There was quite a bit of consternation in them there internets last week about the possibility that White House officials would schedule the State of the Union address on February 2, the date of the Lost season premiere. Appalled Lost fans started tweeting and including the hashtag #NoStateofUnionFeb2.
Once it was announced by White House press secretary Robert Gibbs that while they didn’t yet have a date picked for the annual address he could assure folks that it won’t be on February 2, one of the Lost co-creators, Damon Lindelof posted a tweet, “OBAMA BACKED DOWN!!! Groundhog Day is OURS!!!!!! (God Bless America).”
Lindelof’s colleague Carlton Cuse, joked about the hullaballoo by posting this tweet, “In exchange for moving his speech Damon [Lindelof] and I promise to answer ANY questions the President has about LOST.”
On a more serious note, the campaign finance think tank Center for Responsive Politics suggested that the contributions of “people and political action committees associated with Walt Disney” totaling in $430,000 helped Disney make their case to secure February 2 for Lost.
Political Book Portrays Elizabeth Edwards’ Temper, Hubby’s Ego
Political reporters John Heilemann and Mark Halperin have dug into the political mud fairly deeply to unearth some damning, behind-the-scenes portraits of the major 2008 presidential candidates and those folks with whom they surrounded themselves with. The results are in Heilemann and Halperin’s new book, Game Change.
Among the revelations that’ve garnered mucho publicity in the past few days is the derogatory depiction of the Edwardses excerpted in this week’s New York Magazine entitled, “Saint Elizabeth and the Ego Monster.” (John Edwards’ mistress Rielle Hunter must be raising a champagne glass.) Characterized in the most extremely negative light possible, Elizabeth Edwards was portrayed as an exceptionally difficult person with whom to get along, with campaign aides referring to themselves as “battered spouses” for having to deal with her:
“With her husband, she could be intensely affectionate or brutally dismissive. At times subtly, at times blatantly, she was forever letting John know that she regarded him as her intellectual inferior. She called her spouse a ‘hick’ in front of other people and derided his parents as rednecks. One time, when a friend asked if John had read a certain book, Elizabeth burst out laughing. ‘Oh, he doesn’t read books,’ she said. ‘I’m the one who reads books.’”
John Edwards didn’t come off well either, as he was described as a deluded ego-maniac who thought he could just breeze through the campaign while screwing around and lying about it. The book excerpt said:
“Yet it was [John] Edwards who stepped so far across the line that his career and life were reduced to rubble . . . Edwards’s story is equally, lastingly resonant: an archetypal political tragedy in which the very same qualities that fuel any presidential bid—ego, hubris, vanity, neediness, a kind of delusion—became all-consuming and self-destructive. And in which the gap between public façade and private reality simply grew too vast to bridge.”
