Posted on 08/06/2002 10:49:05 PM PDT by kristinn
Earlier this year, in an attempt to boost sagging ratings against the FOX News Channel, CNN revamped its Crossfire news discussion show by expanding it to one hour from thirty minutes, hired a couple of Clintonistas and moved it to the campus of George Washington University in downtown Washington, D.C.
Free tickets are available by phone, e-mail or at the box office. Stand-by seating is available when the doors open at 6 p.m. for the 7 p.m. live broadcast. The theater has seating for several hundred people. The hosts and guests are generally not advertised in advance except the day of the show.
Fortunately for the D.C. Chapter, RonDog posted a notice on FR last weekend from Ann Coulter's website announcing that she would be a guest host on Crossfire last night.
Chapter member Ned13 was able to pick up the last available ticket to yesterday's show on Sunday. It turned out she wasn't able to go so she asked Angelwood and me if either one of us wanted her ticket. Angelwood couldn't go so I accepted Ned13's offer and met her in front of the theater at 21st and H St., NW, a few minutes before 6 p.m.
I had to empty my pockets and pass through a metal detector to enter the studio. Cameras are allowed in but you can't take pictures when the show is on.
I took a seat in the front row on the side where the Clintonista host sits so I could look at Ann and not have to stare at Paul Begala's face all night.
The audience slowly trickled in over the next half hour and filled the studio. They were mostly white--professionals or students-and more evenly divided politically than one would think for a CNN show from liberal D.C.
From their conversation, the group sitting around me were all conservatives and from a local firm that had been given tickets for their employees. Someone commented that this was part of the strategy for trying to get the seats filled five nights a week.
The stage was roomy and nicely designed. Cameras were hidden above the blue Crossfire signs behind the hosts; a remote camera swung out over the audience for sweeping crowd shots and a couple Teleprompters on dolleys were positioned in front of the stage.
After the audience was finished getting seated at 6:30 a producer came out and addressed the crowd. She told us that any disruptors would be thrown out of the studio and banned from the G.W.U. campus.
We were given our cue to applaud on the return from the breaks and told to remain seated during the show because the remote camera would be swinging over us and very close to our heads.
The producer asked if we had seen the new Crossfire--hardly any hands went up :-) A few more hands were raised when she asked if we had watched it over its twenty-year run on CNN.
She also asked for a show of hands for conservatives/Republicans and liberals/Democrats, respectively. As I mentioned earlier, the audience was almost evenly mixed.
Host Ann Coulter and Paul Begala were introduced a few minutes before showtime. They sat at the table on the stage and checked their notes. As the regular on the panel, Begala gave Ann a few directions and chatted-up the audience a bit.
The show started and they went into a scripted bit where they took predictable partisan shots at each other. Ann stumbled a little reading the Teleprompter, but she got more comfortable as the show went into the guest discussion blocks.
The theme of the show, as dictated by The New York Times was failed presidential candidate Al Gore's column published in that liberal propaganda rag on Sunday on 'the people versus the powerful.'
The guests on the first segment were 'Rat consultant Mark "Bud" Mellman and Republican former Congressman Bob Walker (Pa.) I was pleasantly surprised at how strongly Walker stood up to Begala and Mellman during the segment. Ann got applause from the audience when Walker was being attacked for being a lobbyist by saying that Walker doesn't get his calls answered as easily as Chinese arms dealers did during the Clinton administration.
The next segment was dictated by Time magazine's Clintonista-orchestrated hit piece on President Bush about a supposed plan to destroy al Qaeda that the Clinton administration left gift-wrapped for the new administration at the transition but that had been ignored.
Michael O'Hanlon from the Brookings Institute was the guest for that segment. He was pretty even-handed in how he talked about the "plans" and what each administration did or did not do about al Qaeda.
Begala strangely went off on Ann accusing her of believing "al Qaeda spin" about the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory that Clinton bombed not being a chemical weapons plant (that was already disputed by The Washington Post several years ago.)
During the break staffers for the show passed around note cards to those in the audience who wanted to pose a question to the hosts in the closing Fireback segment. We were advised to ask about a discussion topic or a current event and to put our name and town on the card.
I took a card and scribbled out this question: When the powerful former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin tried to get the Bush Treasury Dept. to manipulate Enron's credit rating, was Mr. Rubin acting on behalf of the people or the powerful Citigroup he works for now?
I handed the card back without much hope of being selected to ask the question. The next segment was with 'Rat lawyer Julien Epstein and Republican attorney Joe diGenova. Thank God Epstein wasn't in the studio and was beamed in from New York City, I've seen enough of his sleaze-excusing-self in person the past few years.
Even by long distance, Epstein was so annoying that his fellow Clinton-enabler Begala had to shut him down as he kept running his mouth. The topic was whether a FOIA request could be used to force the government to release the names of anonymous immigration violators who were rounded up in the wake of September 11 and are still being held.
I'm still ticked at diGenova for representing Clintonista Jack Quinn, who facilitated Clinton's last minute pardon of the fugitive Marc Rich, during the Pardongate investigation, so I wasn't too thrilled to see him either last night.
After that segment ended and they went to commercial a producer called out four names of people who had been selected to ask questions during the closing Fireback segment.
Much to my surprise, I was one of the four. They led us to the back of the theater and gave us our instructions: where to stand, how to hold the mic (low) and to keep the question short. I was scheduled to be third and when my time came I was led to the mark and handed the mic and told that the remote camera would be filming me.
I took my mark and held the mic low in one hand and my question card in the other as the camera swung down and focused its view on me. I decided to add an additional question on when Rubin would be called to testify by the Senate about his phone call. That's why when Begala called on me I was looking intently at the card after I identified myself--I was trying to change the wording on the fly.
I looked back up when I had accomplished that and peered through the levers of the boom camera at Begala as I got in the line about whether Rubin was acting on behalf of the people or the powerful when he made his call to the Bush adminstration.
I looked at a tape of the show tonight and saw that Ann laughed when I said the line about the "people" and that Begala was visibly upset that his friend Rubin was taken to task for a serious ethical breach. His answer was pure spin, but his voice and sharp manner belied his anger.
Ann chimed in after he finished, mockingly saying to him, "Party of the people!"
The show ended on that note and the fourth questioner wasn't able to ask her question. I wandered down to the front of the stage and caught Ann before she was thronged by her growing number of fans. We spoke for minute and she signed the back of my question card,"For a great patriot and fellow Freeper!, Ann Coulter"
I hung around for a little while pondering whether to speak with Begala, but he made no effort to initiate any contact and neither did I. As I left the theater, every few steps I took someone would stop me and say, "That was a great question." Even some staffers working the show told me they liked the question :-)
Outside the theater, I told a group of G.W. students, who also complimented me about the Rubin question, about Free Republic and the D.C. Chapter. It's funny how one voice can bolster so many others sometimes, especially when it's the voice of a Freeper.
It's been so long since I've watched CNN I thought Crossfire was still re-run at 11 p.m. so I called my family and told them to stay up. They got Connie Chung instead :-(
Jim, you're gonna love this.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, I'm Christian Taylor (ph) from Washington, D.C. Mr. Begala, when will the powerful former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin be called to testify in the Senate about asking the Bush treasury department to manipulate Enron's credit rating? And when he made that call, was Mr. Rubin acting on behalf of the people or on behalf of the powerful Citigroup that he works for?
Beeaauut-iful!!! Fight the Good Fight.
Seriously, you da man!
I took a seat in the front row on the side where the Clintonista host sits so I could look at Ann and not have to stare at Paul Begala's face all night.
Very, very savvy move, there.
Your careful reporting settles us in the studio and unfolds the event so we are there! How come we get such good reporting here? Simple, it's FreeRepublic. V's wife.
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