Gore Wins New Hampshire Beauty Contest
            

            Harry,

            I did catch the debate last night, as well as a fair amount of post-game
analysis. First, if you didn't know who the two were and you were told that one
of them was, as a youth, one of the great basketball players in the country,
you wouldn't have picked Bill Bradley. Puffy, jowly, and tired, he looked
pretty awful--is this heart thing worse than they're letting on?--while Gore
had the full (pre-accident) Christopher Reeves look about him. The navy suit
worked, I thought. [For Jacob Weisberg's instant analysis of the debate, click
here.]

            I hate the pre-packaged zinger lines more than anything. Bradley:
"Al, if you'd spent time in the private sector ..." Gore: "Bill, when you talk
about weighted averages, it reminds me of the man with his head in the oven and
his feet on a block of ice. His average temperature was fine but he wasn't too
comfortable." Yuck. Bradley's "Washington bunker" line seemed particularly
annoying from someone who spent 18 years in the Senate and now wants to live in
... Washington. Gore's trifecta of supporting the Gulf War, opposing the Reagan
'81 budget cuts, and supporting welfare reform seemed pretty effective to me.
Bradley, though, was far more charming in the post-game show, where he told Tim
Russert that he was going to get a beer. When Gore was asked if he, too, was
going to get a beer, he paused and seemed to search for the best focus-group
tested answer. "I might," he said. "Or a decaf coffee." Double yuck.

            Will Syria and Israel find peace in the land of the Hatfields and the
McCoys? It must be weird when they hold top-level summit meetings in these
small towns. I went through Glassboro, N.J. last year--home of the
LBJ-Khrushchev summit in '64. I can only imagine what the Soviet premier made
of his first cheesesteak.

            
               USA Today had a thing yesterday I thought was pretty interesting: How
the glut of Oscar-worthy movies at the end of the year is turning off
moviegoers. You know the drill: The studios release their Oscar-contending
dramatic efforts at the end of the year because films from the end of the year
tend to do better come Oscar Night in March. (This must have something to do
with the fact that most academy members are septuagenarians.) Thus, we have
Snow Falling on Cedars , Anna and the King , Magnolia ,
The End of the Affair , and a bunch of other heavies inundating the
screen. Have you seen Man on the Moon yet? I haven't but loved Larry
Flynt and many of Forman's other flix. Did you know the late Andy Kaufman
and do you have a take on this cult of personality that's grown up around him?
And yet they continue to ignore the important work of Foster Brooks?!

            Later.
--Matt