and a grunt.
“Wahzgoanawn?”
For those accustomed to hearing James Carville only when he is trying to enunciate more clearly for television, that translates to: "What's going on?"
So begins another morning in what may count as Washington’s longest-running conversation — a street-corner bull session between four old friends who suddenly find themselves standing once more at the busiest intersection of politics and media in Washington.
Carville calls White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.
Emanuel calls ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent George Stephanopoulos.
A bit later, CNN commentator Paul Begala, who is not quite the early bird that his friends are, will complete the circle with a rapid set of calls to all three.
Different versions of this round-robin chatter have been taking place, with few interruptions, every workday for nearly a generation.
“I refer to it as the 17-year-long conference call,” said Emanuel, who starts calling his friends at 6 a.m. “You can tap into it anytime you want.”
Everyone likes to deride the “conventional wisdom.” In fairness, though, the wisdom is not yet conventional at the moment it is hatched.
And in any given news cycle, it is quite likely that Washington’s prevailing political and media interpretation — at least on the Democratic side — is being hatched on these calls.
The process happens not by design but as the byproduct of pre-dawn badinage — a smart-set take on the world that gets amplified by the prominent platforms all of them hold and by the dozens of later calls and lunches and rants that they will carry on with others throughout the day.
In that sense, the morning calls — no single one of which usually lasts more than a few minutes — among this gang of four is the headwaters of at least one major tributary of Washington politics.
Under other circumstances, the morning calls between Emanuel, Carville, Stephanopoulos and Begala — pollster Stan Greenberg is another frequent member of the core group, a kind of “fifth Beatle” — might be a Society of Has-Beens, reliving ancient glories from the Little Rock “War Room.”
It was Emanuel’s ascension into Barack Obama’s inner circle — even as Carville and Begala remained closely linked with the defeated Clinton political machine — that saved the group from irrelevance.
The calls “are about what’s happening, what the implications are of what’s happening and what’s going on,” said Emanuel.
Mary Matalin, who as Carville’s wife has overheard probably thousands of the group’s calls, describes the conversation as more profane, more sports-centric versions of a knitting club.
“They talk like they are girls,” she said. “The conversations start in the middle and they end in the middle, and if they talk at night, they’ll start in the morning with no break in the flow.”
“To me, the first purpose is friendship,” said Matalin, “and the second purpose is information-sharing.”
According to Begala, the expectation of a daily call is so great that Emanuel will sometimes call him and shout impatiently, “I can’t talk right now!” and then hang up.
While the rapid succession of conversations creates the effect of a single conference call, that is not actually the case. Carville described himself as an antediluvian who does not do e-mail or own a BlackBerry and has been on only a few actual conference calls.
But he said he has come to rely on the calls as his daily fixture.
When one of the callers is traveling, he says, his reaction is, “Where’s my coffee, where’s my glasses ... Goddamn, where you been?”
Begala offers the most academic interpretation of the calls and their daily survey of political news.
Emanuel is the most likely to be talking policy, usually some program Democrats can use to score points in the daily partisan brawl with Republicans.
I wondered how the Democrats were in such lockstep with a "word of the day" during the Clinton era. I always assumed Hillary was the source of the chosen word or phrase. She is the only one with him constantly from state to national politics. This has always been part of the package.
There were several that hit and stuck with the talking heads and politicians. The coordination was so great that by miracle a word was used in the AM and being repeated by the left wing congressmen on the floor in the PM. Who remembers "evil Republicans", or "Great Right Wing Conspireators". There were several of them and they were even repeated on the 6 o'clock news. I would get so mad with the instant application of these little bits into our instant vocabulary.
There were several that hit and stuck with the talking heads and politicians. The coordination was so great that by miracle a word was used in the AM and being repeated by the left wing congressmen on the floor in the PM. Who remembers "evil Republicans", or "Great Right Wing Conspireators". There were several of them and they were even repeated on the 6 o'clock news. I would get so mad with the instant application of these little bits into our instant vocabulary.
Some people thought Geoge leaned right if anything. Then they call you stupid and say faux news and call it a day.
