I watched a few minutes of Morning Joe on MSNBC this morning, where their guests included Daily News publisher, Mort Zuckerman.
John Harris of Politico reported on a story by Room 8 co-founder Ben Smith about union leaders pressuring Democratic Congressmen to vote in favor of the health insurance plan.
Harris pointed to the role being played by Andy Stern, President of the SEIU.
Zuckerman, in an obvious attempt to imply that Obama is a corrupt as those horrible Clintons, stated said that Stern was #1 on the list of people who had overnight stays at the White House.
Mort, in order to show that he is influential enough to know the powerful and non-partisan enough to joke with them, then said that Stern was a nice guy and that he had told Stern that the Obama administration were going to name a room after him.
Since, I have not read or heard of anybody complaining about Obama “renting out the Lincoln bedroom” (one of the most ridiculous charges made during the Clinton years), I suspected Mort’s story had a few holes.
I did a Google search and found out that it was true that Stern had visited the White House more than any other non-government official last year. But I found no evidence from even critics of Stern that he had ever spent a single night in the White House. All his visits were for meetings during the day.
http://www.atr.org/seiu-president-andy-stern-visits-white-a4152
What did we learn about Mort Zuckerman from these 2 minutes –
1 – Mort doesn't do so well without his ghostwriters. As Ben Smith pointed out a few weeks ago when Mort was taking his turn among the millions who will be mentioned as an opponent to Senator Gillibrand –
Zuckerman a public voice; his column runs in U.S. News, and he appears regularly on Sunday TV talk shows such as “The McLaughlin Group,” often identified merely as a U.S. News columnist.
The production of his column, in fact, has been the subject of a great deal of lore in the magazine world. The New Yorker reported in 2007 that the process begins when he calls a secretary to dictate his ideas. The secretary sends her rough copy to legendary British editor Harry Evans in New York, and Evans’s copy then appears on the desk of the U.S. News editor of the moment.
2 – Mort was almost certainly lying about his conversation with Stern. If Stern has never stayed over at the White House, a joke about naming a room after him makes no sense.
3 – Mort was smart enough to know running for public office was dumb idea.