Sing a Song of Hillary
Last week in these pages, Matt Labash explored the song stylings of the Ronulans, or Ron Paul fanatics, such as they were. In the course of doing so, he threw an elbow to the solar plexus of Hillary Clinton, charging that her campaign song, "You and I" was a "perfect choice" since it is "saccharine, turns on synthetic emotion, and is sung by Celine Dion, one of the few people with a voice more cloying than her own." A few days later, the Clinton campaign dropped the song. Coincidence?
Camp Clinton hasn't said why they dropped Dion. But perhaps the song was doomed from the start. What worse way to show that you're in step with American voters than to pick something sung by a Canadian? (In fairness, Hillary had done what all Clintons do when faced with vexing personal dilemmas--she focus-grouped it. The choice was made after she'd held a contest to pick her campaign song.)
As a loyal Hillary supporter, THE SCRAPBOOK is tempted to suggest obvious substitutes. But the Eagles' "Witchy Woman," Elton John's "The Bitch Is Back," and Brownie McGhee's "Big Legged Woman" would be too easy. We're better than that. Besides, now comes word that her campaign has gone with "Blue Sky," by Big Head Todd and the Monsters--a song that was written for the crew of the Space Shuttle Discovery for the first flight after the Columbia disaster.
It is perhaps worth noting that even with the help of Big Head Todd, the return flight suffered all manner of setbacks: unresolved fuel sensor anomalies, debris separating from the external tank during ascent as with Columbia, a large bird striking near the tank during lift-off, a small piece of foam striking the orbiter's wing which caused NASA to announce it was delaying future shuttle flights until the problem could be resolved, and unsuitable weather causing both the postponement and relocation of the landing.
With Hillary now trailing Obama in Iowa polling, here's hoping for her sake that she gets more of a lift from the song than NASA did. If not, she might want to go with a slightly retooled version of the Queen anthem: "We Were the Champions."
Scanners
THE SCRAPBOOK, which believes strongly in science in the public interest, was intrigued to run across an op-ed piece in last Wednesday's edition of the Los Angeles Times. The author was Dr. Daniel G. Amen, an Orange County neuropsychiatrist who owns a nationwide chain of brain-scanning clinics, and his thesis was an original one: He wants "our elected leaders to be some of the 'brain healthiest people' in the land. How do you know about the brain health of a presidential candidate unless you look?" It turns out that the answer is as obvious as the cash register in Dr. Amen's waiting room: Require every presidential candidate to have a brain scan. As you might imagine, Dr. Amen makes his case with some harrowing examples from recent history. Did you know that "three of the last four presidents have shown clear brain pathology?" According to Dr. Amen, "Few people knew it, but we had a national crisis" because Ronald Reagan's Alzheimer's disease "was evident during his second term." Bill Clinton's "moral lapses and problems with bad judgment and excitement [were] indicative of problems in the prefrontal cortex." And of course, "one could argue that our current president's struggles with language and emotional rigidity are symptoms of temporal lobe pathology."
One could also argue that since some of our most inspiring chief executives parted their hair on the left, not the right, side of the head--Abraham Lincoln, both Roosevelts, John F. Kennedy--we should require a certified cosmetologist to examine the coiffures of presidential candidates.
Of course, THE SCRAPBOOK would be the last place to make light of the dread possibility of temporal lobe pathology, or problems of the prefrontal cortex, in the Oval Office. But Dr. Amen's op-ed proposal reminds us of one of the least edifying incidents in modern presidential journalism: the September-October 1964 issue of the now-defunct magazine Fact, the cover of which proclaimed that "1,189 Psychiatrists Say Goldwater Is Psychologically Unfit To Be President!"
Publisher Ralph Ginzburg had sent a letter to 12,356 psychiatrists, whose names had been supplied by the American Medical Association, asking the following question: "Do you believe Barry Goldwater is psychologically fit to serve as President of the United States?" Of the 2,417 who bothered to respond, according to Ginzburg, "571 said that they did not know enough about Goldwater to answer the question; 657 said they thought Goldwater was psychologically fit; and 1,189 said that he was not."
It's unlikely that Fact's questionnaire contributed to Goldwater's defeat by Lyndon Johnson the following month, but the episode was a low point for political journalism in America--not to mention the ethical sensibilities of those physicians foolish enough to answer Ginzburg's inquiry and make public assertions about the mental health of someone they had never met. In the event, Goldwater successfully sued Ginzburg for defamation, who later (in an unrelated case) spent eight months in prison for violation of obscenity laws.
It's common to suggest that one's political adversaries are crazy or delusional; that's standard schoolyard rhetoric, not meant to be taken literally. But when physicians--especially ones with commercial interests at stake--make unfounded claims in the media about the sanity of complete strangers, it is a startling violation of professional ethics. Whether it is Justin Frank, M.D., of George Washington University, who asserts in his Bush on the Couch that George W. Bush is a "paranoid megalomaniac . . . [with a] lifelong streak of sadism," and James Grotstein, M.D., of UCLA and Irvin Yalom, M.D., of Stanford, who extol Frank's casual libel, or Dr. Daniel G. Amen and his chain of brain-scan emporiums, the only thing worse than their irresponsibility is the judgment of a newspaper that would grant them a public forum.