Tuesday night, Sidney Blumenthal of the New Yorker — the most notorious Clinton suck-up in the American media, bar none — sat having a drink in the bar in the Marriott lobby with a number of fellow liberal scribes, including Jeff Greenfield, Hendrik Hertzberg, Garry Wills, Jacob Weisberg, and Michael Tomasky. Blumenthal, slipping into his occasional role as Republican strategist, turned to Tomasky and observed that if Bob Dole really wanted to help his party retake the White House, he would drop dead at the convention and pass the mantle to Jack Kemp.
Blumenthal must have uttered his delightful remark in a loud voice, because a woman at the bar, a Buchanan alternate from Alaska, overheard him. She immediately called the Secret Service and reported that a man had threatened to kill Bob Dole. Before Blumenthal could order another drink, maybe 10 Secret Service agents showed up and escorted him into the hallway, where they spent 45 minutes asking him pointed questions and waited for a computer background check to go through. Meanwhile, as the group huddled 15 feet from the lobby of the most crowded hotel in America, a stream of passersby approached to find out what was going on. “It was,” says Blumenthal, “an X- Files moment?”
Not that there were any hard feelings when it was over. The next day, Blumenthal ran into occasional dinner partner and Gingrich press secretary Tony Blankley. If it happens again, consoled Blankley, I’ll be your character witness. So, no doubt, would the Clintons.
