"NOBODY WOULD listen to me if I expressed this thought. But I am putting this away in an envelope and I believe Barack Obama will win the election with a big surprise vote. I hope I am right. I will only open this envelope after the election!"
This is something written by Liz Smith, yes, "the former Liz," toward the end of the election cycle and after many readers of my various syndicated outlets threatened to (1) commit suicide (2) commit murder (3) stop reading the people who were carelessly displaying my pro Democratic, liberal columns.
So, I gave the nice folks who use my column five days a week a break and stopped being so momentarily controversial. After all, I am only half of the United States and who knew how the election would turn out.
Now that it's over, I have to say that the result has never been more authentically expressed than by Rachel Maddow in her November 7th show on MSNBC. That evening's broadcast should go down in history as one of the best expressed displays and beliefs in the Nate Silver prognostications which proved to be so expertly correct.
And Rachel also showed us a handful of expert Republicans who were predicting just the opposite -- Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity, John Boehner, Karl Rove, Dick Morris, Larry Kudlow. They, as well as Rush Limbaugh on radio, fervently believed that Romney would win with over 300 electoral votes, They were sure that the PAC money spent by Sheldon Adelson of Las Vegas and the Koch brothers of points everywhere would result in an Obama defeat. (Not a single candidate they backed made it.)
If only the millions of dollar offered in this year overlong election had been applied to the national debt, but it wan't. (At least the election put a lot of money into the economy.)
I hope President Obama will get together with Mitt Romney and talk about how to get the divided American public and the House and Senate to come together and reason together. I don't think Mitt Romney is a bad guy; I just think he let himself be captured by Tea Party conservatives and he didn't put up a fight against them. This is a new day in the U.S.A. and here's hoping Rachel Maddow keeps interpreting and everybody becomes slightly more reasonable and the GOP gets its act together and becomes a sensible political party once again.
- INCIDENTALLY, I don't know Rachel Maddow, and I can't get her for your charity so don't even ask. I am just an interested and reasonable listener. All I know is she was the best, most definitive speaker about the Obama win and why it happened and how blind the Republican party has become, to its own detriment.
- WE TOLD you the other day about the great big screening of PBS's Inventing David Geffen documentary. This is directed by the super-talented Susan Lacy. I met Susan's husband, and asked him for his card. He gave me a card. It said "Mark Razum." And so he appeared in my column as Mr. Razum. Alas, Susan's husband mistakenly handed me the business card of their gardener. (I suppose one never knows when a hedge needs trimming.) Susan Lacy's husband is actually Halsted Welles. And he doesn't let any crabgrass grow under his feet, clearly. (I'm sorry Halsted that I called you "Mark" all evening and you didn't correct me.)
- YOU'D THINK that a teenage girl would simply adore the memory of once having posed half naked with actor Mark Wahlberg -- back when he was a rapper and underwear model, going by the name Marky Mark. But not Kate Moss. In the coming issue of Vanity Fair she confesses to writer James Fox: "It didn't feel like me at all. I felt really bad about straddling this buff guy. I couldn't get out of bed for two weeks."
Moss was terribly uncomfortable posing nude, but it was made clear to her "If you don't do it, then we're not going to book you again. I'd lock myself in the toilet and cry and then come out and do it."
And though she became the scary-skinny face and body of "heroin chic," Moss insists she never indulged, but "There was no food. You'd get to work in the morning, but there was no food. Nobody took you out to lunch. Carla Bruni took me to lunch once. She was really nice. Otherwise, you don't get fed. But I was never anorexic. They knew it wasn't true -- otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to work."
As for her family's reaction to the Kate Moss phenomenon in the 1990, her mother (who was a barmaid) one day said, "Why can't you just be normal?" I turned round and said, 'Why do you think you're normal?'' It's that thing of being in suburbia and being crazy, but they don't think they are."
- Pop's music's most controversial star, Lady Gaga is a Yonkers, New York girl, born and bred. And don't let the funny clothes fool you. She knows who she is. The singer just donated $1 million to the Red Cross in the wake of Hurricane Sandy's devastation. Without the inspiration and acceptance of New York, Gaga says, "I would not be the woman or artist I am today."