PICKING UP WHERE MATT WELCH LEFT OFF, now Susan Estrich is all over Arianna Huffington:
Huffington has no chance of winning. Never did. The only reason to run was her ego, self-aggrandizement, attention — at the expense of her kids.
She is running on a platform she didn’t even believe in a few years ago. Nor is it one she lives by.
How could she do that to her children? my own children ask.
In Huffington’s case, of course, it may be a bit more complicated than that, financially speaking, since it’s slightly more difficult to live off your children’s child support when your children aren’t living with you. But don’t bet against her. This is, after all, the woman who runs against oil interests and lives in a mansion financed by oil money, rails against pigs at the trough and pays no taxes, runs as an independent and supports a guru.
I think that this candidacy may have been a gimmick too far. (Via Mitch Berg).
UPDATE: Yes, definitely a gimmick too far:
Arienron – I’m sorry, I mean Arianna – says the business is “cyclical” because she’s been doing research. $2.7 mil seems to me an awful lot of photocopying at the library. But that just goes to show why I’m poor bumbling Dr Watson next to Arianna’s Sherlock Holmes. “Why, Holmes, what an amazing deduction!”
“Elementary, my dear Watson. By the way, did you get a receipt from that hansom cab driver?” . . .
It’s comical how tone deaf Arianna Huffington’s campaign has been. Arnold Schwarzenegger is trying to tap the anger that’s brought this recall campaign so far – the people who are fed up with runaway spending, high taxes, bureaucratic featherbedding. Arianna seems to think there’s another kind of anger out there – people who are angry because they want more government programs, more regulation, more bureaucracies, and they’d be prepared to pay higher taxes for these blessings. Hey, I would too in her shoes. After all if you tripled Arianna’s state income tax bill, you’d get …let’s see now, three times zero equals …zero.
Ouch. Running for office, even as a gimmick, produces a different level of criticism altogether.